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_ Marius no longer went to see any one, but he sometimes encountered
Father Mabeuf by chance.
While Marius was slowly descending those melancholy steps
which may be called the cellar stairs, and which lead to places
without light, where the happy can be heard walking overhead,
M. Mabeuf was descending on his side.
The Flora of Cauteretz no longer sold at all. The experiments on
indigo had not been successful in the little garden of Austerlitz,
which had a bad exposure. M. Mabeuf could cultivate there only
a few plants which love shade and dampness. Nevertheless, he did
not become discouraged. He had obtained a corner in the Jardin
des Plantes, with a good exposure, to make his trials with indigo "at
his own expense." For this purpose he had pawned his copperplates
of the Flora. He had reduced his breakfast to two eggs, and he left
one of these for his old servant, to whom he had paid no wages for
the last fifteen months. And often his breakfast was his only meal.
He no longer smiled with his infantile smile, he had grown morose
and no longer received visitors. Marius did well not to dream
of going thither. Sometimes, at the hour when M. Mabeuf was on
his way to the Jardin des Plantes, the old man and the young man
passed each other on the Boulevard de l'Hopital. They did not speak,
and only exchanged a melancholy sign of the head. A heart-breaking
thing it is that there comes a moment when misery looses bonds!
Two men who have been friends become two chance passers-by.
Royal the bookseller was dead. M. Mabeuf no longer knew his books,
his garden, or his indigo: these were the three forms which happiness,
pleasure, and hope had assumed for him. This sufficed him for
his living. He said to himself: "When I shall have made my balls
of blueing, I shall be rich, I will withdraw my copperplates from
the pawn-shop, I will put my Flora in vogue again with trickery,
plenty of money and advertisements in the newspapers and I will buy,
I know well where, a copy of Pierre de Medine's Art de Naviguer,
with wood-cuts, edition of 1655." In the meantime, he toiled
all day over his plot of indigo, and at night he returned home
to water his garden, and to read his books. At that epoch,
M. Mabeuf was nearly eighty years of age.
One evening he had a singular apparition.
He had returned home while it was still broad daylight.
Mother Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and in bed.
He had dined on a bone, on which a little meat lingered, and a bit
of bread that he had found on the kitchen table, and had seated
himself on an overturned stone post, which took the place of a bench
in his garden.
Near this bench there rose, after the fashion in orchard-gardens,
a sort of large chest, of beams and planks, much dilapidated,
a rabbit-hutch on the ground floor, a fruit-closet on the first.
There was nothing in the hutch, but there were a few apples in
the fruit-closet,--the remains of the winter's provision.
M. Mabeuf had set himself to turning over and reading, with the
aid of his glasses, two books of which he was passionately fond
and in which, a serious thing at his age, he was interested.
His natural timidity rendered him accessible to the acceptance of
superstitions in a certain degree. The first of these books was the
famous treatise of President Delancre, De l'inconstance des Demons;
the other was a quarto by Mutor de la Rubaudiere, Sur les Diables
de Vauvert et les Gobelins de la Bievre. This last-mentioned old
volume interested him all the more, because his garden had been
one of the spots haunted by goblins in former times. The twilight
had begun to whiten what was on high and to blacken all below.
As he read, over the top of the book which he held in his hand,
Father Mabeuf was surveying his plants, and among others
a magnificent rhododendron which was one of his consolations;
four days of heat, wind, and sun without a drop of rain, had passed;
the stalks were bending, the buds drooping, the leaves falling;
all this needed water, the rhododendron was particularly sad.
Father Mabeuf was one of those persons for whom plants have souls.
The old man had toiled all day over his indigo plot, he was worn out
with fatigue, but he rose, laid his books on the bench, and walked,
all bent over and with tottering footsteps, to the well, but when he
had grasped the chain, he could not even draw it sufficiently to
unhook it. Then he turned round and cast a glance of anguish toward
heaven which was becoming studded with stars.
The evening had that serenity which overwhelms the troubles of man
beneath an indescribably mournful and eternal joy. The night
promised to be as arid as the day had been.
"Stars everywhere!" thought the old man; "not the tiniest cloud!
Not a drop of water!"
And his head, which had been upraised for a moment, fell back upon
his breast.
He raised it again, and once more looked at the sky, murmuring:--
"A tear of dew! A little pity!"
He tried again to unhook the chain of the well, and could not.
At that moment, he heard a voice saying:--
"Father Mabeuf, would you like to have me water your garden for you?"
At the same time, a noise as of a wild animal passing became
audible in the hedge, and he beheld emerging from the shrubbery
a sort of tall, slender girl, who drew herself up in front of him
and stared boldly at him. She had less the air of a human being
than of a form which had just blossomed forth from the twilight.
Before Father Mabeuf, who was easily terrified, and who was, as we
have said, quick to take alarm, was able to reply by a single syllable,
this being, whose movements had a sort of odd abruptness in the darkness,
had unhooked the chain, plunged in and withdrawn the bucket,
and filled the watering-pot, and the goodman beheld this apparition,
which had bare feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among
the flower-beds distributing life around her. The sound of the
watering-pot on the leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy.
It seemed to him that the rhododendron was happy now.
The first bucketful emptied, the girl drew a second, then a third.
She watered the whole garden.
There was something about her, as she thus ran about among paths,
where her outline appeared perfectly black, waving her angular arms,
and with her fichu all in rags, that resembled a bat.
When she had finished, Father Mabeuf approached her with tears
in his eyes, and laid his hand on her brow.
"God will bless you," said he, "you are an angel since you take
care of the flowers."
"No," she replied. "I am the devil, but that's all the same to me."
The old man exclaimed, without either waiting for or hearing
her response:--
"What a pity that I am so unhappy and so poor, and that I can
do nothing for you!"
"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?" _
Read next: VOLUME IV: BOOK SECOND - EPONINE: CHAPTER IV. An Apparition to Marius
Read previous: VOLUME IV: BOOK SECOND - EPONINE: CHAPTER II. Embryonic Formation of Crimes in the Incubation of Prisons
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