of that sort. He was over a hundred years old. Say, where do you live now?”
Marius made no reply.
“Ah!” she went on, “you have a hole in your shirt. I must sew it up for you.”
She resumed with an expression which gradually clouded over:—
“You don’t seem glad to see me.”
Marius held his peace; she remained silent for a moment, then exclaimed:—
“But if I choose, nevertheless, I could force you to look glad!”
“What?” demanded Marius. “What do you mean?”
“Ah! you used to call me ‘thou,’ ” she retorted.
“Well, then, what dost thou mean?”
She bit her lips; she seemed to hesitate, as though a prey to some sort of inward conflict. At last she appeared to come to a decision.
“So much the worse, I don’t care. You have a melancholy air, I want you to be pleased. Only promise me that you will smile. I want to see you smile and hear you say: ‘Ah, well, that’s good.’ Poor Mr. Marius! you know? You promised me that you would give me anything I like—”
“Yes! Only speak!”
She looked Marius full in the eye, and said:—
“I have the address.”
Marius turned pale. All the blood flowed back to his heart.
“What address?”
“The address that you asked me to get!”
She added, as though with an effort:—
“The address—you know very well!”
“Yes!” stammered Marius.
“Of that young lady.”
This word uttered, she sighed deeply.
Marius sprang from the parapet on which he had been sitting and seized her hand distractedly.
“Oh! Well! lead me thither! Tell me! Ask of me anything you wish! Where is it?”
“Come with me,” she responded. “I don’t know the street or number very well; it is in quite the other direction from here, but I know the house well, I will take you to it.”
She withdrew her hand and went on, in a tone which could have rent the heart of an observer, but which did not even graze Marius in his intoxicated and ecstatic state:—
“Oh! how glad you are!”
A cloud swept across Marius’ brow. He seized Éponine by the arm:—
“Swear one thing to me!”
“Swear!” said she, “what does that mean? Come! You want me to swear?”
And she laughed.
“Your father! promise me, Éponine! Swear to me that you will not give this address to your father!”
She turned to him with a stupefied air.
“Éponine! How do you know that my name is Éponine?”
“Promise what I tell you!”
But she did not seem to hear him.
“That’s nice! You have called me Éponine!”
Marius grasped both her arms at once.
“But answer me, in the name of Heaven! pay attention to what I am saying to you, swear to me that you will not tell your father this address that you know!”
“My father!” said she. “Ah yes, my father! Be at ease. He’s in close confinement. Besides, what do I care for my father!”
“But you do not promise me!” exclaimed Marius.
“Let go of me!” she said, bursting into a laugh, “how you do shake me! Yes! Yes! I promise that! I swear that to you! What is that to me? I will not tell my father the address. There! Is that right? Is that it?”
“Nor to anyone?” said Marius.
“Nor to anyone.”
“Now,” resumed Marius, “take me there.”
“Immediately?”
“Immediately.”
“Come along. Ah! how pleased he is!” said she.
After a few steps she halted.
“You are following me too closely, Monsieur Marius. Let me go on ahead, and follow me so, without seeming to do it. A nice young man like you must not be seen with a woman like me.”
No tongue can express all that lay in that word, woman, thus pronounced by that child.
She proceeded a dozen paces and then halted once more; Marius joined her. She addressed him sideways, and without turning towards him:—
“By the way, you know that you promised me something?”
Marius fumbled in his pocket. All that he owned in the world was the five francs intended for Thénardier the father. He took them and laid them in Éponine’s hand.
She opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground, and gazed at him with a gloomy air.
“I don’t want your money,” said she.
Book III
The House in the Rue Plumet
I
The House with a Secret
About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the Parliament of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact, for at that period the grand seignors displayed their mistresses, and the bourgeois concealed them, had “a little house” built in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue Plumet, not far from the spot which was then designated as Combat des Animaux.
This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two rooms on the ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a kitchen downstairs, a boudoir upstairs, an attic under the roof, the whole preceded by a garden with a large gate opening on the street. This garden was about an acre and a half in extent. This was all that could be seen by passersby; but behind the pavilion there was a narrow courtyard, and at the end of the courtyard a low building consisting of two rooms and a cellar, a sort of preparation destined to conceal a child and nurse in case of need. This building communicated in the rear by a masked door which opened by a secret spring, with a long, narrow, paved winding corridor, open to the sky, hemmed in with two lofty walls, which, hidden with wonderful art, and lost as it were between garden enclosures and cultivated land, all of whose angles and detours it followed, ended in another door, also with a secret lock which opened a quarter of a league away, almost in another quarter, at the solitary extremity of the Rue du Babylone.
Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those who were spying on him and following him would merely have observed that the justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way somewhere, and would never have suspected that to go to the Rue de Babylone was to go to the