Chapter 208 Six Beastman Cave

Cities, like forests, have hiding holes for their most vicious and terrifying creatures.In the city, however, what hides in this way is ferocious, filthy, base, that is to say, ugly; in the forest, what hides is brutal, fierce, magnificent, that is to say, beautiful.It is also a cave, but the animal cave is better than the human cave.A wild cave is better than a slum. What Marius saw was a slum. Marius was poor, and his house was empty, but, as he was noble, his house was empty.The shabby dwelling upon which his eyes were now fixed was ugly, dirty, foul-smelling, dark, and filthy.All the furniture consisted of a straw chair, a broken table, some old bottles and cans, and two unspeakably broken beds in a corner.All the light came from a skylight with four panes of glass, covered with cobwebs.There was just enough light coming in from the skylight to make faces grimace.The walls seemed to be leprosy, and were patched and scarred, like a face disfigured by some evil disease.It was soaked with dampness like yellow pus, and there were some obscene figures painted with charcoal.

The room in which Marius lived had an uneven floor of bricks; this one had neither brick nor floor; the old plaster floor had been blackened by walking directly on it; Ragged and dusty, but virgin ground, for it had never been touched by a broom; strange rag shoes, rotten slippers, and smelly tendons, scattered here and there in heaps like stars; there was a fireplace in the house, Forty francs a year were rented for the stove; there was a chafing-pan in the fireplace, a cauldron, some chopped wood, rags hanging from a nail, a birdcage, ashes, and a little fire.Two sticks of charred wood were smoking miserably there.

What made the dilapidated house even uglier was its size.It has some convex and concave corners, some black holes and slopes, some bays and headlands.As a result, there are many unexplorable and frightening corners, where there seem to be many fist-sized spiders and foot-wide ground beetles, and there may even be a few human monsters lurking there. Of the two broken beds, one was near the door and the other was near the window.Both beds had their ends facing the fireplace, facing Marius as well. In an adjacent corner of the hole through which Marius had peeped, there was a polychrome engraving in a wooden frame, with two large characters on the lower edge: "DREAM".The picture shows a sleeping woman and a sleeping child, the child is sleeping on the woman's lap, and an eagle in the cloud holds a wreath in its beak, and the woman lifts the wreath from the child with her hands in a dream. In the distance, Napoleon leaned on a dark blue column with a halo on his head and a yellow bracket on top of which read these words:

Beneath the picture frame, there was something like a long plank, leaning against the wall and standing on the ground.It seemed to be a painting reversed, or maybe a canvas with the back painted badly, and a full-length mirror taken off some wall and left there as a spare. Sitting at the table was a man of about sixty, on which Marius saw a quill, ink, and paper. The man was a small, thin man with a sallow complexion, dark eyes, and a sharp, vicious, bewildered expression. The ultimate villain. If Lavatre had studied this face, he would have discovered in it the hybrid form of the vulture and the judge; the bird of prey and the cudgel could disfigure and complement each other;

The man had a long gray beard and wore a blouse, showing a hairy chest and bare arms with gray bristling hair.Beneath the shirt was a pair of grimy trousers and a pair of open-mouthed boots with all the toes exposed. He had a pipe in his mouth and was smoking.There is no more bread in the slums, but there is still smoke. He was writing something, perhaps a letter of the kind that Marius had read. On a corner of the table is an old book that is not in a complete set. It is red-faced and is a twelve-mo version of the old book rental shop. It looks like a novel.On the cover was the title of the book in large letters: God, King, Honor and Lady, by Ducre Duminier.1814.

As the man wrote, he spoke aloud, and what Marius heard him say: "I say, people are not equal even after they die! Just look at the Pere Lachaise cemetery! Those rich gentlemen are buried there. There are locust trees on both sides of the road, and the road is paved with stones. They can Directly by car. Small families, poor people, unlucky people! Down there knee-high with rotten mud, throw them in mud pits, puddles. Throw them there, so that they will rot quickly! Who wants If you want to see them, you have to be prepared to sink into the ground." Having said that, he stopped, punched the table, and gritted his teeth and added:

"Oh! I wish I could swallow this world in one gulp!" A fat woman, who might be forty or a hundred, was crouching by the fireplace, sitting on her bare heels. She also wore only a shirt and a knitted skirt patched with patches of old baize.A coarse apron half covered the skirt.Although this woman is stacked in a pile, it can still be seen that she is a very tall and big person.Next to her husband, it was really a kind of golden body.Her hair was ugly, pale ochre, half white, and she stretched out a big oily hand with flat nails to comb her hair every now and then. Beside her there was also an open book lying on the floor, the same size as that one, perhaps another volume of the same novel.

On a broken bed, Marius caught a glimpse of a thin, pale-faced girl, almost naked, sitting on the edge of the bed, with her legs hanging down, as if in a state of not listening, seeing, or living. This must be the sister of the girl who came to his room just now. At first glance, she was eleven or twelve years old.If you look carefully, you can see that she must be fifteen years old.This is the child who said on the road last night, "I'll go! Go! Go!". She belongs to the kind of sick child who stays for a long time and then grows suddenly.This pathetic human plant was created by poverty.These creatures have no childhood and no teenage years.Fifteen is like twelve, and sixteen is like twenty.A little girl today, a woman tomorrow.As if they were transcending their age in order to end their lives earlier.

At this time, the girl was still a child. Besides, the family showed no sign of labor, no loom, no spinning wheel, no tools.Several suspicious-looking pieces of scrap iron were piled up in one corner.A bleak picture of waiting to die after despair and before death. Marius watched for a long time, and felt that the dark atmosphere in this room was more terrible than that in the tomb, because there were still human souls wandering here, and life was active. The slums, the cellars, the pits, where some poor man crawls at the lowest level of the social building, are not quite tombs, but only the antechambers of tombs, but, just as the rich place their most magnificent things in As they do at the gate of the palace, death puts its rags in this antechamber next door.

The man stopped talking, the woman was silent, and the girl didn't seem to be breathing.Only the pen screamed on the paper. While writing, the man muttered: "Asshole! Asshole! Everything is asshole!" This variation of Solomon's epigram evoked a sigh from the woman. "Good man, be quiet," she said. "Don't get mad at your body, dear. You do them a favor by writing to these fellows, my man." In poverty, as in cold, the bodies are close to each other, but the hearts are far away.The woman, from all appearances, seemed to have loved the man with what little affection she had in her heart; but, probably, in the midst of the miserable misery which lay upon the whole family, as a result of daily mutual complaints, , that feeling is extinguished.In her heart, there was only the ashes of tenderness for her husband.But those sweet titles have not completely died, and they often appear in the mouth.She called him "beloved," "good guy," "my man," and so on, without feeling the emotion.

The man continued to write his.