Chapter 231 Eponine

Marius had led Javert to the scene of the murder and witnessed the unexpected ending.But, before Javert had driven his captives into the three carriages, Marius had slipped out of the poor house.It was only nine o'clock at night.Marius went to where Courfeyrac lived.Courfeyrac is no longer a permanent resident of the Latin Quarter. For some "political reasons", he has long since moved to live in Glass Factory Street, an area that was one of those areas prone to riots at the time.Marius said to Courfeyrac: "I have come to spend the night with you." Courfeyrac pulled out one of the two mattresses from his bed, spread them out on the floor, and said, "Please."

At seven o'clock the next morning, Marius returned to the poor house, paid the rent to Mama Bougon, settled the accounts, and had his books, bed, table, chest of drawers, and two chairs installed. and left without a new address, so that when Javert came in the morning to ask Marius about the incident of last night, he only heard Mama Bougon reply: "Move away." Already!" Mama Bougon was convinced that Marius was an accomplice of the gangsters who had been arrested the night before.She often yelled to the women who were guarding the door nearby: "Who would have expected it? A young man looks like a girl!"

Marius hastily moved away for two reasons.In the first place, he had seen in that house an ugly aspect of society: an aspect of the poor, uglier than the rich, and developing all its most embarrassing and brutal. The process is presented so closely before his eyes, and he now has a strong aversion to this place.Secondly, he did not want to be led to expose Thenardier on any indictment that would necessarily follow. Javert guessed that the young man had fled out of fear, or that he might not have even returned home while the murder was in progress, and that Javert had tried and failed to find him.

A month passed, and another month followed.Marius lived with Courfeyrac all the time.He had heard from a trainee lawyer who used to walk in the anteroom of the court that Thenardier was in prison.Every Monday, Marius sent five francs to the administration of the prison at Raffles, and entrusted them to Thenardier. Marius had no money, so he borrowed the five francs from Courfeyrac.It was the first time in his life to borrow money from someone.These five francs, which must be paid at the time, were a mystery both to Courfeyrac, who gave the money, and to Thénardier, who received it.Courfeyrac often wondered: "Who is this for?" And Thenardier often asked himself: "Where did this come from?"

Marius was also very distressed.Everything fell into the fog again.It was dark again before his eyes, and his life was once again caught in that kind of intangible mystery.The young girl he loved seemed to be her father's old man, the only person in the world who he cared about, the only person who gave him hope, but they didn't know each other. They reappeared before his eyes by chance, and just when he thought he had caught them, a gust of wind blew them away again.Sparks without a grain of truth shot out of that most thrilling conflict.It is impossible to make any guesses.Not even the name he thought he knew.Yuxiuer is definitely not her name.And Lark is just another name.How should we look at the old man?Was he really afraid to show his face in front of the police?Marius thought again of the white-haired workmen he had met near the Invalids.Now it seems that the worker and Mr. Bai are probably the same person.So, is he going to change outfits often?This man has his heroic and respectable side, but also his ambiguous and suspicious side.Why didn't he call for help?Why did he slip away?Was he the girl's father?Finally, was he really the man Thenardier thought he recognized?Did Thenardier admit his mistake?Questions abound, with no answers.All this, indeed, did not detract in the slightest from the celestial charm of the young girl in the Luxembourg Gardens.Heartbreaking distress, Marius is full of love, but his eyes are blind.He was pushed, he was pulled, and he couldn't move.Everything was completely disillusioned again, leaving only infatuation.He even lost the stimulating instinct and quick-witted power of infatuation.That same flame that burns within us also, in general, illuminates our eyes a little, and casts a somewhat operative gleam outward.Marius, however, was deaf to even the whispered suggestion of love.He never made such a plan: What if I went to that place to see it?What if I try this way?Yuxie, who he could no longer call Yuxiu, was of course still alive somewhere, but there was nothing to remind Marius in which direction to look.His current life can be summed up in this sentence: self-confidence has been completely lost in an impenetrable haze.He always held the wish to meet her again, but he no longer had this hope.

The most unfortunate thing is that poverty has come again.He felt the cold air close to his side, close to his back.In those troubled days, for a long time, he had interrupted his work, and the interruption of work was the most dangerous. It was a passing habit.Habits that are easy to throw away but hard to get back. A certain amount of dreaming, like the right amount of tranquilizers, is good.It rests the feverish, even high-fever mind at work, and produces a soft and cool breath from the spirit to trim the rough image of pure thought, to fill in the holes and gaps here and there, to connect paragraphs, and to polish the imagination. edges and corners.But excessive dreams can make a person sinking.Woe to him who does spiritual work and allows himself to fall entirely from thought to dream!He thinks he can get out whenever he can, and sees no difference between the two.He was wrong!

Thought is the activity of wisdom, dream is the activity of delusion.To substitute dreams for thoughts is to confuse poison with food. It is here, we remember, that Marius began.A wild love affair suddenly appeared and drove him into aimless and groundless fantasies.He goes out just to think wildly.Slow staining.Noisy and stagnant abyss.And, as work has decreased, needs have increased.This is a rule.People in a dream state are naturally not thrifty and cheerless, and a slack spirit cannot withstand a tense life.In this way of life there is good as well as bad, for indolence is bad, but generosity is healthy and good.But a man who does not work, poor and generous, is incurable.Financial resources have dried up and expenses have skyrocketed.

It is a downward slope that leads to an abyss, and in this respect the most honest and stable man can slide down as well as the weakest and wickedest, into one of two pits: suicide or crime. . People who go out a lot to daydream will one day go out to dive. Excessive dreams can turn us into people like Aescus or Libra. Marius looked at the invisible lover, but his foot slipped slowly, step by step, down the downhill road.The situation which we have just described, which may seem strange, is actually true.The image of the absent one shines in the darkness of the heart, and the more it fades, the brighter it grows, and the sad and gloomy soul always sees this light appearing on the horizon, a star in the dark night of the heart.She has become the sustenance of Marius' whole soul.He stopped thinking about other things, and he felt drowsily that his old clothes were no longer possible, and the new ones were getting old, his shirt was torn, his hat was torn, his boots were torn, That is to say, his life is also broken.He often thought to himself: "If only I could see her again before I die!"

The only sweet thought left to him was that she had loved him, her eyes had told him that, she knew not him, but she knew his heart, and perhaps now where she was, no matter what How mysterious this place is, she still loves him.Who knew she didn't miss him too, just as he missed her?Every heart in love has such an indescribable moment, when there is only reason to feel pain, but it will feel a faint disturbance of joy.He sometimes thought to himself: "It's because her thoughts are flying to me!" Then he added: "My thoughts should also fly to her." This kind of fantasy, this kind of fantasy that made him nod frequently afterwards, really poured a kind of hope-like brilliance into his heart.Intermittently, especially on those nights when the brooding man is prone to be bewildered, he takes up a stack of blank paper and writes some of the purest, most vain, and most transcendent dreams that love has poured into his brain. up.He called it "corresponding with her".

His mind should not be thought to be confused.Quite the opposite.He has lost his ability to do his work and to move steadily toward a fixed goal, but he has more understanding and integrity than ever.Marius always looked at the things before him, all kinds of things and all kinds of people, with a calm, realistic, and not without strange eyes, and he always gave a pertinent evaluation of everything with honest depression and innocent selflessness.His judgment, almost freed from hope, was sublime. In such a state of mind, nothing can escape him, cannot deceive him, and he is always discovering the truth of life, human beings and destiny.This is a God-given soul that can withstand love and suffering, and it is still happy even in suffering!Anyone who has never observed the affairs of the world and people's hearts in this double light can say that they have not seen anything clearly and cannot understand anything.

The mind is in an extraordinary state in love and in pain. In short, day after day passed without discovering anything new.He only felt that the dreary days left for him were shortening every moment.He seemed to have seen clearly the steep wall on the edge of the bottomless abyss. "Why!" he often thought, "I won't meet her again before this!" People go up along the Rue Saint-Jacques, pass through the wicket, and then turn left along the former inner road for a while, and then they arrive at the Rue des Healthes, and then there is the ice cellar, not far from the Cobelin Creek, One would come across a vacant space, the only one in the vicinity of the long, monotonous ring road that surrounds Paris, where Ruysdal could be tempted to sit down. The place exudes an indescribable remoteness. There is a green grass field with a few taut ropes, some old clothes and rags are drying in the wind, and there is an old manor house from the time of Louis XIII beside the vegetable field. , with strange attic windows on the huge roof, sloping and broken wooden fences, a small pond among poplar groves, a few women, laughter, conversation, looking into the distance, you can see the Pantheon, the Hospital for the Blind and Dumb The trees of the Army Medical College, dark, squat, grotesque, amusing, and beautiful, and in the distance, the austere square top of the bell-tower of Notre-Dame. Since this place is worth seeing, no one comes to see it.Rarely for a quarter of an hour did a cart and a coachman pass by. Once, while wandering alone, Marius happened to come to the little pool in this place.On this day, there happened to be a rare passerby on the road.Marius was somewhat moved by the almost wild taste here, and he asked the passer-by: "What is the name of this place?" The passer-by replied: "Bailing Field." He went on to say: "The shepherdess Urbach killed in Ivry is here." But as soon as the word "lark" was uttered, Marius heard nothing.In a state of fascination, a word or two is enough to bring about that rapid freezing state.All thoughts are suddenly wrapped around one thought, and there is no awareness of anything else.The lark had already replaced Yuxiu'er's name in the depths of Marius' melancholy.He said to himself foolishly, in that obsessive infatuation: "Hey! This is her place. I'm sure I can find her a place here." It was an absurd idea, but irresistible. From then on, he must go to Bailingchang every day.