him; he had paid so little heed to them, that, on the preceding
evening, he had jostled the Jondrette girls on the boulevard, without
recognizing them, for it had evidently been they, and it was with great
difficulty that the one who had just entered his room had awakened in
him, in spite of disgust and pity, a vague recollection of having met
her elsewhere.

Now he saw everything clearly. He understood that his neighbor
Jondrette, in his distress, exercised the industry of speculating on the
charity of benevolent persons, that he procured addresses, and that he
wrote under feigned names to people whom he judged to be wealthy and
compassionate, letters which his daughters delivered at their risk
and peril, for this father had come to such a pass, that he risked his
daughters; he was playing a game with fate, and he used them as the
stake. Marius understood that probably, judging from their flight on the
evening before, from their breathless condition, from their terror
and from the words of slang which he had overheard, these unfortunate
creatures were plying some inexplicably sad profession, and that the
result of the whole was, in the midst of human society, as it is now
constituted, two miserable beings who were neither girls nor women, a
species of impure and innocent monsters produced by misery.

Sad creatures, without name, or sex, or age, to whom neither good nor
evil were any longer possible, and who, on emerging from childhood,
have already nothing in this world, neither liberty, nor virtue, nor
responsibility. Souls which blossomed out yesterday, and are faded
to-day, like those flowers let fall in the streets, which are soiled
with every sort of mire, while waiting for some wheel to crush them.
Nevertheless, while Marius bent a pained and astonished gaze on her, the
young girl was wandering back and forth in the garret with the audacity
of a spectre. She kicked about, without troubling herself as to her
nakedness. Occasionally her chemise, which was untied and torn, fell
almost to her waist. She moved the chairs about, she disarranged the
toilet articles which stood on the commode, she handled Marius' clothes,
she rummaged about to see what there was in the corners.

"Hullo!" said she, "you have a mirror!"

And she hummed scraps of vaudevilles, as though she had been alone,
frolicsome refrains which her hoarse and guttural voice rendered
lugubrious.

An indescribable constraint, weariness, and humiliatio