one who had come to his room.

She seemed to be eleven or twelve years of age. On closer scrutiny it
was evident that she really was fourteen. She was the child who had
said, on the boulevard the evening before: "I bolted, bolted, bolted!"

She was of that puny sort which remains backward for a long time,
then suddenly starts up rapidly. It is indigence which produces these
melancholy human plants. These creatures have neither childhood nor
youth. At fifteen years of age they appear to be twelve, at sixteen they
seem twenty. To-day a little girl, to-morrow a woman. One might say
that they stride through life, in order to get through with it the more
speedily.

At this moment, this being had the air of a child.

Moreover, no trace of work was revealed in that dwelling; no handicraft,
no spinning-wheel, not a tool. In one corner lay some ironmongery of
dubious aspect. It was the dull listlessness which follows despair and
precedes the death agony.

Marius gazed for a while at this gloomy interior, more terrifying than
the interior of a tomb, for the human soul could be felt fluttering
there, and life was palpitating there. The garret, the cellar, the lowly
ditch where certain indigent wretches crawl at the very bottom of the
social edifice, is not exactly the sepulchre, but only its antechamber;
but, as the wealthy display their greatest magnificence at the entrance
of their palaces, it seems that death, which stands directly side by
side with them, places its greatest miseries in that vestibule.

The man held his peace, the woman spoke no word, the young girl did
not even seem to breathe. The scratching of the pen on the paper was
audible.

The man grumbled, without pausing in his writing. "Canaille! canaille!
everybody is canaille!"

This variation to Solomon's exclamation elicited a sigh from the woman.

"Calm yourself, my little friend," she said. "Don't hurt yourself, my
dear. You are too good to write to all those people, husband."

Bodies press close to each other in misery, as in cold, but hearts draw
apart. This woman must have loved this man, to all appearance, judging
from the amount of love within her; but probably, in the daily and
reciprocal reproaches of the horrible distress which weighed on the
whole group, this had become extinct. There no longer existed in her
anything more than the ashes of affection for her husband. Nevertheless,
caressing appellations had survived, as is often the case. S