francs intended for Thenardier the father. He took them and laid
them in Eponine'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 THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET

CHAPTER 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 down stairs,
a boudoir up stairs, 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
passers-by; 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 Rue Blomet. Thanks to clever purchasers of land, the magistrate
had been able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on his own property,
and consequently, without interference. Later on, he had sold in little
parcels, for gardens and market gardens, the lots of ground adjoining
the corridor, and the proprietors of these lots on both sides thought
they had a party wall bef