endant feet, and who did not seem to be listening or seeing or living.
No doubt the younger sister of the 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.