o him.
It resembled the hoarse, rough voice of Eponine.
Marius hastened to the gate, thrust aside the movable bar, passed his head through the aperture, and saw some one who appeared to him to be a young man, disappearing at a run into the gloom.
BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?
CHAPTER III
M. MABEUF
Jean Valjean''s purse was of no use to M. Mabeuf.
M. Mabeuf, in his venerable, infantile austerity, had not accepted the gift of the stars; he had not admitted that a star could coin itself into louis d''or. He had not divined that what had fallen from heaven had come from Gavroche.
He had taken the purse to the police commissioner of the quarter, as a lost article placed by the finder at the disposal of claimants.
The purse was actually lost. It is unnecessary to say that no one claimed it, and that it did not succor M. Mabeuf.
Moreover, M. Mabeuf had continued his downward course.
His experiments on indigo had been no more successful in the Jardin des Plantes than in his garden at Austerlitz.
The year before he had owed his housekeeper''s wages; now, as we have seen, he owed three quarters of his rent.
The pawnshop had sold the plates of his Flora after the expiration of thirteen months. Some coppersmith had made stewpans of them.
His copper plates gone, and being unable to complete even the incomplete copies of his Flora which were in his possession, he had disposed of the text, at a miserable price, as waste paper, to a second-hand bookseller. Nothing now remained to him of his life''s work.