1472 Les Miserables
smile, he had grown morose and no longer received visitors.
Marius did well not to dream of going thither. Sometimes,
at the hour when M. Mabeuf was on his way to the Jardin
des Plantes, the old man and the young man passed each
other on the Boulevard de l’Hopital. They did not speak,
and only exchanged a melancholy sign of the head. A heart-
breaking thing it is that there comes a moment when misery
looses bonds! Two men who have been friends become two
chance passers-by.
Royal the bookseller was dead. M. Mabeuf no longer
knew his books, his garden, or his indigo: these were the
three forms which happiness, pleasure, and hope had as-
sumed for him. This sufficed him for his living. He said
to himself: ‘When I shall have made my balls of blueing,
I shall be rich, I will withdraw my copperplates from the
pawn-shop, I will put my Flora in vogue again with trick-
ery, plenty of money and advertisements in the newspapers
and I will buy, I know well where, a copy of Pierre de Me-
dine’s Art de Naviguer, with wood-cuts, edition of 1655.’ In
the meantime, he toiled all day over his plot of indigo, and
at night he returned home to water his garden, and to read
his books. At that epoch, M. Mabeuf was nearly eighty years
of age.
One evening he had a singular apparition.
He had returned home while it was still broad daylight.
Mother Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and
in bed. He had dined on a bone, on which a little meat lin-
gered, and a bit of bread that he had found on the kitchen
table, and had seated himself on an overturned stone post,