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“Do you know anyone who might be able to help a girl?” Marius asks one night when work has been slim and he’s retreated back to Courfeyrac’s rooms.
Courfeyrac, taken aback, repeats, “A girl?” Marius has never been particularly interested in girls before—nor in boys, nor in much of anything except puzzling over what he intends to decide liberty should mean. It would be enough to make a saint despair, if saints despaired at the same sort of things ordinary mortals do. “What sort of girl?”
“I met her when I was trying to live on my own,” Marius says, leaning back in his chair and stretching his feet closer to the pitiful little huddle of coals on the hearth. “The Jondrettes were in the rooms right next to mine. Their daughter’s name is Éponine, and she has a little brother who’s living on the streets. Éponine’s still staying with her parents herself, with a roof and most of four walls, but her father’s a crook and her mother’s a bully. I’m worried about her.”
Well, of course he’s worried about her. Marius, like Courfeyrac himself always has been, is much better at grasping the plight of a person than the plight of the people, even if Marius is still new enough that he struggles at broadening his thoughts. And this certainly seems like a plight.
Marius says, “I want to help her.” He adds, softly, “She was kind to me,” as if it’s a remarkable thing.
For Marius it probably is a remarkable thing. If Courfeyrac had had to guess, he would have guessed that nobody had ever been particularly kind to Marius before he had the good fortune to stumble out of a hired carriage and into Courfeyrac’s life. And of course, at the moment Marius has barely a penny to bless himself with; he has choices the poorest of Paris do not, but from what Courfeyrac knows they’re choices so bad as not to count at all.
It isn’t as if Courfeyrac would have just left people in trouble regardless, but that makes it even easier to say, “Well, I can probably think of something. How old is she?”
Marius frowns. “I don’t know exactly.”
“Well, at a guess,” Courfeyrac says, jumping up from the trunk he’d been sitting on and starting to pace. “If she’s too young to—ah, if she’s young enough they could cry kidnapping, even if she runs away like her brother did.” He envisions Enjolras afflicted with a tiny girl in braids and barely stifles a laugh. No. They can’t do that to this Éponine; it would be a disastrous repayment for her most necessary kindness.
“She’s not that young,” Marius says. He gazes vaguely into space, as if trying to conjure her into the room. “It’s hard to tell—she’s nothing but bones and worries. Certainly no younger than fifteen, and I don’t think she can really be any older than twenty.”
Courfeyrac considers this. Much too old for anyone’s landlady to let her stay with one of them. If Combeferre’s family lived in Paris, that would do; Combeferre got his kindness from his mother. But alas, they can hardly pack the girl off to the South unattended any more than they can spare someone to bring her, if she’d even agree to go. “I can take her brother once you have a few funds again. Does he have a name?”
Marius blinks, looking away from his imaginary Éponine. “I’ve never met him. Gav-something.”
“Well, let her know Gav-something is welcome here if the streets get too cold—or too wet—or they’ve had their stones borrowed for barricades, and I’ll ask the others what to do about Éponine.” Courfeyrac flings himself back down onto the trunk with the satisfaction of a job well done.
The best-done jobs are always sent to Combeferre for planning and Enjolras for execution, after all. This is no different.
“You want us to what?” Enjolras demands.
“Help a girl,” Courfeyrac says earnestly.
Enjolras looks as if the sheer force of his exasperation might lift him from the ground. Combeferre would know if that were actually possible. “I don’t have time for your love affairs. We need to figure out how to make a connection with the workers so that we can be prepared for—”
“Courfeyrac,” Combeferre says. He looks tired, with shadows under his eyes and a line pinched between his brows that won’t go away.
Courfeyrac sighs. “I’ve never even met her myself; she’s an old friend of Marius’s. Her family is poor to start, and he says they’re not safe for her to live with. She’s one of the people we’re trying to help.”
Enjolras just stares blankly at him.
“What Courfeyrac means,” Combeferre suggests, “is that we can’t leave it to the revolution to save everyone. Some people can’t wait that long, and if we can do something in the meantime we should.”
“That exactly,” Courfeyrac says, relieved. “Only—Marius is staying with me again, and even if he weren’t my landlord won’t contribute to my moral dissolution”—he allows himself an eloquent gesture with his eyebrows—“by allowing me to move young women in.”
Enjolras scowls, conveying the impression of a revolutionary flood held back by a dam made of everyday practicalities. “We could get her her own rooms somewhere.”
Combeferre asks, “Where?”
Enjolras waves a hand. “Somewhere. We can take a collection for the rent from among us, to be fair, and send her there.”
“Offer,” Combeferre says mildly. “She can go or not as she pleases.”
Éponine, according to Marius, does not please.
“What do you mean she refused?” Courfeyrac asks. He had spent days—well, hours, carved out here and there over the course of a few days and while he was running all over Paris talking to people—looking for rooms sufficient to be livable but not so grand as to either strain anyone’s pockets or to make Éponine think that they’re trying to seduce her.
Marius shakes his head. “She refused! I don’t know what she’s thinking.”
“Well, you dislike my charity,” Courfeyrac says, considering. He would happily offer Marius more than the occasional use of the one decent piece of furniture in his own rooms, if Marius would only set his pride away and take it. “Let me talk to her.”
Éponine Jondrette is not at all what Courfeyrac had been expecting. Marius had said she was kind; he had said she was mostly bones and worries.
Bones and worries she certainly is, but Courfeyrac had expected someone gentle and sad, a broken-winged bird. Éponine is all sharp edges and sharper angles, from her elbows to the tilt of her smile to the way she moves, graceful as a feral cat. They’re in a park; she might fly up into the branches of the trees, or scale one of them with her claws, if he says something wrong.
“Good afternoon, Mlle. Jondrette,” Courfeyrac says with a bow, trying to get his bearings.
“Jondrette isn’t my name,” she says. “Just call me Éponine.”
Well, Marius had said her father was a crook. “All right,” Courfeyrac says. “Did Marius tell you…”
Éponine’s face sharpens further. “M’sieur Marius told me that he was going to help me.”
In spite of that sharpness there’s something about her voice when she says Marius’s name, something rapturous. Courfeyrac recognizes it as kin to the feeling he tries to keep out of his own voice, but wilder and stranger—more like Enjolras naming France, or Revolution.
“Well,” Courfeyrac says. The sunlight filters through the trees around them, gold and heavy and slow, and he sees all at once how to get her somewhere safe. This is what he does, after all. At the same time he doesn’t want to, this once; he can do what Marius needs done, but at a cost Marius didn’t bargain for. “He needs to be able to help someone, you know.”
Éponine hesitates on the brink of flight.
Courfeyrac watches her refusal start to soften and goes on, “He won’t take charity from me. I would take it as a personal favor if you let him arrange charity for you. It’s not even his money.”
“I don’t…” She studies him so closely he’s half-afraid he’ll find all his windows broken in the morning, his locks snapped and any treasures he has gone. “Why do you care?”
Courfeyrac smiles at her. It’s a real smile, despite the circumstances. “Because Marius cares, and because our friend Combeferre has given us an incredible sense of the obligations of morality. Also because now that I meet you you look as if you haven’t had a real meal or a good night’s sleep in years, and that offends me.”
He can actually hear her stomach growl.
“Please let him help you,” he says.
Éponine’s lips press tight together, but she nods. “I’ll look at the rooms.”
When Jean Prouvaire finds out that Éponine had left a garden behind at the rooms her parents had been renting, he brings her three pots of soil and asks what kind of flowers she prefers.
“Can she read?” he asks Marius at the Café Musain that night. “I didn’t want to offend her by offering her a book if she couldn’t, but we started talking about her garden and I have a few books she might like, if she can.”
Marius frowns thoughtfully into the middle distance. “I think so. I don’t know if she’d tell me if she couldn’t, though. I don’t think she reads as well as she says she does.”
“And that’s her business,” Courfeyrac says firmly.
“I could go through them with her,” Combeferre says. “I’ve often said we need to make schools more accessible—”
Enjolras, scowling over a map of Paris, says, “And in order to do that we need to pay some attention to our plans here. Éponine is one person; we have all of France to worry about.”
“I have a book on flowers in Latin,” Prouvaire says to Combeferre. “That wouldn’t offend her if you offered to translate, surely, and then you could work around to asking how her French is.”
That is how Courfeyrac ends up bringing Combeferre, who has never gotten around to navigating this barrière before, to Éponine’s rooms, and that is how Combeferre notices the cough that rattles her thin body.
“I’m fine now that I never have to sleep outside if something goes wrong,” she insists. “It was just a cold.”
Combeferre, burdened by his medical training and his medical hobbies both, insists on finding her a throat syrup which he says probably isn’t poison—
(“I beg your pardon,” Courfeyrac says.
“Do you know what sort of things we’re doing to ourselves to find out which of them kill us and which don’t?” Combeferre asks, visions dancing in front of his eyes.
Courfeyrac decides he would rather not know.)
—and tea, and broth, and blankets better than the ragged one she’d brought with her. At that point they’ve well overspent the month’s collection, but Courfeyrac has had coins he can’t spend burning a hole through his pockets for nearly as long as he’s known Marius Pontmercy, and Combeferre murmurs something about skipping the next lecture on the angles of light.
Éponine eyes their burdens with more than a little suspicion.
“I am not carrying all these back,” Courfeyrac tells her.
“The Oath of Hippocrates says, ‘Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick,’” Combeferre says. “We can take the blanket away again if you’d like, though.”
Éponine reaches out a careful hand to the thick wool of the blanket. She strokes it gently once, and then her hand tightens hard around it.
When Courfeyrac visits again a few weeks later Éponine’s cough is nearly gone and the flowers in Prouvaire’s pots are unfurling green shoots above the soil.
“They’re very nice,” he says, after he’s exchanged pleasantries on his part for suspicious looks on hers.
“Thank you,” she says, unbending a little. “M’sieur Marius liked my old garden.”
“It’s important to find things that are beautiful.” Courfeyrac looks at the seedlings, bright and vital in this cramped and shabby room. “I’m glad you have them.”
Éponine says, “So what do you want?”
“I—wait, what has everyone else wanted?”
She shrugs. “Bahorel wanted information. Feuilly too, but different information. I’m not sure what Joly and Laigle wanted, but they invited me to the Café Musain.”
“You should come! We’re…” Courfeyrac probably shouldn’t tell her that they’re plotting to overthrow the king; that seems like a bad plan, even if Marius does like her.
“Your revolution doesn’t have anything to do with me.” Éponine’s eyes are still huge and shadowed, though her face has started to fill out a little with the regular meals. “I’m a poor thief now and I’ll still be a poor thief in a Republic.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have to be—look, come to the Musain and meet Enjolras; he’ll explain.”
Éponine screws her face up dubiously. “Maybe. Is that why you’re here, too?”
Courfeyrac says, “Actually, I came about your brother. Marius found a bit of work and he’s moved out again, so I have a spare pallet if he needs to stay somewhere.”
They both look around Éponine’s rooms—room, really; barely furnished, scarce of space.
“Thank you,” Éponine says. “If I see him I’ll let him know.”
Gavroche Thénardier is his name, and he’s just as feral as Éponine was when Courfeyrac first met her, but differently.
“I don’t need your bed,” he says in street argot so thick Courfeyrac has to concentrate to understand him.
“Well, that’s good, because I wasn’t offering it.” Courfeyrac will take the pallet for Marius, but not for a stranger who is actually sized correctly for the pallet in the first place. For Gavroche it will be a luxuriously large bed, and very possibly luxurious in general.
Gavroche, sitting on the windowsill, says, “Don’t need your mattress either.” He swings his feet.
Courfeyrac lunges to grab his ankle before he can fall, and gets laughed at for his pains. “Listen—”
“I wanted to see the people Éponine had fallen in with,” Gavroche says. “Now I’m seeing you. I don’t want to get soft, with your roofs and your beds and your fires in winter, because what’ll I do then?”
“Come back next winter?”
Gavroche scoffs.
“At least let us feed you,” Courfeyrac says rather desperately. If Marius and the Thénardier siblings are anything like the people of France, any revolution is doomed.
“Hmm,” Gavroche says, swinging his feet again. Perched on the windowsill in motion he looks like a bird too—a sparrow, maybe. “Food I can do with. What have you got?”
Courfeyrac checks his pockets first, helplessly, and then his shelves. “Nothing today, but come back tomorrow after I’ve shopped.”
“All right,” Gavroche says.
Getting Éponine to the Café Musain is trickier than getting Gavroche to come and be fed. But she does come, finally, slipping in like a shadow one day while they are fortunately not planning any revolts at the immediate moment.
Courfeyrac spots her across the room and waves her over to where he and Enjolras are arguing politics with Marius. She comes hesitantly and with a wary look at Combeferre, discussing factory hours with Feuilly, and a warier one at Grantaire and Prouvaire, debating poetry. Courfeyrac isn’t sure he’s ever seen her this uncertain.
“Welcome!” Joly calls, looking up from a lively and low-voiced conversation with Bahorel and Laigle that is certainly not about the revolution, whatever it actually is about.
Enjolras turns to see what the interruption is about, and Éponine sees Marius past him. The way his reflection illuminates her is painful to watch, when it’s so clear that Marius, as ever, doesn’t notice.
Courfeyrac pushes the chair next to him out for Éponine, who takes it with a nod of thanks.
“So,” Enjolras says. “You’re Éponine.”
Brave men have quailed before Enjolras. Given Éponine’s nerves around the others, Courfeyrac isn’t sure what to expect.
“And you’re the self-centered fool who thinks people starving in the streets care who sits in a palace over them,” Éponine says.
Enjolras’s mouth drops open.
“Your revolution isn’t for me,” Éponine tells him. “I’ve heard what your friends talk about and it’s all daydreams. I have those too.” Her voice goes bitter. “But I know better than to believe they’re really going to happen.”
“What—” Marius starts. Courfeyrac kicks him on the ankle and he yelps.
Enjolras says, “But it will happen. It must happen.” He sounds so sure that it’s almost possible that maybe this time it really will happen; maybe the world will bend itself around him as it should. “We already have one skeptic attached to our group”—Grantaire toasts them with the bottle of wine he’s holding—“and I don’t have time for another one.”
“I’m not a skeptic,” Éponine says, taking the seat Courfeyrac had offered her. “I’m just too busy trying to stay alive today to worry about tomorrow. What does your cause have to offer me?”
“I…” Enjolras actually looks disoriented, which is incredible.
Courfeyrac says, “We’ll figure it out.” At Enjolras and Éponine’s matching blank looks, he clarifies, “You can tell us what we need to do, and we’ll do it differently. Convince the workers and the people who’ve turned to crime to live because there is no work, and the sick who’ve lost their homes, and everyone else who can’t think about tomorrow.”
“We will?” Enjolras asks.
“Yes,” Combeferre says, quietly but for all that no more yieldingly than Enjolras in full oration. He gives Courfeyrac an approving nod and Éponine a thoughtful look. “If you’re willing to help, that is.”
Éponine looks around the café, eyes brilliant with something that might be tears. Courfeyrac would pat her shoulder encouragingly if he thought she’d welcome the touch, but he doesn’t.
Enjolras has the clear look of new ideas catching fire within. Combeferre is watching Éponine steadily, as if she is some of the countless answers he’s always searching for. Prouvaire radiates soft encouragement, and Feuilly nods; Bahorel, Laigle, and Joly all give her full-on grins. Grantaire toasts her again, this time almost as seriously as Courfeyrac has ever seen him do anything.
Éponine looks at Marius. “This was your plan all along, wasn’t it, m’sieur Marius?” Her voice barely wavers. “Get me into your revolution?” Marius smiles at her, and she smiles helplessly back. “All right,” she says. “Guess I’ll stay and sort you out.”