Page 312 - les-miserables

ble purposes, and for giving assistance to the workwomen,
and of which she rendered no account.
Fantine tried to obtain a situation as a servant in the
neighborhood; she went from house to house. No one would
have her. She could not leave town. The second-hand deal-
er, to whom she was in debt for her furniture—and what
furniture!—said to her, ‘If you leave, I will have you ar-
rested as a thief.’ The householder, whom she owed for her
rent, said to her, ‘You are young and pretty; you can pay.’
She divided the fifty francs between the landlord and the
furniture-dealer, returned to the latter three-quarters of
his goods, kept only necessaries, and found herself without
work, without a trade, with nothing but her bed, and still
about fifty francs in debt.
She began to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the gar-
rison, and earned twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her
ten. It was at this point that she began to pay the Thenar-
diers irregularly.
However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her
when she returned at night, taught her the art of living in
misery. Back of living on little, there is the living on noth-
ing. These are the two chambers; the first is dark, the second
is black.
Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the
winter; how to give up a bird which eats a half a farthing’s
worth of millet every two days; how to make a coverlet of
one’s petticoat, and a petticoat of one’s coverlet; how to save
one’s candle, by taking one’s meals by the light of the oppo-
site window. No one knows all that certain feeble creatures,

312 Les Miserables