Page 1045 - les-miserables

and on a house at the other. The man in the waistcoat and
the wooden shoes of whom we have just spoken, inhabit-
ed the smallest of these enclosures and the most humble of
these houses about 1817. He lived there alone and solitary,
silently and poorly, with a woman who was neither young
nor old, neither homely nor pretty, neither a peasant nor
a bourgeoise, who served him. The plot of earth which he
called his garden was celebrated in the town for the beauty
of the flowers which he cultivated there. These flowers were
his occupation.
By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of
buckets of water, he had succeeded in creating after the Cre-
ator, and he had invented certain tulips and certain dahlias
which seemed to have been forgotten by nature. He was in-
genious; he had forestalled Soulange Bodin in the formation
of little clumps of earth of heath mould, for the cultivation
of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. He
was in his alleys from the break of day, in summer, planting,
cutting, hoeing, watering, walking amid his flowers with an
air of kindness, sadness, and sweetness, sometimes stand-
ing motionless and thoughtful for hours, listening to the
song of a bird in the trees, the babble of a child in a house,
or with his eyes fixed on a drop of dew at the tip of a spear of
grass, of which the sun made a carbuncle. His table was very
plain, and he drank more milk than wine. A child could
make him give way, and his servant scolded him. He was
so timid that he seemed shy, he rarely went out, and he saw
no one but the poor people who tapped at his pane and his
cure, the Abbe Mabeuf, a good old man. Nevertheless, if the

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