Page 1245 - les-miserables

him, and there created, for a few minutes, in the gloom, a
sort of vague white spot, then disappeared.
Marius had halted for a moment.
He was about to pursue his way, when his eye lighted on
a little grayish package lying on the ground at his feet. He
stooped and picked it up. It was a sort of envelope which ap-
peared to contain papers.
‘Good,’ he said to himself, ‘those unhappy girls dropped
it.’
He retraced his steps, he called, he did not find them; he
reflected that they must already be far away, put the package
in his pocket, and went off to dine.
On the way, he saw in an alley of the Rue Mouffetard, a
child’s coffin, covered with a black cloth resting on three
chairs, and illuminated by a candle. The two girls of the twi-
light recurred to his mind.
‘Poor mothers!’ he thought. ‘There is one thing sadder
than to see one’s children die; it is to see them leading an
evil life.’
Then those shadows which had varied his melancholy
vanished from his thoughts, and he fell back once more into
his habitual preoccupations. He fell to thinking once more
of his six months of love and happiness in the open air and
the broad daylight, beneath the beautiful trees of Luxem-
bourg.
‘How gloomy my life has become!’ he said to himself.
‘Young girls are always appearing to me, only formerly they
were angels and now they are ghouls.’

1245