Page 1256 - les-miserables

that, on the preceding evening, he had jostled the Jondrette
girls on the boulevard, without recognizing them, for it had
evidently been they, and it was with great difficulty that the
one who had just entered his room had awakened in him, in
spite of disgust and pity, a vague recollection of having met
her elsewhere.
Now he saw everything clearly. He understood that his
neighbor Jondrette, in his distress, exercised the industry
of speculating on the charity of benevolent persons, that he
procured addresses, and that he wrote under feigned names
to people whom he judged to be wealthy and compas-
sionate, letters which his daughters delivered at their risk
and peril, for this father had come to such a pass, that he
risked his daughters; he was playing a game with fate, and
he used them as the stake. Marius understood that prob-
ably, judging from their flight on the evening before, from
their breathless condition, from their terror and from the
words of slang which he had overheard, these unfortunate
creatures were plying some inexplicably sad profession, and
that the result of the whole was, in the midst of human soci-
ety, as it is now constituted, two miserable beings who were
neither girls nor women, a species of impure and innocent
monsters produced by misery.
Sad creatures, without name, or sex, or age, to whom
neither good nor evil were any longer possible, and who,
on emerging from childhood, have already nothing in this
world, neither liberty, nor virtue, nor responsibility. Souls
which blossomed out yesterday, and are faded to-day, like
those flowers let fall in the streets, which are soiled with

1256 Les Miserables