daughterofawolf | OOC - The Brick (Reply)

Passages regarding Eponine, because of course I'm not doing this thing at all.
This contains Victor Hugo being harsh af mostly for the sake of impact but I'm fading on a lot of the unnecessary stuff.

She was a frail, emaciated, slender creature (...) she had the form of a young girl who has missed her youth, and the look of a corrupt old woman; fifty years mingled with fifteen (...).

Marius had risen, and was staring in a sort of stupor at this being, who was almost like the forms of the shadows which traverse dreams.

The most heart-breaking thing of all was, that this young girl had not come into the world to be homely. In her early childhood she must even have been pretty. The grace of her age was still struggling against the hideous, premature decrepitude of debauchery and poverty. The remains of beauty were dying away in that face of sixteen...

(Good luck finding an impoverished-to-ugliness PB, but I want to choose someone who's more normally pretty, not gorgeous with smudges on their face, and who looks like a teenager. Currently leaning toward Alice Englert.)

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 probably, (...) these unfortunate creatures were plying some inexplicably sad profession, and that the result of the whole was, in the midst of human society, as it is now constituted, two miserable beings who were neither girls nor women, a species of impure and innocent monsters produced by misery.

Gosh, cannot imagine what this inexplicably sad profession might be, given that they are sent to beg for money off strangers.

Nothing could be more melancholy than to see her sport about the room, and, so to speak, flit with the movements of a bird which is frightened by the daylight, or which has broken its wing. One felt that under other conditions of education and destiny, the gay and over-free mien of this young girl might have turned out sweet and charming. Never, even among animals, does the creature born to be a dove change into an osprey. That is only to be seen among men.

^ I love this, given Cosette's depiction as a lark, and specifically "more a lark than a dove". also interesting that Cosette's wildness is "bohemian" or "adventuress" and Eponine's is "over-free" and broken-winged. casting very different lights on somewhat similar natures changed really only by the amount of love they're receiving.

"There's lots of things I know!"

"I know how to read, I do!"
She eagerly seized a book which lay open on the table, and read with tolerable fluency:--
(...)

She laid down the book, caught up a pen, and exclaimed:--
"And I know how to write, too!"

(...)

"There are no faults of orthography. You can look. We have received an education, my sister and I. We have not always been as we are now. We were not made--"

Here she paused, fixed her dull eyes on Marius, and burst out laughing, saying, with an intonation which contained every form of anguish, stifled by every form of cynicism:--

"Bah!"
(...)
Then she scrutinized Marius, assumed a singular air and said:--
"Do you know, Mr. Marius, that you are a very handsome fellow?"

And at the same moment the same idea occurred to them both, and made her smile and him blush. She stepped up to him, and laid her hand on his shoulder: "You pay no heed to me, but I know you, Mr. Marius. I meet you here on the staircase, and then I often see you going to a person named Father Mabeuf (...) It is very becoming to you to have your hair tumbled thus."

"Do you know what it will mean if we get a breakfast today? It will mean that we shall have had our breakfast of the day before yesterday, our breakfast of yesterday, our dinner of to-day, and all that at once, and this morning."

^ This is just horrifyingly sad to me.

"I often go off in the evening. Sometimes I don't come home again. Last winter, before we came here, we lived under the arches of the bridges. We huddled together to keep from freezing. (...)When I thought of drowning myself, I said to myself: `No, it's too cold.' I go out alone, whenever I choose, I sometimes sleep in the ditches. Do you know, at night, when I walk along the boulevard, I see the trees like forks, I see houses, all black and as big as Notre Dame, I fancy that the white walls are the river, I say to myself: `Why, there's water there!' (...) I think people are flinging stones at me, I flee without knowing whither, everything whirls and whirls. You feel very queer when you have had no food."

This is Azelma, not Eponine, but it's indicative of the kind of house they live in:

The younger daughter exhibited her bleeding fist, without quitting the corner in which she was cowering. She had wounded herself while breaking the window; she went off, near her mother's pallet and wept silently.
(...)
"So much the better!" said the man. "I foresaw that."

Another opportunity of laying hands on that "devil's dandy" must be waited for. Montparnasse had, in fact, encountered Eponine as she stood on the watch under the trees of the boulevard, and had led her off, preferring to play Nemorin with the daughter rather than Schinderhannes with the father. It was well that he did so. He was free. As for Eponine, Javert had caused her to be seized; a mediocre consolation. Eponine had joined Azelma at Les Madelonettes.

Nemorin - a lover. He'd rather be Eponine's lover than Thenardier's thief. As to the consent of this, well...? Who knows. Les Madelonettes seems to be a girl's prison.

Eponine went to the Rue Plumet, recognized the gate and the garden, observed the house, spied, lurked, and, a few days later, brought to Magnon, who delivers in the Rue Clocheperce, a biscuit, which Magnon transmitted to Babet's mistress in the Salpetriere. A biscuit, in the shady symbolism of prisons, signifies: Nothing to be done.

Eponine loves Marius, but she very specifically and cleverly discourages harm from coming to Cosette or Valjean, which I think is important, especially since she knows who Cosette is but Cosette doesn't know who she is - there's nothing to gain.

At the same time, a noise as of a wild animal passing became audible in the hedge, and he beheld emerging from the shrubbery a sort of tall, slender girl, who drew herself up in front of him and stared boldly at him. She had less the air of a human being than of a form which had just blossomed forth from the twilight.

(...) the goodman beheld this apparition, which had bare feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among the flower-beds distributing life around her. The sound of the watering-pot on the leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy. It seemed to him that the rhododendron was happy now.

(...)

When she had finished, Father Mabeuf approached her with tears in his eyes, and laid his hand on her brow.

"God will bless you," said he, "you are an angel since you take care of the flowers."

"No," she replied. "I am the devil, but that's all the same to me."

http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hugo/les_miserables/232/ - whole chapter - giving Marius the information and the dumbass trying to give her money

http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hugo/les_miserables/259/ - whole chapter - "daughter of a wolf" - sitting on the fence standing up to the Patron Minette and threatening to scream while Montparnasse is disappointed he can't kill her.

http://www.online-literature.com/victor_hugo/les_miserables/293/ - Eponine saves Marius on the barricade, and dies ("I do believe I loved you a little")