Marius no longer went to see any one, but he sometimes encountered Father Mabeuf by chance. While Marius was slowly descending those melancholy steps which may be called the cellar stairs, Mabeuf was descending on his side. The Flora of Cauteretz no longer sold at all. The experiments on indigo had not been successful in the little garden of Austerlitz, which had a bad exposure. He had obtained a corner in the Jardin des Plantes, with a good exposure, to make his trials with indigo at his own expense. For this purpose he had pawned his copperplates of the Flora. He had reduced his breakfast to two eggs, and he left one of these for his old servant, to whom he had paid no wages for the last fifteen months. Often his breakfast was his only meal. He no longer smiled with his infantile smile. He had grown morose and no longer received visitors. Marius did well not to dream of going thither. Sometimes, at the hour when Mabeuf was on his way to the Jardin des Plantes, the old man and the young man passed each other on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital. They did not speak, and only exchanged a melancholy sign of the head. A heart-breaking thing it is that there comes a moment when misery looses bonds. Two men who have been friends become two chance passers-by. Royol the bookseller was dead. Mabeuf no longer knew his books, his garden, or his indigo: these were the three forms which happiness, pleasure, and hope had assumed for him. He said to himself that when he should have made his balls of blueing he would be rich, withdraw his copperplates, put his Flora in vogue again, and buy a copy of Pierre de Médine. In the meantime he toiled all day over his plot of indigo, and at night he returned home to water his garden and to read his books. He was nearly eighty.
One evening he had a singular apparition. He had returned home while it was still broad daylight. Mother Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and in bed. He had dined on a bone, on which a little meat lingered, and a bit of bread that he had found on the kitchen table, and had seated himself on an overturned stone post in his garden. Near this bench rose a large chest of beams and planks, a rabbit-hutch on the ground floor, a fruit-closet on the first. There was nothing in the hutch, but there were a few apples in the fruit-closet, the remains of the winter's provision. He had set himself to turning over two books of which he was passionately fond, and in which, a serious thing at his age, he was interested. His natural timidity rendered him accessible to superstitions. The first was the treatise of President Delancre on the inconstancy of demons; the other was a quarto on the goblins of the Bièvre, which interested him all the more because his garden had been one of the spots haunted by goblins in former times. The twilight had begun to whiten what was on high and to blacken all below. As he read, over the top of the book, he was surveying his plants, and among others a magnificent rhododendron which was one of his consolations. Four days of heat, wind, and sun without a drop of rain had passed. The stalks were bending, the buds drooping, the leaves falling. All this needed water. The rhododendron was particularly sad. Mabeuf was one of those persons for whom plants have souls. He had toiled all day over his indigo plot. He was worn out, but he rose, laid his books on the bench, and walked, all bent over and with tottering footsteps, to the well. When he had grasped the chain, he could not even draw it sufficiently to unhook it. Then he turned round and cast a glance of anguish toward heaven, which was becoming studded with stars. The evening had that serenity which overwhelms the troubles of man beneath an indescribably mournful and eternal joy. The night promised to be as arid as the day had been. Stars everywhere, thought the old man. Not the tiniest cloud. Not a drop of water. And his head, which had been upraised for a moment, fell back upon his breast. He raised it again, and once more looked at the sky, murmuring: A tear of dew. A little pity. He tried again to unhook the chain of the well, and could not.
At that moment he heard a voice saying: Father Mabeuf, would you like to have me water your garden for you? 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. Before he, who was easily terrified, was able to reply by a single syllable, this being, whose movements had a sort of odd abruptness in the darkness, had unhooked the chain, plunged in and withdrawn the bucket, and filled the watering-pot, and 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 his soul with ecstasy. It seemed to him that the rhododendron was happy now. The first bucketful emptied, the girl drew a second, then a third. She watered the whole garden. There was something about her, as she thus ran about among paths, where her outline appeared perfectly black, waving her angular arms, and with her fichu all in rags, that resembled a bat. When she had finished, 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. The old man exclaimed, without either waiting for or hearing her response: What a pity that I am so unhappy and so poor, and that I can do nothing for you. You can do something, said she. What? Tell me where Marius lives. The old man did not understand. What Monsieur Marius? He raised his glassy eyes and seemed to be seeking something that had vanished. A young man who used to come here. In the meantime he had searched his memory. Ah, yes. I know what you mean. Wait. Marius, the Baron Marius Pontmercy, parbleu. He lives, or rather, he no longer lives, ah well, I don't know. As he spoke, he had bent over to train a branch of rhododendron, and he continued: Hold, I know now. He very often passes along the boulevard, and goes in the direction of the Glacière, Rue Croulebarbe. The meadow of the Lark. Go there. It is not hard to meet him. When he straightened himself up, there was no longer any one there. The girl had disappeared. He was decidedly terrified. Really, he thought, if my garden had not been watered, I should think that she was a spirit. An hour later, when he was in bed, it came back to him, and as he fell asleep, at that confused moment when thought little by little assumes the form of a dream, he said to himself in a bewildered way: In sooth, that greatly resembles what Rubaudière narrates of the goblins. Could it have been a goblin?
