Left alone, the young girls lean two by two on the window-sills, chatting, craning out their heads. They see the young men emerge from Café Bombarda arm in arm, turn, smile, and disappear into that dusty Sunday throng which makes a weekly invasion of the Champs-Élysées. Do not be long, cries Fantine. Favourite wants the surprise to be of gold. Their attention is soon taken by the mail-coaches: huge vehicles, yellow and black, shapeless with trunks and tarpaulins, an air of fury, grinding the pavements into steels. Favourite says it is a pile of chains flying away. One vehicle, hard to see through the elms, halts a moment, then sets out at a gallop. That is odd, says Fantine; she thought the diligence never stopped. Favourite shrugs. Suppose a case: I am a traveller; I go on in advance; you pick me up on the quay. That is done every day. You do not know life, my dear.
A certain time elapses. Favourite makes a movement like a person waking. Well, and the surprise? They are a very long time about it, says Fantine. The waiter who served them at dinner enters with something that resembles a letter. It is a paper those gentlemen left for these ladies. Why did you not bring it at once? Because the gentlemen ordered him not to deliver it for an hour. Favourite snatches it. There is no address. On it is written: THIS IS THE SURPRISE. She tears it open; she knows how to read. Our beloved: you must know that we have parents. They groan, they implore, they call us prodigal sons and offer to kill calves. Being virtuous, we obey. At the hour when you read this, five fiery horses will be bearing us to our papas and mammas. We flee in the arms of Laffitte and on the wings of Caillard. The Toulouse diligence tears us from the abyss, and the abyss is you. We return to society, to duty, to respectability, at three leagues an hour. Venerate us. We are sacrificing ourselves. Mourn for us in haste, and replace us with speed. Signed Blachevelle, Famueil, Listolier, Félix Tholomyès. Postscript: the dinner is paid for.
The four young women look at each other. Favourite is first: it is a very pretty farce, all the same. Zéphine finds it very droll. Death to Blachevelle, and long live Tholomyès. They burst out laughing. Fantine laughs with the rest. An hour later, when she has returned to her room, she weeps. It was her first love affair. She had given herself to this Tholomyès as to a husband. The poor girl has a child.
Coming Up in Chapter 37
At Montfermeil there is a cook-shop that no longer exists, kept by people named Thénardier, under a board of a man carrying a general through smoke: AT THE SIGN OF SERGEANT OF WATERLOO. In the street, a rusted timber-chain has been made into a swing.
