[CHAPTER III.]
M. MABŒUF.
Jean Valjean's purse was useless to M. Mabœuf, who in his venerable childish austerity had not accepted the gift of the stars; he had not allowed that a star could coin itself into louis d'or, and he had not guessed that what fell from heaven came from Gavroche. Hence he carried the purse to the police commissary of the district, as a lost object, placed by the finder at the disposal of the claimants. The purse was really lost; we need hardly say that no one claimed it, and it did not help M. Mabœuf. In other respects M. Mabœuf had continued to descend: and the indigo experiments had succeeded no better at the Jardin des Plantes than in his garden of Austerlitz. The previous year he owed his housekeeper her wages; and now, as we have seen, he owed his landlord his rent. The Government pawn-brokers' office sold the copper-plates of his Flora, at the expiration of thirteen months, and a coppersmith had made stewpans of them. When his plates had disappeared, as he could no longer complete the unbound copies of his Flora, which he still possessed, he sold off plates and text to a second-hand bookseller as defective. Nothing was then left him of the labor of his whole life, and he began eating the money produced by these copies. When he saw that this poor resource was growing exhausted be gave up his garden, and did not attend to it; before, and long before, he had given up the two eggs and the slice of beef which he ate from time to time, and now dined on bread and potatoes. He had sold his last articles of furniture, then everything; he had in duplicate, in linen, clothes, and coverlids, and then his herbals and plates; but he still had his most precious books, among them being several of great rarity, such as the "Les Quadrins Historiques de la Bible," the edition of 1560; "La Concordance des Bibles," of Pierre de Besse; "Les Marguerites de la Marguerite," of Jean de la Haye, with a dedication to the Queen of Navarre; the work on the "Duties and Dignity of an Ambassador," by the Sieur de Villiers Hotman; a "Florilegium Rabbinicum," of 1644; a Tibullus, of 1567, with the splendid imprint "Venetiis, in ædibus Manutianis;" and lastly a Diogenes Laertius, printed at Lyons in 1644, in which were the famous various readings of the Vatican manuscript 411, of the thirteenth century, and those of the two Venetian codices 393 and 394, so usefully consulted by Henri Estienne, and all the passages in the Doric dialect, only to be found in the celebrated twelfth century manuscript of the Naples library. M. Mabœuf never lit a fire in his room, and went to bed with the sun, in order not to burn a candle: it seemed as if he no longer had neighbors, for they shunned him when he went out, and he noticed it. The wretchedness of a child interests a mother, the wretchedness of a youth interests an old man, but the wretchedness of an old man interests nobody, and it is the coldest of all distresses. Still M. Mabœuf had not entirely lost his childlike serenity; his eye acquired some vivacity when it settled on his books, and he smiled when he regarded the Diogenes Laertius, which was a unique copy. His glass case was the only furniture which he had retained beyond what was indispensable. One day Mother Plutarch said to him,—
"I have no money to buy dinner with."
What she called dinner consisted of a loaf and four or five potatoes.
"Can't you get it on credit?" said M. Mabœuf.
"You know very well that it is refused me."
M. Mabœuf opened his bookcase, looked for a long time at all his books in turn, as a father, obliged to decimate his children, would look at them before selecting, then took one up quickly, put it under his arm, and went out. He returned two hours after with nothing under his arm, laid thirty sous on the table, and said,—
"You will get some dinner."