Consciousness came more painfully than death had, one chasing the other away. Where was she? On a patch of pavement that was damp with blood. Was she alive? Unmercifully so. Where was Monsieur Marius? Long gone by now.
Eponine would know little else about the night at the barricades until another year had passed, though she would think of nothing else. She would think also of that last glimpse of Monsieur Marius that she had caught through heavy lids, though as time passed his visage would waver and become distorted as if viewed through a screen of smoke. It would become crushingly clear that she knew very little indeed about the object of her affections.
The recovery was excruciating in both slowness and pain. There were many times, countless times, when Eponine dragged her clouded mind back into waking only long enough to beg God to let her die. These unanswered prayers proved yet again that the many cries of the poor begging for mercy, be it from God or from man, are so numerous that a single girl's voice is lost in the roar and never heard or answered.
Months rolled by, snatches of conversations hovered over the invalid's head. The charitable doctor who waded through the slums with his black bag of cracked leather, a voice making a vague effort to persuade her to lap at the dish of oily broth that was periodically jabbed at her dry lips. There were other memories, the time that she awoke at an insistent tug at the bandage wrapped around her disfigured hand only to find that it was no more than a mouse hoping to drag a scrap of lint away to build his nest with.
The doctor, with his smile that parted thin lips to display a chipped yellow graveyard of teeth, had told Eponine gently that her hand would not recover so well as the rest of her had. The scar from where the Guardsman's bullet had dashed through her torso would heal into an ugly red twist of flesh, easily hidden beneath a proper dress (Eponine had wanted to laugh at the remark, wondering when it would be that she ever owned a proper frock! She would have laughed in that doctor's face, if only it hadn't hurt her chest so badly to do so.) However, it was where her hand had 'stopped' that very same bullet that had done her all of this damage, that would be Eponine's battle scar for the rest of her days. She was left with a twisted claw, like an old washerwoman's that had been crippled and colored an angry red from a lifetime of labor. Two fingers missing, the rest useless, a lump of flesh that promised Eponine that she would never be a nimble fingered street rat again.
Her father would not have been happy with this prospect, but Eponine didn't know where to find him even if she'd wanted to. She didn't trouble herself to look.
Eponine would know little else about the night at the barricades until another year had passed, though she would think of nothing else. She would think also of that last glimpse of Monsieur Marius that she had caught through heavy lids, though as time passed his visage would waver and become distorted as if viewed through a screen of smoke. It would become crushingly clear that she knew very little indeed about the object of her affections.
The recovery was excruciating in both slowness and pain. There were many times, countless times, when Eponine dragged her clouded mind back into waking only long enough to beg God to let her die. These unanswered prayers proved yet again that the many cries of the poor begging for mercy, be it from God or from man, are so numerous that a single girl's voice is lost in the roar and never heard or answered.
Months rolled by, snatches of conversations hovered over the invalid's head. The charitable doctor who waded through the slums with his black bag of cracked leather, a voice making a vague effort to persuade her to lap at the dish of oily broth that was periodically jabbed at her dry lips. There were other memories, the time that she awoke at an insistent tug at the bandage wrapped around her disfigured hand only to find that it was no more than a mouse hoping to drag a scrap of lint away to build his nest with.
The doctor, with his smile that parted thin lips to display a chipped yellow graveyard of teeth, had told Eponine gently that her hand would not recover so well as the rest of her had. The scar from where the Guardsman's bullet had dashed through her torso would heal into an ugly red twist of flesh, easily hidden beneath a proper dress (Eponine had wanted to laugh at the remark, wondering when it would be that she ever owned a proper frock! She would have laughed in that doctor's face, if only it hadn't hurt her chest so badly to do so.) However, it was where her hand had 'stopped' that very same bullet that had done her all of this damage, that would be Eponine's battle scar for the rest of her days. She was left with a twisted claw, like an old washerwoman's that had been crippled and colored an angry red from a lifetime of labor. Two fingers missing, the rest useless, a lump of flesh that promised Eponine that she would never be a nimble fingered street rat again.
Her father would not have been happy with this prospect, but Eponine didn't know where to find him even if she'd wanted to. She didn't trouble herself to look.