Several Years Later

Sometimes Marius thought back to Éponine, the girl he had never found his way to loving while she was still alive. He felt guilty for these thoughts, considering the happy life he had with Cosette. But he would feel even guiltier if he didn't. After all, he was one of the few people in the world who remembered her at all. He didn't think her father would keep her memory alive, so that just left him.

He knew why he hadn't loved her; that was no mystery to him. But that didn't mean that he shouldn't have- or even that he couldn't have.

He didn't imagine that Éponine could have comforted him after the barricade fell the way Cosette did. Cosette had behaved like an angel from heaven, and Marius couldn't have asked for better care during his recovery. He knew he wasn't a very comforting person himself, but when Éponine was bleeding to death from a bullet she had taken for him, he had been exactly what she needed. He had never felt just so needed by anyone, so completely depended upon for everything. He could still feel her bony hands clutching the rims of his suit coat, fearing he would slip away from her in her final moments. He remembered her still-warm skin under his lips as he kissed her rough, dirty forehead in a soft goodbye.

Cosette still comforted him from time to time. But it wasn't the same. He was a father now, and his three young children took up most of his life. Looking into their eyes, he knew that if need be, he would make the same sacrifices for them that his own father had made for him. Now he understood how Jean Valjean had felt, not being able to share his past with the people he loved most. But that was the burden of men. Part of him felt that he just wasn't cut out to be a father.

And what of Éponine? She was but a ghost now; she had no place in the lives of Marius and Cosette. She never had. Just a wisp, a foggy presence that had surely been born once and then died. Nothing of her or her family remained in France; her father had made sure of that. All evidence that she had ever existed, it was gone, swept away as the Gorbeau House was demolished along with the other old tenement buildings in Saint Michel to make way for the wider streets that were being constructed as part of the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes Marius barely recognized the city that he knew and loved; he was haunted by it, but he knew he could never live anywhere else.

As Marius' republican sympathies increased, so did his thoughts of Éponine. He realized, belatedly, that she was exactly the kind of person his friends had been fighting for. No girl should have to marry a baron in order to escape her sad lot in life. But Éponine had clung to that hope because it was her only option, fooling herself into thinking she loved him when she actually didn't. He couldn't condemn her for loving a shadow; he had done the same. The only difference was that Cosette turned out to be perfect and he was not; that was why Marius had gotten a happy ending and Éponine was not so lucky.

But on the other hand, maybe Éponine's love had been truer simply because he hadn't been trying to make her fall in love with him. Maybe she had loved "the real" him long before Cosette had, seeking him out instead of him having to follow her. Maybe he had allowed himself to be more honest with Éponine than he had with Cosette, even though the former was of a much lower status.

In a way, he almost didn't blame her for trying to separate him from Cosette. Had he been in her situation, he knew he would have done the same thing. Like her, he was jealous and possessive, and he thought of Cosette as his long before he knew that she returned his affections. He had been ready to die for his love affair, however foolish and fruitless it may have been. Once again, though, fate had intervened on his behalf. A Baron could afford to be a romantic.

Sometimes, late at night, he would try to draw her from memory. He was by no means an artist, but since Éponine had missed the dawning of the daguerrotype by seven years, he wanted to see that her image was not forgotten. He tried to draw her the way she had appeared when she had met him outside the cathedral- poorer and prettier. He started with the outline, the general shape of her body; then the clothing, and then the face. The face was by far the hardest part. For the body and clothes he could manage vague scratches of the pen to indicate wretchedness. But the face was quite complicated. He could never recapture the animalistic glow in her eyes, the intensity of her stare, the pointed jaw so different from Cosette's. At the bottom, he scrawled the name Éponine Pontmercy. Just to see how it looked. Probably the kind of thing she had done while she was alive, he mused.

Whenever Cosette walked into the room, he stuffed the drawings into the top drawer of his desk. He felt as though he were committing adultery. Although he never drew Éponine in a romantic or sexual light, he knew well that his actions might well be interpreted that way. His drawings were those of a police sketch artist trying to recreate the face of a suspect from a description, not those of a heartbroken lover. It would do no good to romanticize Éponine and what she had been through. He drew her, misery and all.

You can't do this, he told himself. You can't fall in love with a dead girl you never really knew in the first place. Not when you have a living wife who loves you.

But, stranger things had happened to him.

Éponine was his escape now, when before he had been hers. Whenever he needed to step away from his life with Cosette and their children, he imagined her bony frame appearing in the doorway, carrying a book under its arm. He even missed the way she had eaten a slice of bread in his room and started fiddling with her hair in front of his mirror. Cosette never did frivolous things like that anymore. Marius missed the childlike, carefree part of her so much. He kept waiting for it to come back after her father died, but it never did.

Éponine had never known marriage or motherhood, nor the loss of a beloved family member. No one would ever know what she would have been like as a wife or mother, and thus her spirit was untainted with such roles. Marius could only imagine the way she would have awoken him in the morning, the way she would have tried on her dresses and eaten her food, the way she would have embarrassed him with her awkward transition into the life of a Baronne. It was amusing to think about. But it was also quite sad. If only she could have held out a few months longer, she would now be only an ocean away, and not an entire lifetime.

She had been foolish to fall in love with him. But he was grateful that she had.

Some nights he lay awake on his bed and stared up at the ceiling. His body was splayed out over the mattress, as if he were gazing at the stars. "I'm ready now, Éponine," he whispered.

But she didn't hear him.

Fin