Notes: Thank you to the people who have followed in the last few chapters—I hope you're enjoying my story:) Thank you as well to all the wonderful people who reviewed the last chapter: Deadtom77, a whisper away, frustratedstudent, HermsP, Phoenixflames12, and Musichetta—I'm glad you guys are liking it so far. Well, this is my longest chapter yet, so I'm pretty proud of it, and we get a lot more characterization of Éponine—especially her childhood in Montfermeil and her past with Cosette, and the rest of her long, turbulent history. I hope you enjoy!
BARRICADE
CHAPTER VI
As soon as Éponine is a good distance from the Café Musain, she lets herself fall apart. People are different when there's no one to observe them, as Enjolras well knows. And Éponine is an exception to many rules, but not this one. She isn't usually a crier, but when she does cry it's a flash flood. Tears and screams and heartbreak but she wipes it clean in moments.
She's good at wiping herself clean, and she does so now with ease, carefully replacing the cobblestones she's torn up off of the road of her mind.
Emotion is a weakness, and no one knows that better than Éponine. That was one of the many bitter lessons she'd learned from her father back in Montfermeil.
She begins to walk down the Rue Saint-Denis, seeking the solitude of the shadows. She loses track of time, thinking back to her later childhood and the abuse that had come with it. Every day she blames her parents to some degree, but tonight she is especially angry with them. Perhaps if her parents hadn't been so dishonest about earning their money (thievery is hardly a steady source of income) they would still have some.
Maybe right now she would be in Cosette's position, wearing the latest fashions rather than old, ragged dresses she had made herself. Maybe she would be able to afford her own apartment, instead of living in and working at a bookshop in order to get through university. Hell, maybe she would be able to go to university without being crippled with debilitating debt for the next ten-odd years.
As it is, she is working her way through the University of Paris's seriélittéraire study, taking courses in art, writing, filmmaking. She is literally broke thanks to her parents. They once had money; she remembers vividly a time back in their inn at Montfermeil when her mother bought her beautiful dresses and told her how beautiful she was, when her father joked and laughed with her and picked her up and spun her around, when her best friend 'Parnasse and her rode bicycles throughout Montfermeil. Those were happy days; they bore the signature golden light of memories that makes everything seem so much more simple and beautiful.
The one shadow in her memories is Cosette, the beautiful girl who Marius is now in love with. Cosette and Éponine are the same age; though back then Cosette looked much older and now Éponine looks older. Their circumstances are now completely changed. Éponine remembers Cosette as a gray little girl, who looked more like a malnourished lark than a girl. The Thénardiers had supposedly been taking care of Cosette for her mother, but really Cosette was more of their slave.
Éponine had been too young to really know much about it. All she knew was that sometimes she wanted someone to play with when her little sister Azelma was being too much of a baby and 'Parnasse was being too mean, and her mother absolutely forbade her to play with "the rat", as they called Cosette. Then one day a mysterious man came and took Cosette away, and that was the day things began to go bad.
The inn began failing due to bad press, ever since the policeman Inspector Javert had come to inquire after the mysterious man; Javert had cast a pallor over the inn door, and it never was quite as popular as it had been before. Her parents had begun to turn to (even more) illegal ways of earning their money, and as Éponine was now old enough, she was forced into helping with their schemes. When she was eleven she was taught to write her first four words (the only four words she would know how to write for a few years): les cognes sont là—the cops are here—which she used to alert her parents when she was keeping watch.
Her father had eventually become more and more involved in his gang, the Patron-Minette, which included a group of three other men, who were as twisted and criminal as her father. Their names were Babet, Claquesous, and Gueulemer. 'Parnasse had begun hanging around with them, but he was still the youngest and most innocent of them—only a year older than Éponine.
When Éponine had had Montparnasse, she'd had some refuge in her new lifestyle—they lived in poverty and she was forced to ignore her conscience twenty-four hours a day—but at least she had a friend, someone to talk to and take comfort in. Well, until 'Parnasse shot his first man and discovered that her true calling apparently laid in being an assassin.
After that Éponine had no one.
But then she and her family had adopted the pseudonym of "Jondrette", and moved into the Gorbeau House in Paris. Their next-door neighbor was a handsome young man by the name of Marius, who had the most beautiful blue eyes. He was kind to Éponine, despite her being dressed practically in rags at this point. And what could she do? She needed someone, since 'Parnasse had left her. And so she did what any girl would do at that point—she fell in love.
Éponine had many resources on the streets, and she easily found out that Marius's last name was Pontmercy and he was a bourgeois—his grandfather was a Monsieur Gillenormand, who was extremely rich. His father had been a general in World War I, and had been a firm Situationist. Marius had begun to admire his father greatly and he too adopted Situationist ideas, which caused a rift between the old man Gillenormand and him, and so Marius was turned out of the house and he refused the money his grandfather sent him every month. He moved into the Gorbeau House, next door to Éponine, in self-inflicted poverty.
Then her parents had been arrested and went to jail, along with Montparnasse and the rest of the Patron-Minette, so with no financial means, the "Jondrette" girls had been turned out of the Gorbeau House. Éponine and Azelma had to live on the streets for a while (which wasn't that drastic of a change for them since they'd done their best to stay out of the apartments whenever their parents were around). Eventually Azelma had found work as a maid in the home of a rich old lady owing to Azelma's charismatic girlishness that had made the old lady find her to be a very good companion.
The old lady didn't like Éponine at all, of course. Too blunt, were the words she'd used. (Although, all Éponine had done was tell her that her eye shadow was much too blue for a woman of her age.)
Then Éponine had found out about Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop run by the American George Whitman—he had thirteen beds in the back of the shop, where he let struggling poets and writers stay. Éponine had never been published, but ever since les cognes sont là, she had developed a love for writing and often wrote. She'd saved a camera from the old days too, before Cosette was taken away and everything had gone bad, and she'd taken many photographs too.
She went to Shakespeare and Co., under the slightest hope that M. Whitman would let her stay—she showed him her black notebook of writing and the four rolls of film she'd used up. He'd pursed her lips at her talent—something she later learned he did when he was impressed—and nodded.
That was when things had started getting better.
Now Éponine at least has a place to stay, she is going to classes to develop her apparently formidable natural talents in what she loves to do. Since moving into Shakespeare and Co. about a year ago, she had begun filmmaking (mostly in the nouvelle vague style). She'd started classes at the University about six months ago. Then she'd met Enjolras, and practically forgotten about Marius.
Until tonight. Tonight Courfeyrac mentioned Marius and she remembered everything all over again. And now Marius is in love with Cosette, of all people. Why her? The one girl that makes the irony of it all almost theatrical. Éponine isn't nearly as badly off as she once was, but that had taken work. Cosette…all Cosette had done was get swept away by the mysterious man in the yellow coat, and now she is living in riches and without any problems.
Éponine stops walking. She has, sometime during her musings, crossed the Seine almost without realizing it, and is now on the Rue Plumet, about three miles from where she had left the Café Musain. It is another three miles back the direction she came from to get to the Rue de la Bûcherie, where Shakespeare and Co. and her bed is waiting, and she is far too tired and it is far too late to start walking back to the Fifth Arrondissement.
So she settles down, her back against a brick wall, and decides to sleep there. Sleeping in the streets isn't anything she's not used to, and it's a fairly warm night for early January. Besides, she has a coat now, which was something she didn't have back when she did this every night.
She is just drifting off when she hears a familiar whisper. "Cosette!"
Notes: I hope you liked this chapter, and please review:) I'll be going out of town tomorrow for the whole weekend, so it may take me a while to get back to you, but our hotel has wi-fi so I should be able to answer your review sometime this weekend. I won't be able to update though, but I'll try to update as soon as I get home:) So please leave me a review for me to see after the six-hour car ride! Thanks:)