That he tried too hard was her initial impression of him, and Éponine would stand by it. Tried to hard to talk of such big ideas (the big ideas that didn't include the little people), tried so hard to speak with passion and candor about a life that was as far from his reach as the sun was to Icarus (her mother had always tried to retain some pretense of high society, her father laughed and dove lower into the sewers, and Éponine herself was only interested so long as there was a story to be told).
Though of course no one ever reached for Éponine's life. they fell to it, as she had herself done.
She'd grown up surrounded by trinkets and toys she didn't even think twice about. She had had dolls with wool hair and wooden limbs, stuffed full of expectations. She had had books with fairies and beautiful pictures in them, books that told her she was a princess alone atop some high stone tower and that a prince was sure to be waiting to marry her when she turned sixteen.
She was seventeen now, and she had lost everything.
The first things to go had been her dresses, which she didn't mind much because they were ugly and out of season and could be replaced. Then went her dolls, but it was no skin off her back because they were balding and the paint that made their faces so pretty was peeling and careworn. And she didn't care the day they carted her big bed away, even though carved on the poles were notches indicating how much she'd grown and she would have liked to've kept that to measure herself by. (Papa was tall, Maman was short, and she wanted to be tall like Papa. Heroines of her fairytales were always tall and slender. Short girls did not make for good princesses.)
(Éponine was short now, shorter than all the boys at the café, all her sisters-in-arms standing at the streetcorners, every heroine to grace the stage.)
The books were the last to go, but only because Maman hid them from Papa. Papa had never seen the use of papers and writing and, to be truthful, neither had Maman, but the cheap thrills of popular romance spared Éponine's books until the day Papa was looking for his cravat and found them in the cranny Maman had shoved them in.
"We'll get them back," he promised, wrenching the last of the books away from Éponine's small fingers. "Once the inn's back on its feet again, we'll buy you all t'books in the world."
By that time they'd been too long without bread for her to believe him, but she handed over the books anyway. Her stomach hurt more than her heart, and her head was dizzy and her lips were parched, and Gavroche was wailing in the corner. It seemed easier to accept her father's placations than to protest them.
She wondered if this fine young academic, with his flaxen head full of hair and his upturned mouth full of teeth and his limber arms full of books would have had her do. Hold on to your books. Education is the key to elevating society. That's what one of his friends had remarked to Marius just the other day.
Education was well and fine, Éponine thought, and it filled your mind with all sorts of useful things, like how to quote old poems at young girls who didn't understand their meaning, but it didn't help fill your stomach when hunger clawed like a winter ache up your insides. The things Éponine had picked up from other girls on the streets were far more practical — how to lie, how to cheat, how to steal, how to bewitch desperate men to pay for your services even with mud in your hair and dirt on your face.
She wanted to know if this grand young man with heart full of thunder and a mouth all crammed with the words of other men knew of the pains of the cold that wailed at you, that stripped you to your bones, if he knew of the sores that started to fester on your tongue, the hair that would fall out in clumps, the shadows that started to haunt the edges of your vision, and the people you thought you'd lost long ago appearing like ghosts before your eyes.
Listening to him talk, though, all this faded into background noise that would sometimes bubble and buzz irritatingly, but never quite to the point of disturbing her from the hypnotic way his mouth formed his words. Éponine had long ceased to believe in angels, but the young man with the big dreams and the name that was utterly unpronounceable was beautiful in his vengeance, and when he talked of revolution she could almost believe in it.
Almost.
Éponine (Thenardier) Jondrette had no more illusions about life, but she never minded a good story when it came along. He tried too hard, but she was willing to listen.
note
probably a good time for a disclaimer since i always forget about them.
i don't own les misérables - the book, the musical, or the various film adaptations.