The following day was the 3d of June, 1832, a date which it is necessary to indicate on account of the grave events which at that epoch hung on the horizon of Paris in the state of lightning-charged clouds.
Marius, at nightfall, was pursuing the same road as on the preceding evening, with the same thoughts of delight in his heart, when he caught sight of Éponine approaching, through the trees of the boulevard. Two days in succession—this was too much.
He turned hastily aside, quitted the boulevard, changed his course and went to the Rue Plumet through the Rue Monsieur. This caused Éponine to follow him to the Rue Plumet, a thing which she had not yet done.
Up to that time, she had contented herself with watching him on his passage along the boulevard without ever seeking to encounter him. It was only on the evening before that she had attempted to address him. So Éponine followed him, without his suspecting the fact.
She saw him displace the bar and slip into the garden. She approached the railing, felt of the bars one after the other, and readily recognized the one which Marius had moved. She murmured in a low voice and in gloomy accents:— 'None of that, Lisette!
' She seated herself on the underpinning of the railing, close beside the bar, as though she were guarding it. It was precisely at the point where the railing touched the neighboring wall. There was a dim nook there, in which Éponine was entirely concealed.
She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring and without breathing, a prey to her thoughts. Towards ten o’clock in the evening, one of the two or three persons who passed through the Rue Plumet, an old, belated bourgeois who was making haste