dignity. Gavroche was a born Bohemian, enamoured of low company, and of the careless comedies of life. Their sister Eponine—best loved of the three—was a delicate, fastidious little creature, with an exquisite sense of propriety, and of the refinements of social intercourse. Enjolras was a glutton, caring for nothing so much as for his dinner. Gavroche, more generous, would bring in from the streets gaunt and ragged cats, who devoured in a scurry of fright the food laid aside for him. "I was often tempted to remonstrate," writes Gautier, "and to say to the little scamp, 'A nice lot of friends you do pick up!' But I refrained. After all, it was an amiable weakness. He might have eaten his dinner himself."
Eponine was piquant rather than beautiful. Her little velvety nose looked like a fine truffle of Perigord. Her eyes had the oblique slant of the Orient, and were sea-green like the eyes of Pallas-Athene, or of that fair Dame de Fayel, to whom the Sire de Coucy, dying in the Holy Land, sent back his heart by a trusted squire, and whose husband, discovering the contents of the box, forced her to eat it, of which horror she died. In the Sire de Coucy's passionate verses, his lady's eyes are described as green "like a cat's;" for no other colour, cries the lover rapturously, can inspire ardour and adoration in the human heart.
