"By the way, if you should want me between this and then, come or send here. Ask for Inspector Javert." CHAPTER XV. JONDRETTE MAKES HIS PURCHASE. At about three o'clock Courfeyrac happened to pass along the Rue Mouffetard, accompanied by Bossuet. The snow was thicker than ever, and filled the air, and Bossuet had just said to Courfeyrac,-- "To see all these flakes of snow fall, we might, say that the sky is suffering from a plague of white butterflies." All at once Bossuet noticed Marius coming up the street toward the barrière with a peculiar look. "Hilloh!" said Bossuet, "there's Marius." "I saw him," said Courfeyrac; "but we won't speak to him." "Why not?" "He is busy." "At what?" "Do you not see that he looks as if he were following some one?" "That is true," said Bossuet. "Only see what eyes he makes!" Courfeyrac added. "But whom the deuce is he following?" "Some Mimi-Goton with flowers in her cap. He is in love." "But," Bossuet observed, "I do not see any Mimi or any Goton, or any cap trimmed with flowers, in the street. There is not a single woman." Courfeyrac looked, and exclaimed, "He is following a man." A man wearing a cap, and whose gray beard could be distinguished, although his back was turned, was walking about twenty yards ahead of Marius. This man was dressed in a perfectly new great-coat, which was too large for him, and a frightful pair of ragged trousers all black with mud. Bossuet burst into a laugh. "Who can the man be?" "That?" Courfeyrac replied; "oh, he is a poet. Poets are fond of wearing the trousers of rabbit-skin pedlers and the coats of the Peers of France." "Let us see where Marius is going," said Bossuet, "and where this man is going. Suppose we follow them, eh?" "Bossuet!" Courfeyrac exclaimed, "Eagle of Meaux, you are a prodigious brute to think of following a man who is following a man."