





Cosette’s grief, which had been so poignant and lively four or five
months previously, had, without her being conscious of the fact,
entered upon its convalescence. Nature, spring, youth, love for her
father, the gayety of the birds and flowers, caused something almost
resembling forgetfulness to filter gradually, drop by drop, into that
soul, which was so virgin and so young. Was the fire wholly extinct
there? Or was it merely that layers of ashes had formed? The truth is,
that she hardly felt the painful and burning spot any longer.

One day she suddenly thought of Marius: “Why!” said she, “I no longer
think of him.”


That same week, she noticed a very handsome officer of lancers, with a
wasp-like waist, a delicious uniform, the cheeks of a young girl, a
sword under his arm, waxed moustaches, and a glazed schapka, passing
the gate. Moreover, he had light hair, prominent blue eyes, a round
face, was vain, insolent and good-looking; quite the reverse of Marius.
He had a cigar in his mouth. Cosette thought that this officer
doubtless belonged to the regiment in barracks in the Rue de Babylone.

On the following day, she saw him pass again. She took note of the
hour.

From that time forth, was it chance? she saw him pass nearly every day.

The officer’s comrades perceived that there was, in that “badly kept”
garden, behind that malicious rococo fence, a very pretty creature, who
was almost always there when the handsome lieutenant,—who is not
unknown to the reader, and whose name was Théodule Gillenormand,—passed
by.

“See here!” they said to him, “there’s a little creature there who is
making eyes at you, look.”


“Have I the time,” replied the lancer, “to look at all the girls who
look at me?”


This was at the precise moment when Marius was descending heavily
towards agony, and was saying: “If I could but see her before I
die!”—Had his wish been realized, had he beheld Cosette at that moment
gazing at the lancer, he would not have been able to utter a word, and
he would have expired with grief.

Whose fault was it? No one’s.

Marius possessed one of those temperaments which bury themselves in
sorrow and there abide; Cosette was one of those persons who plunge
into sorrow and emerge from it again.

Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period, the fatal
phase of feminine reverie abandoned to itself, in which the isolated
heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the vine which cling,
as chance directs, to the capital of a marble column or to the post of
a wine-shop: A rapid and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, be
she rich or poor, for wealth does not prevent a bad choice;
misalliances are made in very high circles, real misalliance is that of
souls; and as many an unknown young man, without name, without birth,
without fortune, is a marble column which bears up a temple of grand
sentiments and grand ideas, so such and such a man of the world
satisfied and opulent, who has polished boots and varnished words, if
looked at not outside, but inside, a thing which is reserved for his
wife, is nothing more than a block obscurely haunted by violent,
unclean, and vinous passions; the post of a drinking-shop.

What did Cosette’s soul contain? Passion calmed or lulled to sleep;
something limpid, brilliant, troubled to a certain depth, and gloomy
lower down. The image of the handsome officer was reflected in the
surface. Did a souvenir linger in the depths?—Quite at the
bottom?—Possibly. Cosette did not know.

A singular incident supervened.






During the first fortnight in April, Jean Valjean took a journey. This,
as the reader knows, happened from time to time, at very long
intervals. He remained absent a day or two days at the utmost. Where
did he go? No one knew, not even Cosette. Once only, on the occasion of
one of these departures, she had accompanied him in a hackney-coach as
far as a little blind-alley at the corner of which she read: _Impasse
de la Planchette_. There he alighted, and the coach took Cosette back
to the Rue de Babylone. It was usually when money was lacking in the
house that Jean Valjean took these little trips.

So Jean Valjean was absent. He had said: “I shall return in three
days.”


That evening, Cosette was alone in the drawing-room. In order to get
rid of her ennui, she had opened her piano-organ, and had begun to
sing, accompanying herself the while, the chorus from _Euryanthe_:
“Hunters astray in the wood!” which is probably the most beautiful
thing in all the sphere of music. When she had finished, she remained
wrapped in thought.

All at once, it seemed to her that she heard the sound of footsteps in
the garden.

It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be Toussaint,
she was in bed, and it was ten o’clock at night.

She stepped to the shutter of the drawing-room, which was closed, and
laid her ear against it.

It seemed to her that it was the tread of a man, and that he was
walking very softly.

She mounted rapidly to the first floor, to her own chamber, opened a
small wicket in her shutter, and peeped into the garden. The moon was
at the full. Everything could be seen as plainly as by day.

There was no one there.

She opened the window. The garden was absolutely calm, and all that was
visible was that the street was deserted as usual.

Cosette thought that she had been mistaken. She thought that she had
heard a noise. It was a hallucination produced by the melancholy and
magnificent chorus of Weber, which lays open before the mind terrified
depths, which trembles before the gaze like a dizzy forest, and in
which one hears the crackling of dead branches beneath the uneasy tread
of the huntsmen of whom one catches a glimpse through the twilight.

She thought no more about it.

Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature. There flowed in her
veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs
barefoot. It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a
dove. There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.

On the following day, at an earlier hour, towards nightfall, she was
strolling in the garden. In the midst of the confused thoughts which
occupied her, she fancied that she caught for an instant a sound
similar to that of the preceding evening, as though some one were
walking beneath the trees in the dusk, and not very far from her; but
she told herself that nothing so closely resembles a step on the grass
as the friction of two branches which have moved from side to side, and
she paid no heed to it. Besides, she could see nothing.

She emerged from “the thicket”; she had still to cross a small lawn to
regain the steps.

The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast Cosette’s shadow in
front of her upon this lawn, as she came out from the shrubbery.

Cosette halted in alarm.

Beside her shadow, the moon outlined distinctly upon the turf another
shadow, which was particularly startling and terrible, a shadow which
had a round hat.

It was the shadow of a man, who must have been standing on the border
of the clump of shrubbery, a few paces in the rear of Cosette.

She stood for a moment without the power to speak, or cry, or call, or
stir, or turn her head.

Then she summoned up all her courage, and turned round resolutely.

There was no one there.

She glanced on the ground. The figure had disappeared.

She re-entered the thicket, searched the corners boldly, went as far as
the gate, and found nothing.

She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror. Was this another
hallucination? What! Two days in succession! One hallucination might
pass, but two hallucinations? The disquieting point about it was, that
the shadow had assuredly not been a phantom. Phantoms do not wear round
hats.

On the following day Jean Valjean returned. Cosette told him what she
thought she had heard and seen. She wanted to be reassured and to see
her father shrug his shoulders and say to her: “You are a little
goose.”


Jean Valjean grew anxious.

“It cannot be anything,” said he.

He left her under some pretext, and went into the garden, and she saw
him examining the gate with great attention.

During the night she woke up; this time she was sure, and she
distinctly heard some one walking close to the flight of steps beneath
her window. She ran to her little wicket and opened it. In point of
fact, there was a man in the garden, with a large club in his hand.
Just as she was about to scream, the moon lighted up the man’s profile.
It was her father. She returned to her bed, saying to herself: “He is
very uneasy!”


Jean Valjean passed that night and the two succeeding nights in the
garden. Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.

On the third night, the moon was on the wane, and had begun to rise
later; at one o’clock in the morning, possibly, she heard a loud burst
of laughter and her father’s voice calling her:—

“Cosette!”


She jumped out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened her
window.

Her father was standing on the grass-plot below.

“I have waked you for the purpose of reassuring you,” said he; “look,
there is your shadow with the round hat.”


And he pointed out to her on the turf a shadow cast by the moon, and
which did indeed, bear considerable resemblance to the spectre of a man
wearing a round hat. It was the shadow produced by a chimney-pipe of
sheet iron, with a hood, which rose above a neighboring roof.

Cosette joined in his laughter, all her lugubrious suppositions were
allayed, and the next morning, as she was at breakfast with her father,
she made merry over the sinister garden haunted by the shadows of iron
chimney-pots.

Jean Valjean became quite tranquil once more; as for Cosette, she did
not pay much attention to the question whether the chimney-pot was
really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen, or thought
she had seen, and whether the moon had been in the same spot in the
sky.

She did not question herself as to the peculiarity of a chimney-pot
which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires when some
one looks at its shadow, for the shadow had taken the alarm when
Cosette had turned round, and Cosette had thought herself very sure of
this. Cosette’s serenity was fully restored. The proof appeared to her
to be complete, and it quite vanished from her mind, whether there
could possibly be any one walking in the garden during the evening or
at night.

A few days later, however, a fresh incident occurred.






In the garden, near the railing on the street, there was a stone bench,
screened from the eyes of the curious by a plantation of yoke-elms, but
which could, in case of necessity, be reached by an arm from the
outside, past the trees and the gate.

One evening during that same month of April, Jean Valjean had gone out;
Cosette had seated herself on this bench after sundown. The breeze was
blowing briskly in the trees, Cosette was meditating; an objectless
sadness was taking possession of her little by little, that invincible
sadness evoked by the evening, and which arises, perhaps, who knows,
from the mystery of the tomb which is ajar at that hour.

Perhaps Fantine was within that shadow.

Cosette rose, slowly made the tour of the garden, walking on the grass
drenched in dew, and saying to herself, through the species of
melancholy somnambulism in which she was plunged: “Really, one needs
wooden shoes for the garden at this hour. One takes cold.”


She returned to the bench.

As she was about to resume her seat there, she observed on the spot
which she had quitted, a tolerably large stone which had, evidently,
not been there a moment before.

Cosette gazed at the stone, asking herself what it meant. All at once
the idea occurred to her that the stone had not reached the bench all
by itself, that some one had placed it there, that an arm had been
thrust through the railing, and this idea appeared to alarm her. This
time, the fear was genuine; the stone was there. No doubt was possible;
she did not touch it, fled without glancing behind her, took refuge in
the house, and immediately closed with shutter, bolt, and bar the
door-like window opening on the flight of steps. She inquired of
Toussaint:—

“Has my father returned yet?”


“Not yet, Mademoiselle.”


[We have already noted once for all the fact that Toussaint stuttered.
May we be permitted to dispense with it for the future. The musical
notation of an infirmity is repugnant to us.]

Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and given to nocturnal strolls, often
returned quite late at night.

“Toussaint,” went on Cosette, “are you careful to thoroughly barricade
the shutters opening on the garden, at least with bars, in the evening,
and to put the little iron things in the little rings that close them?”


“Oh! be easy on that score, Miss.”


Toussaint did not fail in her duty, and Cosette was well aware of the
fact, but she could not refrain from adding:—

“It is so solitary here.”


“So far as that is concerned,” said Toussaint, “it is true. We might be
assassinated before we had time to say _ouf!_ And Monsieur does not
sleep in the house, to boot. But fear nothing, Miss, I fasten the
shutters up like prisons. Lone women! That is enough to make one
shudder, I believe you! Just imagine, what if you were to see men enter
your chamber at night and say: ‘Hold your tongue!’ and begin to cut
your throat. It’s not the dying so much; you die, for one must die, and
that’s all right; it’s the abomination of feeling those people touch
you. And then, their knives; they can’t be able to cut well with them!
Ah, good gracious!”


“Be quiet,” said Cosette. “Fasten everything thoroughly.”


Cosette, terrified by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint, and
possibly, also, by the recollection of the apparitions of the past
week, which recurred to her memory, dared not even say to her: “Go and
look at the stone which has been placed on the bench!” for fear of
opening the garden gate and allowing “the men” to enter. She saw that
all the doors and windows were carefully fastened, made Toussaint go
all over the house from garret to cellar, locked herself up in her own
chamber, bolted her door, looked under her couch, went to bed and slept
badly. All night long she saw that big stone, as large as a mountain
and full of caverns.

At sunrise,—the property of the rising sun is to make us laugh at all
our terrors of the past night, and our laughter is in direct proportion
to our terror which they have caused,—at sunrise Cosette, when she
woke, viewed her fright as a nightmare, and said to herself: “What have
I been thinking of? It is like the footsteps that I thought I heard a
week or two ago in the garden at night! It is like the shadow of the
chimney-pot! Am I becoming a coward?” The sun, which was glowing
through the crevices in her shutters, and turning the damask curtains
crimson, reassured her to such an extent that everything vanished from
her thoughts, even the stone.

“There was no more a stone on the bench than there was a man in a round
hat in the garden; I dreamed about the stone, as I did all the rest.”


She dressed herself, descended to the garden, ran to the bench, and
broke out in a cold perspiration. The stone was there.

But this lasted only for a moment. That which is terror by night is
curiosity by day.

“Bah!” said she, “come, let us see what it is.”


She lifted the stone, which was tolerably large. Beneath it was
something which resembled a letter. It was a white envelope. Cosette
seized it. There was no address on one side, no seal on the other. Yet
the envelope, though unsealed, was not empty. Papers could be seen
inside.

Cosette examined it. It was no longer alarm, it was no longer
curiosity; it was a beginning of anxiety.

Cosette drew from the envelope its contents, a little notebook of
paper, each page of which was numbered and bore a few lines in a very
fine and rather pretty handwriting, as Cosette thought.

Cosette looked for a name; there was none. To whom was this addressed?
To her, probably, since a hand had deposited the packet on her bench.
From whom did it come? An irresistible fascination took possession of
her; she tried to turn away her eyes from the leaflets which were
trembling in her hand, she gazed at the sky, the street, the acacias
all bathed in light, the pigeons fluttering over a neighboring roof,
and then her glance suddenly fell upon the manuscript, and she said to
herself that she must know what it contained.

This is what she read.








[Illustration: Cosette With Letter]


The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a
single being even to God, that is love.

Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.

How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!

What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills the
world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could
comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of
all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.

The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac
curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of
dreams.

God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black,
creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being
transparent.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the
attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.

Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which
possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from
seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a
multitude of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the
song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children,
the light of the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars,
all creation. And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love.
Love is sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.

Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.

The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love,
that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the
infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.

Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like
it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible,
imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is
immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can
extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones,
and we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven.

Oh Love! Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each
other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances
which penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss!
strolls by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I have
sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from
the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies
of men.

God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give
them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in
fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable
felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is
impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the
plenitude of man.

You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because
it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a
greater mystery, woman.

All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack air
and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible.
Suffocation of the soul.

When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic
unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are
concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of
the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the
same spirit. Love, soar.

On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she
walks, you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do: to
think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.

What love commences can be finished by God alone.

True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a
handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its
hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely
little.

If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive
plant; if you are a man, be love.

Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we
possess paradise, we desire heaven.

Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand
how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and
more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.

“Does she still come to the Luxembourg?” “No, sir.” “This is the church
where she attends mass, is it not?” “She no longer comes here.” “Does
she still live in this house?” “She has moved away.” “Where has she
gone to dwell?”


“She did not say.”


What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one’s soul!

Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame
on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a
child of him!

There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. There
is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.

Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in
hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a
finger,—that would suffice for my eternity!

Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to
live in it.

Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture.
There is ecstasy in agony.

Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing.

Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.

Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long
trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This
destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the
tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the
definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living
perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by
the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe,
alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances!
Death will deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them
again.

I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His
hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water
trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.

What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to
love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer
composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything
that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more
germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul,
inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds and
the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its
vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer
feels anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the
crests of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.

If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become
extinct.






As Cosette read, she gradually fell into thought. At the very moment
when she raised her eyes from the last line of the note-book, the
handsome officer passed triumphantly in front of the gate,—it was his
hour; Cosette thought him hideous.

She resumed her contemplation of the book. It was written in the most
charming of chirography, thought Cosette; in the same hand, but with
divers inks, sometimes very black, again whitish, as when ink has been
added to the inkstand, and consequently on different days. It was,
then, a mind which had unfolded itself there, sigh by sigh,
irregularly, without order, without choice, without object, hap-hazard.
Cosette had never read anything like it. This manuscript, in which she
already perceived more light than obscurity, produced upon her the
effect of a half-open sanctuary. Each one of these mysterious lines
shone before her eyes and inundated her heart with a strange radiance.
The education which she had received had always talked to her of the
soul, and never of love, very much as one might talk of the firebrand
and not of the flame. This manuscript of fifteen pages suddenly and
sweetly revealed to her all of love, sorrow, destiny, life, eternity,
the beginning, the end. It was as if a hand had opened and suddenly
flung upon her a handful of rays of light. In these few lines she felt
a passionate, ardent, generous, honest nature, a sacred will, an
immense sorrow, and an immense despair, a suffering heart, an ecstasy
fully expanded. What was this manuscript? A letter. A letter without
name, without address, without date, without signature, pressing and
disinterested, an enigma composed of truths, a message of love made to
be brought by an angel and read by a virgin, an appointment made beyond
the bounds of earth, the love-letter of a phantom to a shade. It was an
absent one, tranquil and dejected, who seemed ready to take refuge in
death and who sent to the absent love, his lady, the secret of fate,
the key of life, love. This had been written with one foot in the grave
and one finger in heaven. These lines, which had fallen one by one on
the paper, were what might be called drops of soul.

Now, from whom could these pages come? Who could have penned them?

Cosette did not hesitate a moment. One man only.

He!

Day had dawned once more in her spirit; all had reappeared. She felt an
unheard-of joy, and a profound anguish. It was he! he who had written!
he was there! it was he whose arm had been thrust through that railing!
While she was forgetful of him, he had found her again! But had she
forgotten him? No, never! She was foolish to have thought so for a
single moment. She had always loved him, always adored him. The fire
had been smothered, and had smouldered for a time, but she saw all
plainly now; it had but made headway, and now it had burst forth
afresh, and had inflamed her whole being. This note-book was like a
spark which had fallen from that other soul into hers. She felt the
conflagration starting up once more.

She imbued herself thoroughly with every word of the manuscript: “Oh
yes!” said she, “how perfectly I recognize all that! That is what I had
already read in his eyes.” As she was finishing it for the third time,
Lieutenant Théodule passed the gate once more, and rattled his spurs
upon the pavement. Cosette was forced to raise her eyes. She thought
him insipid, silly, stupid, useless, foppish, displeasing, impertinent,
and extremely ugly. The officer thought it his duty to smile at her.

She turned away as in shame and indignation. She would gladly have
thrown something at his head.

She fled, re-entered the house, and shut herself up in her chamber to
peruse the manuscript once more, to learn it by heart, and to dream.
When she had thoroughly mastered it she kissed it and put it in her
bosom.

All was over, Cosette had fallen back into deep, seraphic love. The
abyss of Eden had yawned once more.

All day long, Cosette remained in a sort of bewilderment. She scarcely
thought, her ideas were in the state of a tangled skein in her brain,
she could not manage to conjecture anything, she hoped through a
tremor, what? vague things. She dared make herself no promises, and she
did not wish to refuse herself anything. Flashes of pallor passed over
her countenance, and shivers ran through her frame. It seemed to her,
at intervals, that she was entering the land of chimæras; she said to
herself: “Is this reality?” Then she felt of the dear paper within her
bosom under her gown, she pressed it to her heart, she felt its angles
against her flesh; and if Jean Valjean had seen her at the moment, he
would have shuddered in the presence of that luminous and unknown joy,
which overflowed from beneath her eyelids.—“Oh yes!” she thought, “it
is certainly he! This comes from him, and is for me!”


And she told herself that an intervention of the angels, a celestial
chance, had given him back to her.

Oh transfiguration of love! Oh dreams! That celestial chance, that
intervention of the angels, was a pellet of bread tossed by one thief
to another thief, from the Charlemagne Courtyard to the Lion’s Ditch,
over the roofs of La Force.






When evening came, Jean Valjean went out; Cosette dressed herself. She
arranged her hair in the most becoming manner, and she put on a dress
whose bodice had received one snip of the scissors too much, and which,
through this slope, permitted a view of the beginning of her throat,
and was, as young girls say, “a trifle indecent.” It was not in the
least indecent, but it was prettier than usual. She made her toilet
thus without knowing why she did so.

Did she mean to go out? No.

Was she expecting a visitor? No.

At dusk, she went down to the garden. Toussaint was busy in her
kitchen, which opened on the back yard.

She began to stroll about under the trees, thrusting aside the branches
from time to time with her hand, because there were some which hung
very low.

In this manner she reached the bench.

The stone was still there.

She sat down, and gently laid her white hand on this stone as though
she wished to caress and thank it.

All at once, she experienced that indefinable impression which one
undergoes when there is some one standing behind one, even when she
does not see the person.

She turned her head and rose to her feet.

It was he.

His head was bare. He appeared to have grown thin and pale. His black
clothes were hardly discernible. The twilight threw a wan light on his
fine brow, and covered his eyes in shadows. Beneath a veil of
incomparable sweetness, he had something about him that suggested death
and night. His face was illuminated by the light of the dying day, and
by the thought of a soul that is taking flight.

He seemed to be not yet a ghost, and he was no longer a man.

He had flung away his hat in the thicket, a few paces distant.

Cosette, though ready to swoon, uttered no cry. She retreated slowly,
for she felt herself attracted. He did not stir. By virtue of something
ineffable and melancholy which enveloped him, she felt the look in his
eyes which she could not see.

Cosette, in her retreat, encountered a tree and leaned against it. Had
it not been for this tree, she would have fallen.

Then she heard his voice, that voice which she had really never heard,
barely rising above the rustle of the leaves, and murmuring:—

“Pardon me, here I am. My heart is full. I could not live on as I was
living, and I have come. Have you read what I placed there on the
bench? Do you recognize me at all? Have no fear of me. It is a long
time, you remember the day, since you looked at me at the Luxembourg,
near the Gladiator. And the day when you passed before me? It was on
the 16th of June and the 2d of July. It is nearly a year ago. I have
not seen you for a long time. I inquired of the woman who let the
chairs, and she told me that she no longer saw you. You lived in the
Rue de l’Ouest, on the third floor, in the front apartments of a new
house,—you see that I know! I followed you. What else was there for me
to do? And then you disappeared. I thought I saw you pass once, while I
was reading the newspapers under the arcade of the Odéon. I ran after
you. But no. It was a person who had a bonnet like yours. At night I
came hither. Do not be afraid, no one sees me. I come to gaze upon your
windows near at hand. I walk very softly, so that you may not hear, for
you might be alarmed. The other evening I was behind you, you turned
round, I fled. Once, I heard you singing. I was happy. Did it affect
you because I heard you singing through the shutters? That could not
hurt you. No, it is not so? You see, you are my angel! Let me come
sometimes; I think that I am going to die. If you only knew! I adore
you. Forgive me, I speak to you, but I do not know what I am saying; I
may have displeased you; have I displeased you?”


“Oh! my mother!” said she.

And she sank down as though on the point of death.

He grasped her, she fell, he took her in his arms, he pressed her
close, without knowing what he was doing. He supported her, though he
was tottering himself. It was as though his brain were full of smoke;
lightnings darted between his lips; his ideas vanished; it seemed to
him that he was accomplishing some religious act, and that he was
committing a profanation. Moreover, he had not the least passion for
this lovely woman whose force he felt against his breast. He was beside
himself with love.

She took his hand and laid it on her heart. He felt the paper there, he
stammered:—

“You love me, then?”


She replied in a voice so low that it was no longer anything more than
a barely audible breath:—

“Hush! Thou knowest it!”


And she hid her blushing face on the breast of the superb and
intoxicated young man.

He fell upon the bench, and she beside him. They had no words more. The
stars were beginning to gleam. How did it come to pass that their lips
met? How comes it to pass that the birds sing, that snow melts, that
the rose unfolds, that May expands, that the dawn grows white behind
the black trees on the shivering crest of the hills?

A kiss, and that was all.

Both started, and gazed into the darkness with sparkling eyes.

They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp
earth, nor the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their hearts
were full of thoughts. They had clasped hands unconsciously.

She did not ask him, she did not even wonder, how he had entered there,
and how he had made his way into the garden. It seemed so simple to her
that he should be there!

From time to time, Marius’ knee touched Cosette’s knee, and both
shivered.

At intervals, Cosette stammered a word. Her soul fluttered on her lips
like a drop of dew on a flower.

Little by little they began to talk to each other. Effusion followed
silence, which is fulness. The night was serene and splendid overhead.
These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their
dreams, their intoxications, their ecstasies, their chimæras, their
weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had
longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each
other. They confided to each other in an ideal intimacy, which nothing
could augment, their most secret and most mysterious thoughts. They
related to each other, with candid faith in their illusions, all that
love, youth, and the remains of childhood which still lingered about
them, suggested to their minds. Their two hearts poured themselves out
into each other in such wise, that at the expiration of a quarter of an
hour, it was the young man who had the young girl’s soul, and the young
girl who had the young man’s soul. Each became permeated with the
other, they were enchanted with each other, they dazzled each other.

When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she
laid her head on his shoulder and asked him:—

“What is your name?”


“My name is Marius,” said he. “And yours?”


“My name is Cosette.”





