بخش 3 کتاب 6

BOOK SIX

THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS

THE NICKNAME AS A WAY OF FORMING FAMILY NAMES

MARIUS WAS NOW a handsome young man of medium height, with thick, jet black hair, a high, intelligent forehead, passionate flaring nostrils, a candid and calm look, and with something hard to define that was at once arrogant, thoughtful, and innocent shining from every pore. His profile, whose every line was rounded without ceasing to be strong, had that Germanic softness that made its way into French physiognomy via Alsace and Lorraine and that complete absence of angles that made the Sicambri1 so recognizable among the Romans and that distinguishes the leonine race from the aquiline. He was at that stage in life when the minds of thinking men are made up of almost equal proportions of depth and naïveté. Given a serious situation, he had all it took to be stupid; one turn of the screw more, and he could be sublime. His manners were reserved, frigid, polite, not particularly open. As his mouth was alluring, his lips the most rosy red and his teeth the whitest in the world, his smile made up for what was severe in his whole physiognomy. At certain moments, the contrast between his chaste forehead and that sensual smile was quite strange. His eyes were small, his gaze grand.

In the period when he was most desperately destitute, he noticed that young girls turned around when he passed and, with a heavy heart, he fled or hid. He thought they were looking at him because of his old clothes and that they were laughing at him; the fact is that they looked at him because of his grace, which set them dreaming.

This mute misunderstanding between himself and the pretty passersby had made him fierce. He did not choose any one of them for the very good reason that he took off when faced with any of them. He lived like this indefinitely—stupidly, said Courfeyrac.

Courfeyrac also told him, “Don’t try and be honourable”—for they were on familiar terms; familiarity is a tendency early in a friendship when you are young. “My dear boy, a word of advice. Take your nose out of books for a while and look at the talent. There’s something to be said for the girls, O Marius! The way you run away blushing, you’ll end up a brute.” At other times, Courfeyrac would say when he ran into him: “Hello, Monsieur l’abbé.”

Whenever Courfeyrac said something of the kind to him, Marius spent the week avoiding women more than ever, young or old, and he would avoid Courfeyrac into the bargain.

There were, though, two women, in all the immensity of creation, that Marius did not flee and that he was not on his guard with. If the truth be known, you would have amazed him by pointing out that these two were actually women. One was the old bearded woman who swept out his room and who made Courfeyrac say: “Since his servant wears her beard, Marius doesn’t wear his.” The other was a little girl whom he saw regularly and never looked at.

For more than a year, Marius had noticed in a deserted walk of the Luxembourg gardens, the walk that runs alongside the parapet of the plant nursery, a man and a very young girl, almost always seated side by side on the same bench at the most solitary end of the path, on the rue de l’Ouest side. Every time that fate, which gets mixed up in the promenades of people whose eyes are turned inward, took Marius into this path, which was practically every day, he would find this couple there. The man might have been sixty or so; he looked sad and serious; his whole person radiated that robust yet weary feel of the soldier retired from active service. If he had worn a decoration, Marius would have said: That’s a former officer. He looked like a good man, but unapproachable, and he never met anyone else’s gaze. He wore blue trousers, a blue redingote, and a broad-brimmed hat, all of which looked new, a black tie, and a Quaker shirt, meaning, dazzlingly white but made of coarse material. A young working girl passing close by one day said: “Now there’s a widower who’s nice and neat.” His hair was as white as snow.

When the young girl who accompanied him first came and sat with him on the bench that they seemed to have adopted, she was just a bit of a girl, about thirteen or fourteen years old, thin to the point of being almost ugly, gauche, mousy, though promising to have rather beautiful eyes one day. Only, they were always looking up with a sort of off-putting assurance. She was dressed the way convent boarders are, in clothes both infantile and too old for her, in a badly cut dress of coarse black merino wool. They looked like father and daughter.

For two or three days, Marius studied this aging man who was not yet old and this little girl who was not yet a person, then forgot about them completely. They, for their part, did not seem to have even seen him. They chatted between themselves in a quiet, oblivious sort of way. The girl babbled endlessly and cheerily. The old man didn’t say much, and at times would gaze at her with eyes filled with fatherly adoration.

Marius had got into the habit of walking down this path without thinking. He invariably found them there. This is how it went:

Marius preferred to come from the other end of the path to the one where their bench was. He would walk the whole length of the path, pass by them, then turn back and go as far as the end at which he had come in, then do it all again. He came and went this way five or six times on his walk and he did the walk five or six times a week without their reaching the point of exchanging greetings. Though they seemed, and perhaps because they seemed, to want to avoid people’s eyes, the old gentleman and the young girl had naturally attracted the attention of the five or six students who occasionally strolled past the nursery, the studious ones after their courses, the others after their game of billiards. Courfeyrac, who was in the latter category, had observed them for a while, but he found the girl ugly and so had swiftly and carefully given them wide berth. He had fled like some Parthian,2 firing a nickname at them as he did so. Struck solely by the girl’s frock and the old man’s hair, he had called the girl “Mademoiselle Lanoire”—Miss Black—and her father “Monsieur Leblanc”—Mr. White—so aptly that, as no one knew them from Adam in any case, in the absence of a name, the nickname stuck. The students would say: “Ah, Monsieur Leblanc’s on his bench!” and Marius, like the others, had found it convenient to call this unknown gentleman Monsieur Leblanc. We will do as they did and use Monsieur Leblanc to simplify this tale.

So Marius saw them practically every day, at the same time, for the first year. He found the man to his liking, but the girl rather dismal.

LUX FACTA EST1

THE SECOND YEAR, at the exact point in the story the reader has reached, it happened that this little Luxembourg habit was broken, without Marius himself really knowing why, and it was nearly six months before he set foot in his walk again. The day finally came when he went back. It was a blissful summer morning, Marius was full of joy as you are on a beautiful day. He felt as though his heart was bursting with all the birdsong he could hear and all the bits of blue sky he could see through the leaves of the trees.

He headed straight for “his” walk and when he got there he spotted the familiar pair, still on the same bench. Only, when he came closer, though it was definitely the same man, it seemed to him that it was not the same girl. The person he now saw was a tall and beautiful creature with the full array of womanly charms at that precise moment when these are still combined with all the utterly artless graces of the child; a fleeting and pure moment that these words alone can translate: fifteen years old. Wonderful chestnut hair streaked with gold, a forehead that looked made of marble, cheeks that looked made of rose petals, a pale incarnadine, a flushed whiteness, an exquisite mouth with a smile like a flash of light and a voice that was sheer music, a head that Raphael would have given Mary, placed on a neck that Jean Goujon2 would have given Venus. And, so that nothing was missing from this ravishing face, the nose was not beautiful, it was pretty; neither straight nor curved, neither Italian nor Greek; it was a Parisian nose par excellence, that is, somewhat witty, fine, irregular, and pure, enough to drive painters to despair and to charm poets.

When Marius passed close by her, he could not see her eyes, which were constantly downcast. He could only see her long chestnut eyelashes dipped modestly in shadow.

This did not prevent the beautiful child from smiling while listening to the man with the white hair talking to her, and nothing was as ravishing as that fresh smile that went with her downcast eyes.

Initially Marius thought the man must have another daughter, that this girl was no doubt a sister of the first. But when the invariable habit of the walk had brought him close to the bench a second time, and he had studied her carefully, he recognized that it was the same one. In six months, the little girl had become a young girl; that’s all. Nothing could be more normal than such a phenomenon. There is an instant, the blink of an eye, when girls blossom suddenly into roses. Yesterday when you left them they were still children, today you find them downright disturbing.

This one had not only grown, she had been perfected. Just as three days in spring are enough for certain trees to cover themselves with flowers, six months had been enough for her to deck herself out with beauty. Her very own spring had come.

You sometimes see people, poor and mean people, who seem to wake up out of destitution and suddenly hurtle headlong into wild extravagance; they go on a spending spree and suddenly become stunning, lavish, resplendent. This comes from income pocketed; yesterday an interest payment came through. The young girl had received her half-yearly dividend.

And then again, she was no longer the school boarder with her felt hat, her merino wool frock, her school shoes, and her chapped hands; taste had come to her with beauty; she was now dressed well with a sort of simple, rich, unmannered elegance. She had on a dress of black damask, a short hooded cape of the same fabric, and a white crepe hat. Her white gloves showed off the fineness of her hand as she played with the Chinese ivory handle of her umbrella, and her silk lace-up boots emphasized the smallness of her foot. When you passed close by, her whole toilette gave off a fresh, green, penetrating perfume.

As for the man, he was exactly the same.

The second time Marius veered close to her, the young girl looked up. Her eyes were a deep celestial blue, but this veiled azure still held only the gaze of a child. She looked at Marius with indifference, as she would have looked at a toddler running around under the sycamores or at the marble vase that was casting a shadow over the bench; and Marius for his part continued his promenade thinking of something else.

He passed close by the bench where the young girl was another four or five times but without even turning his eyes her way.

On the following days, he returned as usual to the Luxembourg; as usual, he found “the father and daughter” there, but he no longer took any notice of them. He thought no more of the girl now that she was beautiful than he had thought of her when she was ugly. He always passed close by the bench where she sat simply because that was his habit.

THE EFFECT OF SPRING

ONE DAY THE air was mild, the Luxembourg was flooded with sun and shade, the sky was as pure as if angels had rinsed it that morning, the sparrows were twittering deep in the chestnut trees, Marius had opened his whole soul to nature, he was not thinking anything, he lived and breathed, he passed close by the bench, the young girl glanced up at him and their eyes met.

What was there this time in the young girl’s gaze? Marius could not have said. It was nothing and everything. It was a strange lightning flash.

She dropped her gaze and he went on his way.

What he had just seen was not the unaffected and simple eye of a child, it was a mysterious gulf that had cracked open a fraction, then promptly shut again. There comes a day when every young girl peeks out like this. Woe to the man who happens to be there!

This first glance of a soul that does not yet know itself is like dawn in the sky. It is the awakening of something radiant and new. Nothing can convey the dangerous charm of this unexpected gleam that dimly shines its light on lovely expanses of shadow and that is made up of all the innocence of the present and all the passion of the future. It is a sort of vague tenderness, lying in wait, and sparked by the merest chance. It is a trap that innocence sets unknowingly as it goes about collecting hearts unwittingly and unwillingly. It is a virgin with the glance of a woman.

Only very rarely does that look, wherever it falls, fail to send its object into a profound spin. All pure feeling, all yearning, all ardent longing, is concentrated in that heavenly yet fatal ray of light, which, more than the most practised ogling of the flirt, has the magic power to suddenly cause that dark flower we call love, full of perfume and poison, to bloom deep in the soul.

That evening, when he got back to his garret, Marius ran his eyes over his clothes and realized for the first time that he had the sordidness, the indecency, and the unbelievable stupidity to go walking in the Luxembourg in his everyday attire, that is, in a hat that was ripped near the band, great walloping carter’s clodhoppers, black trousers that were shiny at the knees, and a black coat threadbare at the elbows.

BEGINNING OF A GREAT SICKNESS

THE NEXT DAY at the usual time, Marius dug his new coat out of his wardrobe, along with his new trousers and his new boots; he donned the complete panoply, pulled on gloves, an extravagant luxury, and took himself off to the Luxembourg.

On the way there he ran into Courfeyrac and pretended not to see him. Courfeyrac, when he got home, told his friends: “I’ve just seen Marius’s new hat and new coat, and Marius in them. No doubt he was off to sit for some exam. He looked a complete ninny.” When he got to the Luxembourg, Marius circled the pond and gazed at the swans, then stood for a long time contemplating a statue the head of which was black with mold and which was missing a hip. Near the pond a potbellied bourgeois in his forties was holding the hand of a little boy of five and quietly lecturing him: “Beware of extremes, son.1 Maintain an equal distance from despotism and anarchy.” Marius heard the bourgeois out, then circled the pond one more time. Finally, he headed for “his” walk, slowly and apparently with great reluctance. You would have said that he was both forced to go and hindered from doing so. He was unconscious of all this and believed he was behaving as he did every other day.

When he stepped into the walk, he immediately caught sight of Monsieur Leblanc and the young girl on “their” bench at the other end. He buttoned his coat right up to the top, carefully smoothed out the wrinkles, examined the lustrous sheen of his trousers somewhat complacently and marched up to the bench. There was something of the attack in this approach and certainly a desire to conquer. I say, then, that he marched up to the bench the way I’d say: Hannibal marched on Rome.

Otherwise all his movements were completely mechanical and he did not for a second deviate from his usual concerns, either with work or matters of the mind. He was thinking at that moment that the Manuel du Baccalauréat was an idiotic book and that it must have been written by rare cretins for it to analyze, as masterpieces of the human spirit, three of Racine’s tragedies but only one of Molière’s comedies. There was a high-pitched ringing in his ear. As he came up to the bench, he smoothed the wrinkles out of his coat again and planted his gaze firmly on the young girl. It seemed to him that she filled the entire end of the walk with a vague blue light.

As he came closer, his pace slowed more and more. At some distance from the bench, well before he had come to the end of the walk, he stopped altogether and, though he himself did not know how it happened, he spun on his heel and turned back. He had not even told himself that he wasn’t going to the end. The young girl would hardly have a chance to make him out from so far away—she would not see how handsome he looked in his new clothes. Yet he held himself perfectly erect, so that he would look good in case anyone behind him should happen to be watching.

He reached the opposite end, then came back, and this time he got a bit closer to the bench. He got as close as three trees away, in fact, but once there he felt for some reason that he could not possibly go on, and he hesitated. He thought he’d seen the young girl’s face poke forward toward him. In any case, he made a virile and violent effort, overcame his hesitation, and continued his advance. A few seconds later, he passed the bench, straight and firm, his face red to the ears, without daring to dart so much as a glance either to left or right, his hand shoved stiffly in his coat like a statesman. The moment he passed—under the cannon standing in the square—his heart fluttered with palpitations. She was wearing the damask dress and crepe hat of the day before. He heard a heavenly voice that had to be “her voice.” She was chatting away happily. She was indeed pretty. He could tell, even though he didn’t try to get a look at her. “Yet,” he thought to himself, “she couldn’t help but hold me in high esteem if she knew it was I who am the real author of the dissertation on Marcos Obregon de la Ronda, which Monsieur François de Neufchâteau has claimed as his own and stuck at the beginning of his edition of Gil Blas!” He went past the bench, went right to the end of the walk a few steps farther on, then retraced his steps and went past the beautiful girl once more. This time he was very pale. Besides, he felt nothing but enormous discomfort. He walked away from the bench and from the young girl and, once his back was turned to her, he imagined her watching him and that made him stumble.

He did not try to approach the bench again but stopped about halfway down the walk and there he did something he never did, he sat down, casting sidelong glances and thinking, in the most hidden recesses of his mind, that after all it was pretty tough that persons whose white hat and black dress he admired could be so absolutely insensible to his lustrous trousers and his brand-new coat.

After a quarter of an hour, he got up, as though he were about to begin walking toward the bench again, surrounded as it was in glory. But, instead, he stood rooted to the spot. For the first time in fifteen months he told himself that the gentleman who sat there every day with his daughter must have noticed him and probably found his zeal rather strange.

For the first time, too, he felt some irreverence in giving this unknown man the nickname of Monsieur Leblanc, even if only in his secret thoughts.

He stood there for a few minutes with his head down, drawing in the sand with a stick. Then he promptly turned in the direction opposite to the bench and to Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter, and went home.

That day he forgot to have dinner. At eight o’clock in the evening he realized this and, since it was too late to go down to the rue Saint-Jacques, he said “Well!” and chewed on a bit of bread.

He went to bed only after he had carefully brushed his coat and folded it away.

SUNDRY THUNDERBOLTS FALL ON MA BOUGON

THE NEXT DAY, Ma Bougon—or Grumpypants, as Courfeyrac called the old concierge–chief tenant–cleaning lady of the Gorbeau slum; her real name was Madame Burgon, but, as we have observed, that vandal Courfeyrac respected nothing—Ma Bougon, stupefied, noticed Marius going out again in his new coat.

He returned to the Luxembourg, but he did not get farther than his usual seat halfway along the walk. He sat down on it as he had the day before, gaping from a distance and distinctly seeing the white hat, black dress, and especially the blue light. He did not budge from his seat and only went home when the gates of the Luxembourg were closing. He did not see Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter leave and decided that they must have gone out through the rue de l’Ouest gate. Later, some weeks afterwards, when he thought about it, he had no idea where he had dined that particular evening.

The next day, this was the third day, Ma Bougon was dumbstruck once more to see Marius going out again in his new coat.

“Three days in a row!” she cried.

She tried to follow him, but Marius walked briskly, with huge strides; it was like a hippopotamus trying to keep track of a chamois. She lost sight of him in two minutes flat and went home out of breath, half choking from asthma and fury.

“What a donkey,” she grumbled, “putting on his best clothes every day and making people chase after him like that!”

Marius had taken himself to the Luxembourg. The young girl was there with Monsieur Leblanc. Marius got as close as he could while pretending to be reading his book, but he remained a long way off again, then he returned to plop himself down on his bench, where he spent four hours watching frank little sparrows hopping about on the path, seemingly poking fun at him.

A fortnight went by in this way. Marius no longer went to the Luxembourg to stroll, but to sit in the same place always without knowing why. Once he got there, he would not stir again. Every morning, he would put on his new outfit only to avoid showing himself off and the next day he would begin all over again.

She was definitely wondrously beautiful. The only slightly critical thing you could say perhaps was that the contradiction between her gaze, which was sad, and her smile, which was jubilant, gave her face a somewhat wild look, which meant that at times that sweet face became strange without ceasing to be lovely.

TAKEN PRISONER

ON ONE OF the last days of the second week, Marius was sitting as usual on his seat holding an open book, which he had not turned a page of for two hours. Suddenly he gave a start. An event was in train at the end of the walk. Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter had just left their bench, the daughter had taken her father’s arm, and they were making their way together, slowly, to the middle of the walk, where Marius was. Marius closed his book, then opened it again and forced himself to read. He was trembling. The glory was heading straight for him. “Oh, my God!” he thought. “I’ll never have time to strike a pose.” But the man with white hair and the young girl were coming closer. It seemed to him to be taking either a century or only a second. “What are they coming this way for?” he wondered. “Help! She’s going to walk past! Her feet are going to walk on this sand, along this path, two feet away!” He was overcome, he would have liked to be stunningly handsome, he would have liked to be wearing the cross of the Légion d’Honneur. He heard the soft measured tread of their footfalls as they approached. He imagined that Monsieur Leblanc was throwing him angry looks.

“Is this monsieur going to speak to me?” he wondered. He bowed his head; when he raised it again, they were almost upon him. The young girl went past and as she passed she looked at him. She looked straight at him, with a thoughtful sweetness that made Marius shiver from head to toe. It seemed to him that she reproached him for sitting there for so long without coming to her and that she was saying: “I’ll come to you if you won’t come to me.” Marius remained dazzled by the play of light and shadow in those eyes. He felt as though his brain was on fire. She had come to him, what ecstasy! And then, the way she had looked at him! She seemed to him more beautiful than he had ever seen her. Beautiful with a beauty both entirely womanly and angelic at once, with a complete beauty that would have made Petrarch sing and brought Dante1 to his knees. He felt as if he were swimming in the wide blue sky. At the same time, he was horribly thrown because he had a speck of dust on his boots.

He felt sure that she had also looked at his boots.

He followed her with his eyes until she disappeared out of sight. Then he began to bound around the Luxembourg like a madman. At times, he probably actually laughed to himself and talked out loud. He mooned around nannies with their little charges so much that each one of them thought he was in love with her.

Finally he left the Luxembourg, hoping to come across her again in a street somewhere.

He crossed paths with Courfeyrac, instead, under the arcades of the Odéon and said to him: “Come and have dinner with me.”

They went and had dinner at Rousseau’s and spent six francs. Marius ate like a horse. Over dessert, he said to Courfeyrac: “Did you read the paper? What a great speech Audry de Puyraveau2 gave!” He was hopelessly in love. After dinner, he said to Courfeyrac: “Come and I’ll take you to a show.”

They went to the Porte Saint-Martin to see Frédérick3 in L’Auberge des Adrets. Marius enjoyed himself enormously.

At the same time, he became twice as unsociable. As they left the theatre, he refused to look at the garter of a pretty milliner who was leaping over a gutter and when Courfeyrac said, “I wouldn’t mind adding that piece to my collection,” he was very nearly appalled.

Courfeyrac had invited him to have lunch at the Café Voltaire the next day. Marius went and ate even more than the night before. He was quite pensive and very lighthearted. You’d have said he was seizing every opportunity to laugh his head off. He tenderly embraced some provincial who was introduced to him. A circle of students had gathered around the table and they had discussed the mindless poppycock, subsidized by the state, peddled at the Sorbonne; then the conversation had turned to the mistakes and gaps in the dictionaries and prosodies of Quicherat.4 Marius cut into the discussion to shout: “But it’s very nice, all the same, to get the cross!” “That’s a funny one, for you!” said Courfeyrac softly to Jean Prouvaire.

“No, it’s not,” replied Jean Prouvaire, “it’s serious.”

It was, in fact, serious. Marius was in the first violent and deliriously wonderful phase grand passions start with. Just one look was all it had taken. When the mine is loaded with explosives, when the fuse is ready to run, nothing could be simpler. A look is a spark.

The jig was up. Marius was in love with a woman. His destiny was entering the realm of the unknown.

The looks women throw out are like the moving parts of certain machines that look innocuous enough but are deadly. You go past the machinery every day quietly and with impunity and without suspecting a thing. There even comes a time when you forget the thing is there. You come and go, you daydream, you talk, you laugh. Then, suddenly, you feel yourself caught. It’s all over. The machinery has you in its grip, you have been seized by a glance. It has caught you, no matter how or by what means, latching on to some trailing thought or some momentary distraction. You are lost. You will be sucked in, body and soul. A train of mysterious forces takes possession of you. You struggle in vain. No one can help you now. You are going to drop from one cog to the next, from one trap to the next, from one anguish to the next, from one torture to the next, you, your mind, your fortune, your future, your soul; and, depending on whether you are in the power of a nasty piece of work or a noble creature, you will not emerge from this terrifying machine except disfigured by shame or transfigured by passion.

ADVENTURES OF THE LETTER U OPEN TO CONJECTURE

ISOLATION, DETACHMENT FROM everything, pride, independence, a love of nature, lack of any daily physical activity, living for himself, the secret struggles of chastity, benign rapture before all creation—all had prepared Marius for this possession we call passion. His worship of his father had gradually become a religion, and, like all religions, had withdrawn to the nether regions of his heart. He needed something in the foreground. Love came along.

A good long month went by during which Marius went to the Luxembourg every day. When the moment came, nothing could keep him away.

“He’s out on the job,” said Courfeyrac.

Marius lived in raptures. It was undeniable that the young girl now looked at him.

He had finally plucked up the courage to go closer to the bench. But he no longer passed directly in front of it, obeying at once the instinctive timidity and the instinctive prudence of lovers. He thought it was better not to attract “the father’s attention.” He worked out positions behind trees and the pedestals of statues with consummate Machiavellianism, so as to be seen as much as possible by the young girl and as little as possible by the old gent. Sometimes he would stand for half an hour at a stretch without moving in the shadow of some Leonidas or Spartacus,1 holding a book while his eyes, gently raised, sought the beautiful girl over the top of it and she, for her part, would turn her lovely head toward him with a vague smile. Chatting away perfectly naturally and quietly all the while, she pressed on Marius all the longings of a virginal and passionate gaze. An antique and immemorial little game that Eve knew by heart from the day the world began and that every woman knows by heart from the day her life begins! Her lips responded to one man and her eyes responded to the other.

We must assume, though, that Monsieur Leblanc ended up catching on, for often when Marius arrived he would stand and start walking. He had abandoned their customary spot and had adopted the seat next to the Gladiator at the other end of the walk as though testing to see if Marius would follow. Marius did not understand and made the mistake of falling for it. The “father” began to be less punctual and no longer brought his “daughter” every day. Sometimes he came on his own. In which case Marius did not stay. Another mistake.

Marius took no notice of these symptoms. He had gone from the timid phase to the blind phase, a natural and fatal progression. His love was growing. He dreamed of the one he loved every night. And then something unexpectedly wonderful happened to him, to add fuel to the fire—and add to the haze covering his eyes. One evening, at dusk, he had found, on the bench that “Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter” had just left, a hankie. A very simple hankie with no embroidery, but fine and white and seemingly giving off heavenly scents. He snapped it up, over the moon. The hankie was marked with the letters U.F. Marius knew nothing about the beautiful child, nor about her family, nor her name, nor her address. Those two letters were the first thing about her that he had picked up, those adorable initials on which he immediately began building his castles in the air. U was obviously the first name. “Ursula!” he thought. “What a gorgeous name!” He kissed the hankie, inhaled its perfume, placed it over his heart, on his bare skin, during the day and slept with it under his lips at night.

“I can smell her whole soul in it!” he cried.

This hankie belonged to the old monsieur, who had quite simply dropped it out of his pocket. The days following the find, Marius no longer showed at the Luxembourg without pressing the hankie to his lips and holding it to his heart. The beautiful girl had no idea what was going on and indicated as much by barely perceptible signs.

“Such modesty!” sighed Marius.

EVEN WAR INVALIDS CAN BE HAPPY

SINCE WE HAVE used the word modesty, and since we are hiding nothing, we should say that at one point, in the middle of all his ecstasy, “his Ursula” committed a grievous offence against him. It was one of those days where she managed to get Monsieur Leblanc to leave the seat and stroll down the walk. A fresh Prairial breeze1 was blowing, stirring the tops of the plane trees. Father and daughter, arm in arm, had just passed in front of Marius’s seat. Marius had stood up behind them and followed them with his eyes, as is only right for a lost soul in this situation.

All of a sudden a particularly lively gust of wind, probably specially tasked with going about the business of spring, flew up from the plant nursery, swooped down the path, enveloped the young girl in a ravishing shiver worthy of the nymphs of Virgil and the fauns of Theocritus,2 and lifted her dress, that dress that was more sacred than the dress of Isis,3 almost up to her garter. A leg of exquisite shape was revealed. Marius saw it. He went into a spin, furious.

The young girl had swiftly pulled her dress down in a divinely demure, indeed horrified, movement, but he was no less outraged. True, he was alone in the walk. But someone else could easily have been there. And what if there had been someone else there! The very thought! What she had done was terrible! Alas, the poor child had done nothing; there was only one culprit—the wind; but Marius, in whom the Bartholo who lurks in every Cherubino4 was vaguely stirring, was determined to be unhappy and was even jealous of her shadow. For that is indeed how the bitter and bizarre jealousy of the flesh is awakened in the human heart and has its way there, no matter how unfairly. And quite apart from this jealousy, the sight of that gorgeous leg did not thrill him one bit; the white stocking of the first woman passing by would have given him more pleasure.

When “his Ursula,” having reached the end of the path, turned and retraced her steps with Monsieur Leblanc, passing by the seat Marius had sat back down on, Marius threw her a gruffly savage look. The young girl tilted backward slightly and raised her eyebrows as if to say: “What’s got into you?” That was their “first tiff.”

Marius had barely finished making a scene with his eyes when someone crossed the path. It was a disabled ex-serviceman, all bent over, all wrinkled and white, in a Louis XV uniform,5 with the little oval patch of red cloth with crossed swords on his chest, the Saint-Louis Cross for soldiery; to cap it off, he was decorated with a coat sleeve that had no arm inside, a silver chin, and a wooden leg. Marius thought he sensed that the man looked extremely pleased. It even seemed to him that, as he hobbled past, the old cynic had given him an extremely gleeful conspiratorial wink, as though luck had put them in cahoots and they had enjoyed some windfall together. What did he have to be so happy about, this reject of Mars?6 What possible connection was there anyway between this wooden leg and that other leg? Marius spiraled off into a paroxysm of jealousy. “Maybe he was there!” he said to himself. “Maybe he saw!” And he felt like exterminating the disabled ex-serviceman there and then.

In time every point loses its edge. Marius’s fury at “Ursula,” as right and just as it was, blew over. He ended up forgiving her; but it was quite an effort and he sulked for a whole three days.

Yet, through all that and because of all that, his passion only grew—to the point of becoming insane.

ECLIPSE

WE HAVE JUST seen how Marius discovered that She was called Ursula—or thought he had.

Appetite comes with loving. To know that her name was Ursula was already a lot, and not much. Marius would have devoured this crumb of happiness in three or four weeks. He wanted another crumb. He wanted to know where she lived.

He had made an initial mistake, falling into the ambush involving the move to the Gladiator’s seat. He had made a second mistake, not staying in the Luxembourg when Monsieur Leblanc came there on his own. He now made a third. A whopper. He followed “Ursula” home.

She lived in the rue de l’Ouest, at the most deserted end, in a new three-story house that looked fairly unassuming.

From that moment on, Marius added the happiness of following her home to his happiness at seeing her in the Luxembourg. His hunger increased. He knew her name, her first name at least, and it was a lovely name, a beautifully feminine name; he knew where she lived; now he wanted to know who she was.

One night after he had followed her home and seen the two of them disappear behind the porte cochère, he went in after them and brazenly said to the porter: “Was that the gentleman from the first floor1 who just came in?” “No,” answered the porter. “It was the gentleman from the third floor.”

Another fact. This success made Marius even more reckless.

“At the front?” he asked.

“Heavens!” said the porter. “The whole house faces the street.”

“And what does the gentleman do for a living?” Marius went on.

“He has a private income, Monsieur. And a very good man he is, too; he does a lot for the less fortunate, even though he’s not rich himself.” “What is his name?” Marius went on.

The porter lifted his head and said: “Is Monsieur with the police?”

Marius took off at that, rather sheepishly, but also thrilled. He was finally getting somewhere.

“Good,” he thought. “I know she’s called Ursula, that she’s the daughter of a man of private means, and that she lives here in the rue de l’Ouest, on the third floor.” The next day, Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter put in only a brief appearance at the Luxembourg and left while it was still broad daylight. Marius followed them into the rue de l’Ouest as was now his custom. When he got as far as the porte cochère, Monsieur Leblanc let his daughter pass ahead of him, then he stopped, turned round, and glared at Marius.

The day after that, they did not come to the Luxembourg at all. Marius waited in vain all day. At nightfall, he went to the rue de l’Ouest and saw a light in the third-floor windows. He strolled beneath these windows until the light went out.

The following day, no one at the Luxembourg. Marius waited all day, then went on night duty beneath the windows again. That took him till ten o’clock. He ate whatever he could garner for dinner. Fever feeds the sick, the lovesick feed on love.

He spent a week at this caper, Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter having given up the Luxembourg altogether. Marius engaged in sad conjecture; he did not dare keep watch over the porte cochère during the day. He made do with night forays to contemplate the reddish glow of the windowpanes. Now and again he saw shadows flit past, and his heart beat faster. On the eighth day when he arrived beneath the windows, there was no light.

“Oh!” he said. “The lamp hasn’t been lit yet. Though it’s dark already. I wonder if they’ve gone out?”

He waited. Ten o’clock came and went. Midnight. One in the morning. No light was lit in the windows of the third floor and no one came home. He went away very gloomy.

The next day—for he lived only from one next day to the one after that, there were no more todays, so to speak, for him—the next day, as expected, he found no one in the Luxembourg; at dusk, he went to the house. No light at the windows; the shutters were shut; the third floor was in total darkness.

Marius knocked on the porte cochère, went in, and asked the porter: “The gentleman on the third floor?”

“Moved,” replied the porter.

Marius tottered, and bleated feebly: “Since when?”

“Yesterday.”

“Where does he live now?”

“No idea.”

“Didn’t he leave his new address?”

“No.”

And the porter looked up and recognized Marius.

“Well, well, it’s you!” he said. “So you really are a snitch, then?”