بخش 4 کتاب 5

BOOK FIVE

WHOSE END IS NOTHING LIKE ITS BEGINNING

LONELINESS AND THE BARRACKS COMBINED

COSETTE’S PAIN, STILL so poignant and so acute four or five months before, had entered into the convalescent phase, without her even noticing. Nature, springtime, youth, her love for her father, the gaiety of the birds and the flowers, caused something almost like forgetting to trickle, little by little, day by day, drop by drop, into this soul so virginal and young. Was the fire dying out there completely? Or was a layer of ash simply forming? The fact is that she now hardly felt any of those sore spots once so burning.

One day, she suddenly thought of Marius: “Fancy!” she said. “I never think about him anymore.”

That same week she noticed a very good-looking officer of the lancers going by the garden gate, a man with a wasp waist, a ravishing uniform, the rosy cheeks of a girl, a sabre under his arm, a waxed moustache, and a polished lancer’s cap. Add to that, blond hair, striking blue eyes, a round, vain, insolent, and pretty face; the absolute opposite of Marius. He even had a cigar in his mouth. Cosette thought this officer had to be in the regiments barracked in the rue de Babylone.

The next day, she saw him go by again. She noted the time. Dating from that moment, was it purely by chance? she saw him go by almost every day.

The officer’s friends noticed that in that “badly kept” garden, behind that nasty rococo gate, there was a rather pretty creature who was almost always to be found dawdling about when the good-looking lieutenant went by, a man not unknown to the reader, going as he did by the name of Théodule Gillenormand.

“Wait!” they said to him. “There’s a girl there giving you the eye—go on, look!”

“Do you think I have time,” answered the lancer, “to look at all the girls who look at me?”

This was precisely the time that Marius was gravitating seriously toward death and telling himself: “If only I could see her one more time before I die!” If his wish had been granted, if he had at that moment seen Cosette ogling a lancer, he would have died of pain without being able to utter a word.

Whose fault was it? No one’s.

Marius had the sort of temperament that sinks deep into sorrow and stays there, wallowing; Cosette was of those who dive in and resurface fairly fast.

Cosette, what’s more, was going through that phase, so dangerous, so fatal to a woman’s development, when she is left to her own devices, when her lonely young girl’s heart is like the tendrils of the vine, clinging, willy-nilly, to the capital of a marble column or a cabaret signpost.

A quick and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, whether poor or rich, for wealth does not protect you from making a bad choice; misalliances are made very high up the ladder; the true misalliance is that of souls; and, just as more than one unknown young man, without name, without birth, without fortune, is a marble capital that supports a temple of grand feelings and grand ideas, so some other man of the world, self-satisfied and opulent, with polished boots and polished words, if you look, not at the outside, but at the inside, that is, at what is reserved for women, is nothing more than a crummy little dive dimly haunted by violent, sordid, and debauched passions—the cabaret sign-post.

What was there in Cosette’s soul? Passion that had calmed down or gone to sleep; love in a floating state; something limpid and shiny, murky at a certain depth, dark deeper down still. The image of the good-looking officer was reflected on the surface. Was there a memory at the bottom? At the very bottom? Perhaps. Cosette did not know.

Something strange happened.

COSETTE’S FEARS

IN THE FIRST two weeks of April, Jean Valjean went on a trip. This, we know, was something he did from time to time, at very long intervals. He stayed away one or two days at most. Where did he go? No one knew, not even Cosette. Only once, at one of these departures, had she accompanied him in a fiacre as far as the corner of a little cul-de-sac, where she read: Impasse de la Planchette. There, he had got down and the fiacre had taken Cosette back to the rue de Babylone. It was usually when the household money was running out that Jean Valjean went on these little trips.

So Jean Valjean was away. He had said: “I’ll be back in three days.”

That evening, Cosette was alone in the salon. To stop herself from being bored, she had opened her piano-organ and had started to sing, accompanying herself, the chorus from Euryanthe1—“Hunters lost in the woods!”—which is perhaps the most beautiful thing in all music. When she had finished, she remained pensive.

All of a sudden she thought she heard someone walking in the garden. It couldn’t be her father, he was away; it couldn’t be Toussaint, she was in bed. It was ten o’clock at night.

She went to the salon window, which was shut and shuttered, and pressed her ear against it. It seemed to her that it was a man’s tread and that whoever it was was walking very softly.

She flew upstairs to her bedroom, opened a transom cut into her shutters, and looked out at the garden. There was a full moon that night. You could see as clearly as in broad daylight. There was no one there.

She opened the window. The garden was absolutely still, and all you could see of the street was deserted as always.

Cosette thought she must have imagined it. She had only thought she’d heard the noise. It was a hallucination brought on by Weber’s sombre and majestic chorus, opening up as it does bewildering depths before the mind and shimmering before your eyes like a dizzying forest, in which you hear the crackling of dead branches under the anxious feet of hunters glimpsed in the twilight.

She thought no more of it.

Besides, Cosette was not by nature easily frightened. There was in her veins the blood of the bohemian and the adventurer who goes about barefoot. As you’ll recall, she was more of a lark than a dove. In her heart of hearts, she was wild and brave.

The next day, not so late, at nightfall, she was strolling around the garden. Amid the jumble of thoughts that were preoccupying her, she was fairly sure she could hear the same sound as the night before, now and again, the sound of someone walking in the dark under the trees pretty close by, but she told herself that nothing resembles the sound of footfalls in grass as much as two branches rubbing against each other, and she took no more notice. Besides, she couldn’t see anything.

She emerged from “the bushes” and now only had to cut across a small green lawn to reach the steps. The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast her shadow in front of her on the lawn as she came out of the flowerbeds. Cosette stopped in her tracks, terrified.

Next to her shadow, the moon distinctly threw another shadow on the lawn, one strangely frightening and terrible, a shadow with a round hat. It was like the shadow of a man standing on the edge of the flowerbeds just a few feet behind Cosette.

For a moment she could not speak, or cry out, or call for help, or move, or turn her head. Finally she mustered all her courage and spun around resolutely. There was no one there. She looked at the ground. The shadow had disappeared.

She ducked back into the bushes, boldly ferreted around in all the nooks and crannies, went as far as the gate, and came up empty.

Her blood was like ice in her veins. Was it yet another hallucination? What! Two days in a row? One hallucination, all right, but two hallucinations? What was truly disturbing was that the shadow was assuredly not a ghost. Ghosts hardly ever wear round hats.

The next day Jean Valjean came back. Cosette told him what she thought she’d heard and seen. She expected to be reassured, that her father would just shrug his shoulders and tell her: “You are a silly little girl.” Jean Valjean was worried.

“It can’t be anything,” he said.

He made some excuse to leave her and went into the garden and she saw him examining the gate very carefully.

That night, she woke up; this time she was sure, she distinctly heard someone walking quite close to the steps under her window. She ran to her transom and opened it. There in the garden there was, indeed, a man, holding a big stick in his hand. Just as she was about to cry out, the moon lit the man’s profile. It was her father. She went back to bed, telling herself: “That means he’s really worried!” Jean Valjean spent that night in the garden, and the two nights that followed. Cosette could see him through the peephole in her shutters.

The third night, the moon was waning and starting to rise later; it might have been one o’clock in the morning, she heard a great guffaw and her father’s voice calling her: “Cosette!” She leaped out of bed, threw on her dressing gown and opened her window.

Her father was down below on the lawn.

“I’m waking you up to reassure you,” he said. “Look. There’s your shadow with a round hat.”

And he pointed to a long shadow that the moon cast on the lawn and that did, indeed, bear a close resemblance to a man wearing a round hat. It was the silhouette produced by a metal chimney, with a capped pot, rising up above a neighbouring roof.

Cosette started to laugh, too, all her ghoulish speculations fell away, and the next day, over breakfast with her father, she poked fun at herself over the sinister garden haunted by the shadows of chimney pots.

Jean Valjean became perfectly relaxed again; as for Cosette, she didn’t much notice whether the chimney pot was actually in the right place to cast the shadow she had seen, or thought she had seen, or whether the moon was in the right spot in the sky. She didn’t pose herself any questions about the weirdness of a chimney pot that is afraid of being caught in the act and darts back when you look at its shadow, for the shadow had leaped back when Cosette had turned round and Cosette had thought she was quite sure of that. Cosette became perfectly serene again. The demonstration struck her as complete; the idea that there could have been someone walking in the garden in the evening or at night went out of her head.

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

EMBELLISHED BY TOUSSAINT’S COMMENTS

IN THE GARDEN, near the gate on the street, there was a stone bench, which was protected from prying eyes by an arbour, but which a passerby could just reach, at a pinch, stretching an arm through the gate and the arbour.

One evening in this same month of April, Jean Valjean had gone out and Cosette had sat down on this bench after sunset. The wind was freshening in the trees, Cosette was in a trance; an aimless sadness was taking hold of her little by little, that invincible sadness that evening brings on and that stems, perhaps—who knows?—from the mystery of the half-open grave at that hour.

Fantine was, perhaps, lurking in the shadows.

Cosette rose to her feet, slowly circled the garden, walking on grass wet with dew. In the midst of this melancholy somnambulism in which she was immersed, she told herself: “You really need wooden clogs to be in the garden at this hour. I’ll catch a cold.” She went back to the bench. As she sat down, she noticed, over where she had just been, a rather big stone that had definitely not been there a moment before.

Cosette studied the stone, wondering what this could mean. All at once the idea that the stone had not come and sat on the bench on its own, that someone had put it there, came to her and frightened her. No doubt about it; the stone was there; she did not touch it, she fled without daring to look back, taking refuge in the house and immediately closing the shutters on the French windows by the steps, and barring and bolting the windows. She asked Toussaint: “Is my father back yet?” “Not yet, Mademoiselle.”

(We have indicated Toussaint’s stutter once and for all. Please permit us not to dwell on it any further. We draw the line at musical notation of a disability.) Jean Valjean was a thoughtful man and a nocturnal wanderer, and he often came home quite late at night.

“Toussaint,” Cosette went on, “you are careful to barricade the shutters properly with bars at night, aren’t you?—at least on the garden side? Do you stick those little iron things in the little rings to lock them properly?” “Oh, don’t you worry, Mademoiselle.”

Toussaint never failed in this, which Cosette knew very well, but she couldn’t prevent herself from adding: “Because it’s so deserted around here!” “As for that,” said Toussaint, “it’s the honest truth. A body could be murdered in their bed before you could say Boo! And with Monsieur not sleeping in the house! But there’s nothing to fear, Mademoiselle, I lock up the windows like it was the Bastille.1 Women, on their own! It’s enough to make you shudder, I know! Can you imagine? Seeing a man come into your room at night and telling you to shut up! and then setting about cutting your throat for you. It’s not so much dying I worry about—we all die, that’s all right, we know very well we have to die. It’s the abomination of feeling those people pawing you. And then again, their knives, they can’t be all that sharp! Oh, God!” “That’s enough,” said Cosette. “Just lock everything nice and securely.”

Cosette, horrified by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint and perhaps also by a recollection of the apparitions of the other week, which now came back to her, did not even dare say, “Go and have a look at the stone someone has put on the bench, then!” for fear of having to reopen the garden door and letting “those people” in. She had all the doors and windows carefully shut everywhere, got Toussaint to go over the entire house from cellar to attic, shut herself up in her room, shot the bolts, looked under her bed, got into bed, and slept badly. The whole night, she saw that stone as big as a mountain and full of caves.

At sunrise—the peculiarity of the sun rising is to make us laugh at all our terrors of the night, and the laugh we have is always in proportion to the fear we have had—at sunrise Cosette woke to dismiss her fright as a nightmare and said to herself: “What was I dreaming about? It’s like those footsteps I thought I heard the other week in the garden at night! It’s like the shadow of the chimney pot! Am I going to be a complete coward this time?” The sun, which was glowing red through the slits in the shutters, turned the damask curtains crimson and 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 with a round hat in the garden; I dreamed up the stone like the rest.” She got dressed, went downstairs to the garden, ran to the bench, and felt a cold sweat break out, for the stone was there. But this lasted only a moment. What is fright at night is curiosity by day.

“Bah!” she said. “Let’s take a closer look.”

She lifted up the stone, which was sizeable. There was something underneath that looked like a letter. It was a white paper envelope. Cosette snatched it. There was no address on one side, no seal on the other. Yet the envelope, although open, was not empty. You could see sheets of paper inside.

Cosette fumbled inside. It was no longer fear she felt, it was not only curiosity; it was the beginning of anxiety.

Cosette pulled out the contents of the envelope—a small paper notebook, each page of which was numbered and bore a few lines written in a rather lovely hand, Cosette thought, and very fine.

Cosette looked for a name, there was none; a signature, there was none. To whom was this addressed? Probably to her, since a hand had deposited the packet on the bench. Who did it come from? An irresistible fascination took hold of her, she tried to turn her eyes away from these pages that trembled in her hand, she looked up at the sky, the street, the acacias all drenched in light, the pigeons flying over a neighbouring rooftop; then all at once her eyes swiftly dropped to the manuscript and she told herself that she had to know what was inside.

This is what she read:

A HEART UNDER A STONE

The reduction of the universe to one single being, the expansion of one single being into God: That is what love is.

Love is the angels’ greeting to the stars.

How sad the soul when it is sad out of love!

What a void is the absence of the being who alone fills the world! Oh, how true it is that the loved being becomes God! You would understand God becoming jealous if the Father of all had not evidently made Creation for the soul, and the soul for love.

A glimpse of a smile down there under a white crepe hat with a lilac veil is enough for the soul to enter the palace of dreams.

God is behind all things, but all things hide God. Things are black, human beings opaque. To love someone is to make them transparent.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the body’s position, the soul is on its knees.

Lovers who are separated cheat absence by a thousand chimeras that, nonetheless, have their reality. They are prevented from seeing each other, they can’t write to each other, yet they find a whole host of mysterious ways of communicating. They send each other birdsong, the perfume of flowers, the laughter of children, the sun’s rays, the wind’s sighs, starlight, all of Creation. And why not? All God’s works are made to serve love. Love is powerful enough to load the whole of nature with its messages.

O spring, you are a letter I write to her.

The future belongs even more to hearts than to minds. Loving is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible.

Love partakes of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like the soul, it is a divine spark, like the soul, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that is inside us, that is everlasting and infinite, that nothing can limit and that nothing can extinguish. You feel it burn right to the marrow of your bones and you see it shine out to the back of the sky.

O love! Adoration! Sensual joy of two minds that understand each other, of two hearts that are exchanged, of two glances that pierce each other through! You will come to me, won’t you, happiness? Strolling together in lonely expanses! blessed sparkling days! I have sometimes dreamed that now and then the hours broke away from the life of the angels and came down here below to traverse the destiny of men.

God cannot add anything to the happiness of those who love each other except by giving them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, indeed, an increase; but to increase the intensity itself of the ineffable felicity that love brings to the soul—that is impossible, even for God. God is the fullness of heaven; love is the fullness of mankind.

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

All of us, whoever we may be, have beings we breathe in like air. If they are lacking, air is lacking, we suffocate. Then we die. To die for lack of love is appalling. The suffocation of the soul!

When love has melted and blended two beings in an angelic and sacred unity, the secret of life is open to them; they are nothing more, then, than the two sides of a single destiny; they are nothing more than the two wings of a single spirit. Love, soar!

The day a woman who passes you by radiates light as she walks, you are lost, you love. There is only one thing left for you to do and that is to think of her so unwaveringly that she is forced to think of you.

What love starts only God can end.

True love feels despair or delight over a glove lost or a handkerchief found and it needs eternity for all its devotion and its hopes. It is composed at once of the infinitely big and the infinitely small.

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

Nothing is enough for love. We have happiness, we want paradise; we have paradise, we want heaven.

O, you who love each other, all these things are contained in love. Know how to find them in it. Love entails contemplation, as much as the heavens, and, more than the heavens, sensual delight.

“Will she come again to the Luxembourg?” “No, Monsieur.” “It’s in this church that she hears mass, is it not?” “She no longer comes.” “Does she still live in this house?” “She moved.” “Where has she moved to?” “She didn’t say.” What a dismal thing not to know the address of one’s soul!

Love has its childish side, the other passions have their petty side. Shame on passions that make man petty! Glory be to the passion that makes him a child!

It is a strange thing, you know? I am in darkness. There is a being that has taken the heavens with her in moving away.

Oh! To be lying down side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time gently to stroke each other’s fingertip in the dark, that will do for my eternity.

You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love is to live from it.

Love. A sombre starry transfiguration is involved in this torture. There is ecstasy in agony.

O, joy of the birds! It’s because they have a nest that they are able to sing.

Love is breathing in the heavenly air of paradise.

Deep hearts, wise spirits, take life the way God made it. It is a long ordeal, an unintelligible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for man at the first step inside the grave. Then something appears to him and he begins to discern finality. Finality, think about that word. The living see infinity; finality only lets itself be seen by the dead. Meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to whoever has loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will take everything from him. Try to love souls and you will find them again.

I met in the street a very poor young man who loved. His hat was old, his coat was worn; there were holes at his elbows; the water got into his shoes and the stars got into his soul.

What a great thing, to be loved! What an even greater thing, to love! The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer made up of anything but what is pure; it no longer relies on anything but what is elevated and grand. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it than a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene soul, out of reach of vulgar passions and emotions, rises above the clouds and shadows of this world, the follies, the lies, the hatreds, the vanities, the miseries, and inhabits the endless skies and feels only the deep and subterranean rumblings of destiny, as the mountain peak feels earthquakes.

If there wasn’t someone who loved, the sun would go out.

COSETTE, AFTER THE LETTER

WHILE SHE READ, Cosette gradually fell to daydreaming. The moment she lifted her eyes from the last line of the notebook, the good-looking officer—it was his hour—passed, triumphant, in front of the gate and Cosette found him repulsive.

She returned to contemplating the notebook. It was written in a ravishing hand, Cosette thought; the same hand, but different inks, sometimes very black, sometimes pale, as when you put water in the inkwell and write on different days. It was obviously a whole way of thinking that poured its heart out there, sigh by sigh, erratically, without order, without choice, without aim, randomly. Cosette had never read anything like it. This manuscript, in which she saw more clarity than obscurity, had the effect on her of a sanctuary whose door suddenly cracked open. Every one of these lines shone out resplendent in her eyes and flooded her heart with a strange glow. The education she had received had always spoken to her of the soul but never of love, which was like talking about a firebrand without mentioning the flame. This manuscript of fifteen pages suddenly and sweetly revealed to her all about love, pain, destiny, life, eternity, the beginning, the end. It was like a hand opening and suddenly throwing a fistful of sunbeams her way. She felt in these few lines a passionate, ardent, generous, honest nature, a sacred will, immense pain and boundless hope, an aching heart, ecstasy in full bloom. What was this manuscript? A letter. A letter without an address, without a name, without a date, without a signature, urgent and disinterested, an enigma composed of truths, a message of love made to be carried by an angel and read by a virgin, a rendezvous arranged for somewhere out of this world, a love letter from a phantom to a shade. It was a calm but shattered absent being, who seemed to be ready to take refuge in death and who was sending the absent woman the secret of destiny, the key of life, love. It had been written with one foot in the grave and a finger in heaven. These lines, falling one by one onto the paper, were what could be called soul drops.

Who could these pages come from? Who could have written them? Cosette did not hesitate for a second. There was only one man it could have come from.

Him!

The day looked brighter again to her mind. Everything was clear again. She felt unbelievable joy and profound anguish. It was him! He was writing to her! He was there! It was his arm that had passed through this gate! While she was busy forgetting him, he had found her once more! But had she forgotten him? No! Never! She was mad to have thought so for a moment. She had always loved him, always adored him. The fire had been covered and lay smoldering for a while, but she could see clearly that it had only gone deeper. Now it burst into flame again and fired every bit of her, body and soul. This notebook was like a flying spark that had fallen from this other soul into her own, and she felt the wild blaze rekindling. She took every word of the manuscript to heart. “Oh, yes!” she said. “How well I recognize all that! That’s everything his eyes already told me.” As she finished reading it for the third time, Lieutenant Théodule waltzed back past the gate and made his spurs ring out on the pavement. Cosette was forced to look up. She found him insipid, silly, stupid, useless, conceited, offensive, impertinent—and extremely ugly. The officer thought he should smile at her. She turned away in shame and outrage. She would gladly have thrown something at his head.

She fled, went back inside the house and shut herself up in her room to reread the manuscript, learn it by heart, and daydream. When she had read it thoroughly, she kissed it and tucked it inside her corset.

That was it, Cosette had fallen once more in deep seraphic love. The abyss known as Eden had just opened up again.

All that day, Cosette was in a kind of haze. She could barely think, her ideas were scrambled like a tangled skein of wool in her brain, she couldn’t manage any conjectures, she hoped, trembling all the while—what? vague things. She didn’t dare promise herself anything and didn’t want to deny herself anything, either. Her face went all pale and her body all shivery. It seemed to her at times that she was verging on the fanciful; she said to herself: “Is this real?” Then she patted the beloved bundle under her dress, she pressed it to her heart, felt its corners against her flesh, and if Jean Valjean could have seen her at that moment, he would have shuddered in the face of this luminous and unfamiliar joy that streamed from her eyes. “Oh, yes!” she thought. “It’s him all right! This comes to me from him!” And she told herself that an intervention of angels, some celestial chance, had restored him to her.

O, transfigurations of love! O, dreams! This celestial chance, this intervention of angels, was that little ball of bread hurled by one thief to another thief, from the Charlemagne yard to the Lions’ Den, over the rooftops of La Force.

THE OLD ARE MADE FOR GOING OUT AT THE RIGHT MOMENT

WHEN EVENING CAME, Jean Valjean went out; Cosette got dressed. She did her hair the way it most became her, and put on a dress whose bodice had had one snip of the scissors too many, and which, thanks to this low neckline, let the hollow of the neck show and was, as young girls say, “a bit indecent.” It was not indecent in the slightest, but it was prettier than it otherwise would have been. She went to all this trouble with her toilette without knowing why.

Did she want to go out? No. Was she expecting a visit? No. At dusk, she went down into the garden. Toussaint was busy in her kitchen, which opened onto the rear courtyard.

She began to walk under the trees, parting the branches from time to time, since some were very low.

And so she reached the bench. The stone was still there. She sat down, and placed her soft hand on the stone as if she wanted to stroke it and thank it.

All of a sudden, she had that indefinable feeling you get when someone is standing behind you, even when you can’t see them. She turned her head and shot to her feet.

It was him.

He was bareheaded. He looked pale and emaciated. You could scarcely see that his clothes were black. Twilight turned his beautiful forehead white and covered his eyes in shadow. Beneath a veil of incomparable sweetness, he had a whiff of death and of the night about him. His face was lit up by the brightness of the dying light and by the thoughts of a soul about to depart. It seemed that he was not yet a phantom but already no longer a man.

His hat had been tossed a few feet away in the bushes.

Cosette was ready to faint and did not let out a cry. She slowly backed away, for she felt herself drawn. He didn’t budge. Something indefinably sad enveloped her; she could feel his eyes on her rather than see them.

As she backed away, Cosette hit a tree and leaned back on it. Without the tree, she would have fallen.

Then she heard his voice, that voice that she had never really heard, as it rose above the rustling of the leaves and murmured: “Forgive me, I’m here. My heart is bursting, I couldn’t go on living the way I was, I’ve come. Did you read what I put there, on that bench? Do you recognize me a little? Don’t be afraid of me. It’s been a while already, do you remember the day you looked at me? It was in the Luxembourg, near the Gladiator. And the day you walked past me? That was the sixteenth of June and, then, the second of July. It will soon be a year ago. For a long while now, I haven’t seen you. I asked the woman who rents chairs, she told me she didn’t see you anymore. You were living in the rue de l’Ouest, on the third floor at the front of a new house, you see how I know? I followed you. What else could I do? And then you disappeared. I thought I saw you go past once when I was reading the paper under the arcade of the Odéon. I ran. But no. It was just someone who had a hat like yours. At night, I come here. Don’t worry, no one sees me. I come and look at your windows as close as I can. I tread very softly so you won’t hear me, for you would perhaps be frightened. The other night I was behind you, you turned around, I fled. Once I heard you singing. I was happy. Does it worry you if I hear you singing through the shutters? It can’t hurt you. No, isn’t that so? You see, you are my angel, let me come sometimes. I think I’m going to die. If you only knew! I adore you! I do! Forgive me, I’m talking to you, but I don’t know what I’m saying, perhaps I’m annoying you, am I annoying you?” “Oh, Mother!” she said.

And she slumped in a heap as though she were dying herself.

He caught her, she fell, he caught her in his arms, he squeezed her tight without knowing what he was doing. He tottered himself as he held her. He felt as if his head were full of smoke; he had flashes in his eyes; his thoughts vanished; it seemed to him that he was performing a religious act and that he was committing an act of profanation. Besides, he did not feel the slightest desire for this ravishing woman whose shapes he could feel against his chest. He was lost in love.

She took his hand and put it on her heart, he felt the notebook there. He stammered: “You love me?”

She answered in such a low voice that it was no more than a breath you could barely hear: “Be quiet! You know I do!” And she hid her burning face against the proud and intoxicated young man’s chest.

He fell on the bench, she flopped next to him. They had run out of words. The stars began to shine. How did it happen that their lips met? How does it happen that birds sing, snow melts, the rose opens, that May blossoms, that dawn comes on all white behind the black trees over the shivering hilltops?

One kiss, and that was everything.1

Both quivered, thrilled, and they looked at each other in the shadows with sparkling eyes. They did not feel either the freshness of the night, or the coldness of the stone, the dampness of the ground, or the wetness of the grass; they looked at each other and their hearts were full of thoughts. They had taken each other’s hands without knowing it.

She did not ask him, she did not even wonder, where and how he had got into the garden. It seemed so natural to her that he should be there!

Now and then, Marius’s knee touched Cosette’s knee and both shivered. At intervals, Cosette stammered out a word. Her soul was trembling on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.

By and by they began to talk. The outpouring succeeded the silence, which is bliss. The night was serene and splendid overhead. These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their dreams, their euphorias, their ecstasies, their fantasies, their weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when they no longer saw each other. They each confided to the other, in an ideal intimacy that already nothing could add to, what was most hidden and most mysterious in themselves. They told each other, with a candid faith in their illusions, all that love, youth, and the vestiges of childhood that survived in them both, had put into their heads. These two hearts poured themselves out to each other and into each other, so that at the end of an hour, the young man had the soul of the young girl and the young girl had the soul of the young man. They entered each other, enchanted each other, 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,” he said. “And you?”

“My name is Cosette.”