بخش 4 کتاب 8

BOOK EIGHT

ENCHANTMENT AND DESOLATION

BROAD DAYLIGHT

THE READER WILL have worked out that Éponine, having recognized through the gate the girl living in the rue Plumet where Magnon had sent her, had begun by keeping the burglars away from the rue Plumet, then had taken Marius there; and that after several days of ecstasy in front of the gate, Marius, driven by that force that draws iron to the magnet and the man in love to the stones the beloved’s house is made of, had ended up entering Cosette’s garden much as Romeo had entered the garden of Juliet. This had been even easier for him than for Romeo; Romeo was forced to scale a wall; Marius had only to gently force the decrepit gate’s bars that wobbled in their rusty sockets, like old people’s teeth in theirs. Marius was thin and easily squeezed through.

As there was never anyone in the street and Marius only went into the garden at night in any case, he did not risk being seen.

From that blessed and sacred moment when a kiss sealed the betrothal of these two souls, Marius went there every evening. If, at this time in her life, Cosette had fallen in love with an unscrupulous philanderer, she would have been lost, for there are generous natures that give themselves and Cosette was of their number. One of a woman’s magnanimous impulses is to yield. Love, at this height, where it is absolute, gets complicated with an inexpressibly heavenly blindness on the part of modesty. What dangers you run, O noble souls! Often, you give your heart, but we take only your body. Your heart is left to you and you look at it in the shadows and shudder. Love has no middle ground; either it destroys or it saves. All of human destiny lies in that particular dilemma. A dilemma, the choice between destruction or salvation, which no act of fate poses more inexorably than love does. Love is life—except when it is death. Cradle—coffin, too. The same emotion says both yes and no in the human heart. Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one that shines brightest—and blackest, alas!

God wanted the love that Cosette met with to be the kind that saves.

Right to the end of that month of May in the year 1832, every night, in that poor wild garden, under those daily more perfumed and more profuse bushes, were two beings, made up of every form of chastity and every form of innocence, overflowing with every kind of heaven-sent felicity, closer to archangels than to human beings, pure, honest, exhilarated, radiant, shining resplendent for each other in the darkness. It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown and to Marius that Cosette had a halo. They touched each other, they gazed at each other, they took each other’s hands, they held each other tight; but there was a limit they did not overstep. Not that they respected it; they didn’t know it existed. Marius felt a barrier, Cosette’s purity, and Cosette felt a support, Marius’s loyalty. That first kiss had also been the last. Since then Marius had gone no further than brushing Cosette’s hand, or her fichu, or a lock of her hair, with his lips. Cosette was to him a perfume, not a woman. He breathed her. She refused nothing and he demanded nothing. Cosette was happy and Marius was satisfied. They lived in that ravishing state that we might describe as the bedazzlement of one soul by another soul. It was that ineffable first embrace of two pure virgin souls in the ideal. Two swans meeting on the Jungfrau.1 At that initial phase of love, a phase when sensual pleasure keeps absolutely still under the all-powerfulness of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic Marius, would have been rather more capable of visiting a streetwalker than lifting Cosette’s gown up to ankle level. Once, in the moonlight, Cosette had bent down to pick something up off the ground, and her bodice gaped open to reveal a glimpse of her cleavage; Marius averted his eyes.

What went on between these two beings? Nothing. They adored each other.

At night, when they were there, the garden felt sacred and alive. All the flowers opened around them and sent them incense; they opened their souls and spread them out among the flowers. The lascivious and vigorous vegetation quivered, full of sap and euphoria, around these two innocents, and they spoke words of love that made the trees shiver.

What were these words? Breaths. Nothing more. But those breaths were enough to arouse and excite the whole of the natural world around them. A magic power you would hardly fathom if you were to read such babble in a book, for it is made to be blown away and dispersed like puffs of smoke by the wind under the leaves. Take away from the murmuring of two lovers that melody that comes from the soul and that accompanies them like a lyre, and all that is left is no more than shadow; you say: What! Is that all? Ah, yes, infantile drivel, needless repetition, laughing at nothing, useless information, inanities, all that is deepest and most sublime in this world! The only things worth the trouble of being said and of being listened to.

Those particular inanities, those particular sweet nothings—the man who has never heard them, the man who has never uttered them, is an imbecile and a nasty piece of work. Cosette was saying to Marius: “You know what?” (In all this, through all this celestial virginity, and without either one of them being in the least able to say how, they had come to address each other with the familiar form of “you”—tu.) “You know what? My name is Euphrasie.”

“Euphrasie? No, it’s not, your name is Cosette.”

“Oh, Cosette is a pretty awful name they must have pulled out of a hat when I was little. But my real name is Euphrasie. Don’t you like the name Euphrasie?” “Yes … But Cosette isn’t awful.”

“Do you like it better than Euphrasie?”

“Er … yes.”

“Well, then, I like it better too. It’s true, it’s quite pretty, Cosette. Cosette it is.” And the smile she added turned this dialogue into an idyll fit for some celestial grove.

Another time she looked him steadily in the eye and declared: “Monsieur, you’re handsome, you’re gorgeous, you’re clever as can be and you’re not at all stupid, you’re a lot more knowledgeable than I am, but take this: I love you!” And Marius, on cloud nine, imagined he had heard a verse sung by a star in the sky.

Or else, she would give him a little tap because he was coughing, and would say to him: “Don’t cough, Monsieur. I don’t want anyone to cough at my place without my permission. It’s extremely mean to cough and worry me like that. I want you to be in fine fettle, first because if you are not in fine fettle, I will be most unhappy. What do you expect me to do?” And this was quite simply divine.

Once Marius said to Cosette: “Just imagine, for a while I thought your name was Ursula.” This made them laugh all evening.

In the middle of another conversation, he was suddenly moved to exclaim: “Oh, one day, at the Luxembourg, I could happily have broken an old returned soldier’s neck!” But he pulled up short and went no further. It would have meant speaking to Cosette about her garter and there was no way he could do that. It would have meant contact with an unknown quantity, the flesh, before which, out of a sort of holy fright, this immense innocent love recoiled.

Marius imagined life with Cosette just like this, without anything else; coming every evening to the rue Plumet, shifting the obliging old bar of the presiding judge’s gate, sitting on the bench, side by side, elbow to elbow, watching the falling night begin scintillating through the trees, reconciling the pleat in his trousers to the fullness of Cosette’s frock, stroking her thumbnail, calling her tu, each smelling the same flower, one after the other, forever and ever, indefinitely. All that time the clouds passed over their heads. Every time the wind blows, it sweeps away more of humanity’s dreams than clouds in the sky.

But this does not mean that this chaste and almost fierce love was absolutely without gallantry—no. To pay compliments to the woman you love is the first step toward caressing her, a half-daring testing of the waters. A compliment is something like kissing through a veil. Sensual pleasure sets its soft seal there, while staying well out of sight. Faced with sensual pleasure, the heart steps back, the better to love. Marius’s sweet talk, dripping as it was with fantasy, was, so to speak, tinged with a celestial hue. When birds fly high above beside the angels, they must hear words like those. Tangled up in them, though, was life, humanity, the whole positive power of which Marius was capable. It was what is said in the grotto as a prelude to what will be said in the boudoir, a lyrical effusion, strophe and sonnet mixed up together, the sweet hyperbole of billing and cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and giving off a subtle heavenly perfume, the ineffable warbling of heart to heart.

“Oh!” Marius would murmur. “You are so beautiful! I don’t dare look at you. That’s why I contemplate you instead. You are so graceful. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. When the tip of your shoe peeks out from the hem of your dress, it bowls me over. Then there’s that enchanted glow when your thoughts dawn. You speak such amazingly good sense. I sometimes feel you’re a dream. Speak, I’m listening, I think you’re wonderful. O, Cosette! It’s so strange and wonderful. I’ve completely lost my head. You are wonderful, Mademoiselle. I study your feet with a microscope and your soul with a telescope.” And Cosette would reply: “I love you a little bit more with every passing minute this morning.” The call-and-answer did what it could in this dialogue, always coming back to the subject of love, like those weighted dolls made of elder wood that bounce back upright each time they’re knocked down.

Everything about Cosette epitomized naïveté, ingenuousness, transparency, purity, candour, radiance. You could have described Cosette as cloudless. She had the effect of spring or first light on whoever saw her. There was dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation of dawn light in the form of a woman.

It was only perfectly natural that Marius admire her, adoring her as he did. But the truth is that this little boarding-school girl, fresh from the convent, chatted with an exquisite perspicacity and at times came out with all sorts of true and subtle things. Her very babble was conversation. She saw clearly and was never wrong about anything. Women feel and speak with the loving instinct of the heart, that infallible organ. No one knows better than a woman how to say things that are both sweet and profound at once. Sweetness and profundity, that is a woman in a nutshell; that is heaven in a nutshell.

In this state of complete happiness, tears sprang to their eyes at every instant. One of God’s creatures crushed, a feather fallen from a nest, a broken branch of hawthorn, roused their pity, and their ecstasy, sweetly steeped in melancholy, seemed to want nothing more than to cry. The most imperious symptom of love is at times an unbearable compassion.

And alongside all this—all such contradictions are the lightning play of love—they liked to laugh and with such delightful abandon and such intimacy that they sometimes seemed almost like two boys. Yet, unbeknownst even to hearts drunk with chastity, nature, unforgettable, is always there. It is there, with its sublime and brutal end; and no matter how innocent souls may be, you can feel, in the most decorous tête-à-tête, the wonderful and mysterious difference that distinguishes a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.

They idolized each other.

The permanent and the immutable subsist. Two people love each other, they smile at each other, they laugh at each other, they pout at each other half-heartedly, they entwine their fingers, and none of this stops eternity. Two lovers hide in the evening, in the twilight, in the invisible, among the birds, among the roses, they fascinate each other in the shadows with their hearts which shine through their eyes, they murmur, they whisper, and all the time the immense wheeling of stars fills infinity.

THE GIDDINESS OF COMPLETE HAPPINESS

THEY EXISTED SOMEHOW, dazed with happiness, spellbound. They did not notice the cholera that decimated Paris that very month. They had swapped as many secrets as they could but that did not get them much further than their names. Marius had told Cosette he was an orphan, that his name was Marius Pontmercy, that he was a lawyer, that he made a living writing things for booksellers, that his father had been a colonel, that he was a hero, and that Marius had fallen out with his grandfather, who was rich. He had also said something about being a baron but that had not impressed Cosette. Marius, a baron? She did not understand. She did not know what the word meant. Marius was Marius. On her side, she had confided to him that she had been brought up in the Petit-Picpus convent, that her mother was dead just as his was, that her father was called Monsieur Fauchelevent, that he was a very good man, that he gave a lot to the poor but that he was poor himself, and that he deprived himself of everything while depriving her of nothing.

Oddly, in the kind of symphony in which Marius had been living since he started seeing Cosette, the past, even the most recent past, had become so confused and remote for him that what Cosette told him satisfied him fully. It did not even occur to him to speak to her about the episode that night in the old Gorbeau building, the Thénardiers, the burn, or her father’s strange attitude and incredible escape. Marius had forgotten all that for the moment; he did not even know in the evening what he had done that morning, nor where he had eaten, nor whom he had spoken to; he had singing in his ears that made him deaf to all other thoughts, he existed only during the hours he saw Cosette. So, since he was in heaven, it was perfectly natural that he should forget earth. Both of them languidly carried the indefinable weight of unearthly pleasures. This is the way those somnambulists known as the lovesick live.

Alas! Who has not felt all these things? Why must the time come when you emerge from blue skies and why does life go on afterwards?

Loving almost takes the place of thinking. Love is an ardent forgetting of the rest. So try asking passion to be logical. There is no more of an absolute logical sequence in the human heart than there is a perfect geometric figure in celestial mechanics. For Cosette and Marius nothing existed anymore except Marius and Cosette. The world around them had fallen down a hole. They lived inside a golden moment. There was nothing ahead, nothing behind. Marius scarcely even thought about the fact that Cosette had a father. He was so bedazzled that everything else had been wiped from his brain. So what did they talk about, these lovers? We know: the flowers, the swallows, the setting sun, the rising moon, all the things that matter. They had told each other everything, and nothing. The everything of those in love is nothing. But the father, the real world, that dump, those thugs, that episode, what was the point? And was he absolutely certain that that nightmare had really happened? They were together, they adored each other, that was all there was. Everything else was not. It seems likely that this vanishing of the hell behind us is part and parcel of arriving in paradise. Did we see demons? Do they exist? Did we tremble? Did we suffer? We no longer have a clue. A rose-coloured cloud blankets all that.

So these two went on living like this, in this rarefied atmosphere, with all the improbability that is part of nature; neither at the nadir nor at the zenith, between humanity and the seraphim, above the mire, below the ether, in the clouds; barely flesh and blood, soul and rapture from head to toe; already too elevated to have their feet on the ground, still too loaded with humanity to disappear into the blue, in suspension like atoms awaiting precipitation; apparently outside fate; oblivious to that rut, yesterday, today, and tomorrow; filled with wonder, swooning, floating; at times light enough to soar into infinity; almost ready to vanish into eternity.

They were sleeping wide awake, rocking, cradled. O, splendid lethargy of the real, bowled over by the ideal! Sometimes, beautiful as Cosette was, Marius would close his eyes before her. Eyes closed—that is the best way to see the soul.

Marius and Cosette did not ask themselves where this was taking them; they looked on themselves as having arrived. It’s one of man’s strange conceits, to want love to take them somewhere.

THE BEGINNING OF A SHADOW

JEAN VALJEAN HIMSELF SUSPECTED nothing.

Cosette, not quite as dreamy as Marius, was gay and that was all Jean Valjean needed to be happy. The thoughts Cosette had, her tender preoccupations, the image of Marius that filled her soul, in no way detracted from the incomparable purity of her beautiful chaste and smiling face. She was at that age when a virgin carries her love the way an angel carries its lily. So Jean Valjean was at peace. Then again, when two lovers understand each other, it all goes very smoothly; any third party, no matter who, that might disturb their love, is kept completely in the dark by a few precautions that are always the same for all lovers. And so, Cosette never objected to anything Jean Valjean said. If he felt like a walk: Yes, my darling father. If he felt like staying home: Perfect. If he felt like spending the evening with her: She was thrilled. As he always retired at ten o’clock at night, Marius only ever turned up in the garden after ten, when he heard, from the street, Cosette opening the French windows onto the terrace by the garden steps. It goes without saying that Marius was never to be seen in the daytime. Jean Valjean forgot about Marius’s existence. Only once, one morning, he happened to say to Cosette: “Why, you’ve got white all over your back!” The night before, Marius had got carried away and pressed Cosette against the wall.

Old Toussaint, who went to bed early, thought only of sleeping once her chores were finished and was as much in the dark as Jean Valjean.

Never did Marius set foot in the house. When he was with Cosette, they hid in a recess near the steps so that they could not be seen or heard from the street and they sat there, often contenting themselves, by way of conversation, with squeezing each other’s hands twenty times a minute and gazing up at the branches of the trees. At those moments, a bolt of lightning could have fallen thirty feet away and they would not have noticed, so deeply absorbed were they in each other.

Endless limpid purity. Hours all white, almost all alike. This kind of love affair is a gathering of lilies and dove’s feathers.

The whole garden lay between them and the street. Whenever Marius came or went, he carefully readjusted the bar of the gate so that no one could see it had been disturbed.

He usually dragged himself away around midnight and went back to Courfeyrac’s. Courfeyrac said to Bahorel: “Would you believe it? Marius comes home these days at one in the morning!” Bahorel answered: “What do you expect? There’s a live wire in every seminarian.”

At times, Courfeyrac would cross his arms, look serious, and say to Marius: “You’re going to rack and ruin, young man!” Courfeyrac was a pragmatist and did not take kindly to this reflected glow of some secret paradise that lay over Marius; he was not used to passions that didn’t publicize themselves; he had no time for them and occasionally challenged Marius to return to the real world.

One morning he threw this rebuke at him: “My dear man, you strike me these days as living on the moon, in the kingdom of dreams, province of illusion, capital, Soap Bubble. Come on, be a good boy, what’s her name?” But nothing could induce Marius “to spill the beans.” You could have ripped out his nails sooner than one of the two sacred syllables that made up that unspeakably wonderful name, Cosette. True love is as luminous as the dawn and as silent as the grave. But Courfeyrac could see this change in Marius, that even his taciturnity was now radiant.

In that sweet month of May, Marius and Cosette discovered what triggered even more immense happiness: How to argue and use vous just to use tu with all the more relish afterwards;

How to talk together at length and in the most minute detail about people who didn’t interest them in the slightest; one more proof that, in this ravishing opera we call love, the libretto is virtually of no account; For Marius, listening to Cosette talk fashion;

For Cosette, listening to Marius talk politics;

Sitting side by side, knees grazing, and listening to the carriages bowling along the rue de Babylone; Gazing at the same planet in space or the same worm glistening in the grass;

How to be silent together, a sweetness even greater than talking;

And so on, and so forth.

Yet sundry complications were looming.

One evening, Marius was wending his way to their rendezvous along the boulevard des Invalides, walking with his head down as usual. Just as he was about to turn the corner into the rue Plumet, he heard someone say quite close to him: “Good evening, Monsieur Marius.” He lifted up his face and recognized Éponine.

This had a singular effect on him. He had not thought for single moment about the girl since the day she had taken him to the rue Plumet, he had not seen her again, she had completely gone out of his mind. He had every reason to be grateful to her, he owed her his present happiness and yet he was embarrassed at seeing her.

It is a mistake to think that passion, when it is happy and pure, leads a person to a state of perfection; it simply leads them, as we have observed, to a state of forgetting. In such a situation, a person forgets to be bad, but they also forget to be good. Gratitude, obligation, vital and troublesome recollections, evaporate. At any other time, Marius would have behaved differently toward Éponine. Absorbed by Cosette as he was, he didn’t even clearly register that this particular Éponine was Éponine Thénardier, that she bore a name written down in his father’s will and testament, that name to which, only a few months earlier, he would have been so ardently devoted. We show Marius as he was, without embellishment. His father himself was fading somewhat from his heart beneath the splendour of his love.

He answered rather awkwardly: “Ah! It’s you, Éponine?”

“Why do you say vous to me? Have I done anything to you?”

“No,” he replied.

Certainly, he had nothing against her. Far from it. Only, he felt that now that he called Cosette tu, he could only use vous on Éponine.

As he said no more, she burst out: “So, why—?”

Then she stopped. It seemed that words failed this creature once so insouciant and so bold. She tried to smile and could not. She stumbled on: “Well, then—” Then she shut up again and stood there looking down.

“Bonsoir, Monsieur Marius,” she said suddenly, brusquely, then turned and left.

A CAB ROLLS IN ENGLISH AND YELPS LIKE A MUTT IN SLANG

THE NEXT DAY was June 3, 1832, a date we must draw attention to because of the grave events that were at that time hanging over Paris like heavy black clouds. As night fell, Marius was walking along the same path as the day before with the same rapturous thoughts in his heart, when he saw, through the trees on the boulevard, Éponine coming toward him. Two days in a row was too much. He swiftly turned off the boulevard, changed direction, and headed for the rue Plumet by the rue Monsieur.

This prompted Éponine to follow him as far as the rue Plumet, something she had never yet done. Until that moment she had been happy just to see him go by on the boulevard without even trying to run into him. The night before she had tried to speak to him for the very first time.

So Éponine followed him, without his suspecting a thing. She saw him shift the bar on the gate and slip into the garden.

“Well I never!” she said. “He’s going into the house!”

She went over to the gate, tested the bars one after the other and easily identified the one Marius had shifted. She muttered to herself on a forlorn note: “None of that, Lisette!” She sat down at the bottom of the gate right beside the bar as though guarding it. This was exactly the point where the gatepost joined the neighbouring wall. There was a dark corner there where Éponine disappeared entirely.

She stayed there for over an hour without moving, almost without breathing, a prey to her ideas. At around ten o’clock, one of the two or three people out and about in the rue Plumet, an old bourgeois out late who was racing to get through that deserted and ill-famed stretch, passed close by the garden gate and got as far as the corner the gate formed with the wall when he heard a muffled and menacing voice say: “I wouldn’t be surprised if he came every night!” The man looked all around him, saw no one, dared not peer into that black corner, and stepped up the pace, frightened out of his wits.

This passerby did well to hurry, for very shortly afterwards, six men entered the rue Plumet, creeping along the walls, separately and at some distance from each other, looking for all the world like a drunken patrol.

The first to reach the garden gate stopped and waited for the others; a second later, all six were gathered together. The men began talking in low voices.

“It’s icicaille,” said one.

“Is there a mutt in the garden?” asked another.

“Don’t know. Anyway, I’ve got a meatball we’ll make him chew on.”

“Have you got some putty to take out the porthole?”

“Yep.”

“The gate’s old,” added a fifth man, who had the voice of a ventriloquist.

“All the better,” said the second man to have spoken. “She won’t sing as much under the fiddle [saw] and won’t be so hard to mow down.” The sixth man, who had not yet opened his mouth, began to inspect the gate just as Éponine had done an hour earlier, gripping each of the bars in turn and jiggling them carefully. And so he came to the bar Marius had worked loose. As he was about to grab this bar, a hand shot out suddenly from the shadows and clapped itself on his arm. He felt himself shoved back hard from the middle of his chest and a voice, hoarse but restrained, said to him: “There is a mutt.” At the same time, he saw a pale girl standing in front of him.

The man felt that commotion that the unexpected always produces. He bristled hideously; nothing is as awful to see as a wild animal, startled; their frightened look is frightening. He staggered back and stammered: “Who’s this hussy?” “Your daughter.”

It was, indeed, Éponine who was speaking to Thénardier.

As soon as Éponine popped up, the five others, that is, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, Montparnasse, and Brujon, came over without a sound, without haste, without a word, with the sinister slowness peculiar to such men of the night.

You could see ghastly-looking tools in their hands. Gueulemer was holding the curved pliers that prowlers call fanchons, cutters.

“Jesus wept! What are you doing here? What’re you trying to do to us? Are you off your rocker?” shouted Thénardier, insofar as you can shout keeping your voice down. “What are you doing, coming here and stopping us from getting on with the job?” Éponine started to laugh and leaped up to kiss him.

“I’m here, daddy darling, because I’m here. Can’t a girl sit on a stone these days? You’re the one who shouldn’t be here. What are you doing turning up here, since it’s a no-go? I told Magnon. There’s nothing doing here. Oh, come on, give me a kiss, my dear darling daddy! It’s been so long since I last saw you! So you’re out again, then?” Old man Thénardier tried to get out of Éponine’s arms and grumbled: “All right then. You’ve had your kiss. Yes, I’m out. I am not in. Now get lost.” But Éponine would not let go and kissed him all the harder.

“My dear darling daddy, how did you do it, then? You must be sharp as a tack to get out of that one. Tell me all about it! And what about my mother? Where’s my mother? What’s the latest on Mum?” Thénardier answered: “She’s doing all right, I don’t know, leave me alone; I said, get lost.” “I don’t want to get lost, though,” said Éponine, simpering like a spoiled brat. “Fancy sending me packing when I haven’t seen you for four months already and I’ve hardly had time to give you a kiss.” And she flew at her father’s neck again.

“Come on now, this is ridiculous!” said Babet.

“Let’s get a move on,” said Gueulemer. “The cops could come past any minute.”

The ventriloquist’s voice sang this couplet:

It’s not New Year’s Day by heck

To hang off Mummy or Daddy’s neck.1

Éponine turned to face the five crooks.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Monsieur Brujon. Hello, Monsieur Babet. Hello, Monsieur Claquesous. Don’t you recognize me, Monsieur Gueulemer? How are things, Monsieur Montparnasse?” “Of course they recognize you!” yelled Thénardier. “But hello, goodbye, shove off! Leave us alone.” “It’s the hour for foxes, not the hour for chicks,” said Montparnasse.

“You can see for yourself we’ve got a joint to case icigo,” added Babet.

Éponine took Montparnasse’s hand.

“Watch out!” he said. “You’ll cut yourself, I’ve got a blade out.”

“My dear Montparnasse,” Éponine replied very sweetly, “you must learn to trust people. I am my father’s daughter, after all. Monsieur Babet, Monsieur Gueulemer, I’m the one who was asked to look into this business.” It is remarkable that Éponine did not speak a word of slang. Since she met Marius, that ghastly language had become anathema to her.

She squeezed Gueulemer’s big rough fingers with her weak bony little skeleton’s hand and went on: “You know very well I’m no fool. Normally people believe me. I’ve done you favours on more than one occasion. Well, then, I’ve gathered information, you’d be exposing yourselves for nothing, you know. I swear to you there’s nothing doing in this house.” “There are women there on their own,” said Gueulemer.

“No. The people have moved.”

“The candles haven’t, though!” said Babet.

And he showed Éponine, through the treetops, a light moving around in the attic of the villa. This was Toussaint, who had stayed up to hang the linen out to dry.

Éponine made a last-ditch effort.

“Well, anyway,” she said, “these people are as poor as church mice and this is the kind of shack where there isn’t a sou.” “Get the hell out of here!” cried Thénardier. “When we’ve turned the joint upside down and we’ve put the cellar up top and the attic down below we’ll tell you what’s inside and if it’s francs, sous, or centimes.” And he pushed her aside to get past.

“My very dear friend, Monsieur Montparnasse,” said Éponine, “please, you’re a good boy, don’t go in!” “Be careful, you’ll cut yourself!” replied Montparnasse.

Thénardier added in that decisive tone of his: “Beat it, fairy princess, and let the men go about their business.” Éponine let go of Montparnasse’s hand, which she had grabbed again, and said: “So you want to get into this house?” “Just for a bit!” said the ventriloquist, snickering.

She backed against the gate, faced the six bandits, though they were armed to the teeth and looked like demons in the night light, and in a firm low voice she said: “Sorry, I don’t want you to.” They stopped in their tracks, dumbfounded. The ventriloquist, though, stopped snickering. She went on: “Friends! Listen carefully. It’s not on. Now I’m doing the talking. First of all, if you enter this garden, if you touch this gate, I’ll scream, I’ll bang on the walls, I’ll wake everyone up, I’ll get you nabbed, all six of you, I’ll call the police.” “She’d do it, too,” said Thénardier in an undertone to Brujon and the ventriloquist.

She nodded and added: “Starting with my father!”

Thénardier went up to her.

“Not so close, little man!” she said.

He backed off, grumbling between his teeth. “What the hell’s got into her?” And he added: “Bitch!” She began to laugh with a terrible laugh.

“Whatever you say, you won’t be going in. I can’t be the daughter of a dog since I’m the daughter of a wolf. There are six of you, but what do I care? You are men. Well, I am a woman. You don’t frighten me, not for a second. I’m telling you, you won’t be going in that house, because I don’t want you to. If you go near it, I’ll bark. I told you, the mutt is me. I don’t care what happens to you. On your way, you’re boring me! Go wherever you like, but don’t come here, I forbid you to! You’ve got your knives, I’ve got my fists, we’re even. Come on, what are you waiting for!” She took a step toward the crooks, she was terrifying, she started to laugh again.

“Good God! I’m not frightened. This summer, I’ll be hungry, this winter, I’ll be cold. How hilarious they are, these silly geese of men who think they can frighten a girl. Me, frightened? What of? Oh, yeah, that’s right, terrified! Because you have stupid tarts for mistresses who hide under the bed every time you start yelling. That won’t wash here! Not with me! I’m not frightened of anything!” She pinned Thénardier with her steady stare and said: “Not even of you!”

Then she continued, raking her bitter flaming ghost’s eyes over the rest of the crooks: “What’s it to me if they scrape me off the pavement in the rue Plumet tomorrow, hacked to death by my own father—or if they find me in a year’s time in a ditch in Saint-Cloud or on the Île des Cygnes2 in among all the rotten old cork floats and drowned dogs!” Here she was forced to break off, a dry cough took hold of her, her breathing came out like a rattle from her narrow, frail chest.

She went on: “All I have to do is scream, they’ll come running, whoosh! There are six of you; but I am the rest of the world.” Thénardier made a move toward her.

“Get back!” she cried.

He stopped, and said to her gently: “All right, I won’t come any closer, but there’s no need to shout. So then, my girl, you want to stop us working? But we’ve got to earn our living. Aren’t we friends anymore, then?” “You annoy me,” said Éponine.

“But we’ve got to live, got to eat—”

“Drop dead.”

That said, she plonked down on the base of the gate, and began quietly singing:

My arms so plump

My legs so shapely,

And time won’t come again.3

She was leaning with her elbow propped on her knee and her chin in her hand, and swinging her foot in an attitude of complete indifference. Her dress was full of holes and showed her sharp collarbones. The streetlamp nearby lit up her face and her body. Nobody could look more resolute and amazing.

The six assassins, dumbstruck and dark at being held in check by a mere girl, darted under the long shadow cast by the lamp and held a conference full of furious and humiliated shrugs.

She watched them, but with a calm and savage air.

“There’s something up with her,” said Babet, “some reason. D’you reckon she’s fallen in love with the mutt? It’d be a shame to miss out on this, but. Two women, an old man who lives out the back; there are plenty of good curtains at the windows. The old boy’d have to be a Jew-bag. Looks like a safe bet to me.” “Well, then, in you go, the rest of you,” cried Montparnasse. “Do the business. I’ll stay here with the girl, and if she moves a muscle—” He flashed the switchblade that he held open up his sleeve in the light of the streetlamp.

Thénardier did not say a word and seemed ready to be led.

Brujon, who was a bit of an oracle and who had, as we know, “set the job up,” had still not spoken. He seemed to be thinking. He had the reputation of not backing away from anything and it was known that he had one day, out of sheer bravado, done over a police station. On top of that, he made up verses and songs, which gave him great authority.

Babet questioned him.

“You don’t say anything, Brujon?”

Brujon remained silent a moment more; then he shook his head in several different ways and finally decided to speak: “This is the thing: I came across two sparrows fighting this morning. This evening, I bang into a woman arguing. All this is bad. Let’s clear out.” They cleared out.

While clearing out, Montparnasse muttered: “All the same, if they’d wanted me to, I’d have finished her off.” Babet responded: “Not me. I don’t touch women.”

At the corner of the street they stopped and engaged in this puzzling dialogue in muted voices: “Where are we going to sleep tonight?”

“Underneath Pantin.”

“Have you got the gate key on you, Thénardier?”

“Ah, hell.”

Éponine, who had not taken her eyes off them, saw them turn back the way they had come. She got up and started to creep behind them, hugging the walls and houses. She followed them in this fashion as far as the boulevard. There, they split up and she saw those six men sink into the darkness where they seemed to melt.

THINGS OF THE NIGHT

AFTER THE CROOKS had gone, the rue Plumet resumed its quiet nocturnal appearance.

What had just happened in this street would not have amazed a forest. Timberland, thickets, ferns, heather, fiercely entangled branches, tall grasses, lead their own dark lives; wild teeming nature suddenly catches glimpses of the invisible there; what is below man makes out through the mist what is above man; and things we, the living, know nothing about, confront each other in the night. Bristling musky nature is startled by certain approaches in which it believes it gets a whiff of the supernatural. The forces of darkness know each other and have mysterious checks and balances among themselves. Teeth and claws dread the intangible. Bloodthirsty bestiality, starving voracious appetites in quest of prey, instincts armed with nails and jaws whose only source and goal is the stomach, anxiously watch and scent the imperturbable spectral shape prowling under a shroud, standing in its filmy rustling dress and seeming to them to live a dead and terrible life. These brutal things, which are merely matter, vaguely fear having to deal with the immense darkness condensed in an unknown being. A black figure barring the way stops the wild beast in its tracks. What emerges from the graveyard intimidates and disconcerts what emerges from the lair; the ferocious is frightened of the sinister; wolves back away when they come upon a ghoul.

VI. MARIUS FALLS TO EARTH AND GIVES COSETTE HIS ADDRESS

WHILE THIS SPECIES of bitch with a human face mounted guard against the gate and the six bandits were giving in, outmanouevred by a girl, Marius was by Cosette’s side.

Never had the sky been more starry and enchanting, the trees more tremulous, the smell of the grass more pungent; never had the birds gone to sleep in among the leaves with a sweeter twittering; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity better answered the inner music of love; never had Marius been more in love, happier, more enraptured. But he had found Cosette sad. Cosette had been crying. Her eyes were red.

This was the first cloud in this wonderful dream.

Marius’s first words had been: “What’s wrong?”

And she had replied: “This.”

Then she had sat down on the bench by the steps and while he took his place all atremble beside her, she had expanded: “My father told me this morning to get ready, that he had business to attend to, and that we might perhaps be going away.” Marius shuddered from head to toe.

When you are at the end of life, dying means going away; when you are at the beginning of life, going away means dying.

For six weeks now, Marius had, little by little, slowly, by degrees, been taking possession of Cosette each day. An ideal but thorough possession. As we’ve already explained, with first love, you take the soul well before the body; later on you take the body well before the soul, sometimes you don’t take the soul at all; the Faublases and the Prudhommes1 add: because there isn’t one; but happily this bit of sarcasm is blasphemy. Marius, then, possessed Cosette the way minds possess—in spirit; but he wrapped her round with all his soul and held her jealously to him with incredible conviction. He possessed her smile, her breath, her scent, the deep radiance of her blue eyes, the softness of her skin when he touched her hand, the lovely mark she had on her neck, her every thought. They had vowed never to sleep without dreaming of the other and they had kept their word. And so he possessed her every dream, too. He gazed endlessly at the tiny hairs on the back of her neck, which he sometimes brushed with his breath, and he told himself that there was not one of those tiny hairs that did not belong to him, Marius. He contemplated and adored the things she wore, her ribbons and bows, her gloves, her cuffs, her brodequins, as sacred objects of which he was master. He felt he was lord of the pretty tortoiseshell combs she wore in her hair and he even told himself, muffled and confused stammerings of dawning desire, that there was not a thread of her dress, not a stitch of her stockings, not a tuck of her corset, that was not his. By Cosette’s side, he felt himself to be by his property, by his possession, by his despot and his slave. It felt as though their souls had so merged that, if they had wanted to take them back again, they could not possibly have distinguished between them. “This one is mine.” “No, it’s mine.” “I assure you, you’re mistaken. This is me all over.” “What you take for you is me.” Marius was part of Cosette and Cosette was part of Marius. Marius could feel Cosette living in him. To have Cosette, to possess Cosette, was no different for him from breathing. It was into the midst of this faith, of this intoxication, of this virginal possession, amazing and absolute, of this sovereignty, that these words, “We are going away,” fell suddenly and the abrupt voice of reality cried out to him: “Cosette is not yours!” Marius woke up. For six weeks he had lived, as we said, outside life; those words—going away!—brought him down to earth with a thud.

He was lost for words. Cosette felt only that his hand was cold. It was her turn to say: “What’s wrong?” He replied, so low that Cosette could hardly hear him: “I don’t understand what you mean.” She recapitulated: “This morning my father told me to pack all my things and get ready, that he would give me his clothes to pack in a trunk, that he was obliged to go on a trip, that we were going away, that we needed a big trunk for me and a little one for him, and to get all that ready within a week from now, that we would perhaps go to England.” “But that’s monstrous!” cried Marius.

It is certain that at that moment, to Marius’s mind, no abuse of power, no violence, no abomination of the most extravagant tyrants, no act of Busiris,2 Tiberius, or Henry VIII was equal in ferocity to this: Monsieur Fauchelevent’s taking his daughter off to England because he had business to attend to.

He asked in a weak voice: “And when would you leave?”

“He didn’t say when.”

“And when would you come back?”

“He didn’t say when.”

Marius shot to his feet and said coldly: “Cosette, are you going?”

Cosette turned her beautiful eyes full of anguish toward him and answered in a baffled voice: “Where?” “To England? Are you going?”

“Why are you talking to me in that tone?”

“I’m asking you whether you’re going?”

“What do you expect me to do?” she said, clasping her hands together.

“So you’ll go?”

“If my father goes?”

“So you’ll go?”

Cosette took Marius’s hand and squeezed it without answering.

“Fine,” said Marius. “Then I’ll go elsewhere.”

Cosette felt the meaning of these words even more than she understood them. She went so pale that her face became white in the dark. She stammered: “What do you mean?” Marius looked at her, then slowly raised his eyes to the sky and answered: “Nothing.”

When he lowered his gaze again he saw that Cosette was smiling at him. The smile of the woman you love has a brightness you can see at night.

“What idiots we are! Marius, I’ve got an idea.”

“What?”

“You go, too, if we’re going! I’ll tell you where! You can come and join me wherever I am!” Marius was now wide awake. He had come back to reality. He shouted at Cosette: “Go with you! Are you mad? That’d take money and I don’t have any! Go to England? But I now owe, I don’t know, over ten louis to Courfeyrac—a friend of mine you don’t know! I’ve got an old hat that’s not worth three francs, I have a coat that has buttons missing in front, my shirt’s all torn, I’ve got holes at the elbows, my boots let in water; for six weeks I haven’t thought about all that and I haven’t told you about it. Cosette, I’m a pauper! You only see me at night and you give me your love; if you saw me in daylight, you’d give me a sou! Go to England? How? I don’t even have the money for a passport!” He threw himself against a tree that happened to be there and stood with both arms above his head, his forehead against the bark, feeling neither the wood scraping his skin nor the fever hammering at his temples, motionless, ready to fall, like the very statue of despair.

He stayed in that position for a long time. A person could spend eternity in such bottomless pits. Finally he turned round. He heard a small stifled sound behind him, soft and sad.

It was Cosette sobbing.

She had been crying for close to two hours right next to Marius while he had been lost in thought.

He went to her, fell on his knees, and slowly prostrating himself, took the tip of her foot, which peeped out from under her dress, and kissed it. She let him do this in silence. There are moments when a woman accepts the religion of love like a gloomy and resigned goddess.

“Don’t cry,” he said.

She murmured: “But I might be going away and you can’t come!”

He said: “Do you love me?”

She answered him sobbing these words straight from paradise that are never more thrilling than when said through tears: “I adore you!” He went on in a tone of voice that was an inexpressible caress: “Don’t cry. Tell me, will you do that for me and not cry?” “Do you love me?” she said.

He took her hand: “Cosette, I have never given my word of honour to anyone because my word of honour frightens me. I feel that my father is there, looking over my shoulder. And yet, I give you my most sacred word of honour that, if you go away, I will die.” There was in the tone in which he uttered those words a melancholy so solemn and so calm that Cosette shook. She felt the chill that something sombre and true gives off as it passes. She stopped crying from shock.

“Now listen,” he said. “Don’t expect me tomorrow.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t expect me until the day after tomorrow.”

“Oh! Why not?”

“You’ll see.”

“A day without seeing you! I couldn’t stand it.”

“We can sacrifice one day if it means spending our whole lives together.”

Then Marius added in a whisper as though to himself: “He is a man who never changes his habits and he has never received anyone except at night.” “What man are you talking about?” asked Cosette.

“Me? I didn’t say anything.”

“What are you hoping for, then?”

“Wait till the day after tomorrow.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Yes, Cosette.”

She took his head in both hands, stood on tiptoe to be at his height, and tried to see the hope in his eyes.

Marius went on: “I’ve been thinking, you should know my address, anything could happen, you never know; I live at that old friend of mine’s, Courfeyrac, rue de la Verrerie, number sixteen.” He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a penknife, and with the blade wrote on the plaster of the wall: 16, rue de la Verrerie. Cosette meanwhile was looking intently into his eyes again.

“Tell me what you’re thinking. Marius, you are thinking something. Tell me what it is. Oh, tell me so I can get to sleep tonight!” “What I’m thinking is this: that God can’t possibly want to separate us. Wait for me the day after tomorrow.” “What will I do till then?” said Cosette. “It’s all right for you, you’re out and about, you can come and go. Men are so lucky! Me, I’ll be all on my own. Oh, I’ll be so sad! What will you do tomorrow night, then, tell me?” “I’m going to try something.”

“Then I’ll pray to God and I’ll think of you all the time, from now till then, so you are sure to succeed. I won’t ask you any more questions. You are my master. I’ll spend tomorrow night singing that music from Euryanthe that you love—you came and listened to it one night outside my shutters. But come early the day after tomorrow. I’ll expect you at nine o’clock on the dot, I warn you. My God! How sad that the days are so long! Nine o’clock sharp, you hear me—I’ll be in the garden.” “I will, too.”

And without a word, moved by the same thought, driven by the same electric currents that put two lovers in perpetual contact, both of them dizzy with desire even in their misery, they fell into each other’s arms, without realizing that their lips were joined while their uplifted eyes, overflowing with ecstasy and tears, were fixed on the stars.

When Marius left, the street was deserted. At that precise moment Éponine had tracked the burglars as far as the boulevard.

While Marius had been daydreaming, with his head against the tree, an idea had flashed through his mind; an idea, alas! that he himself judged outrageous and unthinkable. He had decided on a desperate course of action.

VII. OLD HEART AND YOUNG HEART FACE-TO-FACE

OLD MAN GILLENORMAND had now long since turned ninety-one. He was still living with Mademoiselle Gillenormand at no. 6, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire in the old house that belonged to him. He was, as you will recall, of that antique race of old men who await death perfectly erect, whom age burdens without buckling, and whom even sorrow does not bow.

Yet for some little time, his daughter had been saying: “My father is going downhill.” He no longer slapped the servants; he no longer banged his cane with the same verve on the stair landing when Basque was slow to open the door for him. For the past six months, the July Revolution had hardly ruffled his feathers at all. He had seen in the Moniteur almost with tranquillity this coupling of words: Monsieur Humblot-Conté, peer of France.1 The fact is that the old man was filled with despair. He did not sag, he did not surrender—that was no more in his physical makeup than in his moral makeup; but he felt himself inwardly disintegrating. For four years he had been waiting for Marius resolutely—that is indeed the right word—in the conviction that the naughty little rascal would ring at his door one of these days; now he had reached the point where, at certain mournful hours, he told himself that if Marius took his time even a little longer … It wasn’t death that he found unbearable, it was the idea that he might never see Marius again. Never to see Marius again—that had never, even for a moment, entered his head until now; but now the idea was beginning to occur to him and it sent shivers down his spine. Absence, as always happens with emotions that are natural and true, only increased the love the grandfather felt for the ungrateful boy who had taken himself off like that. It is on nights in December, when the temperature drops below zero, that we most think of the sun. Monsieur Gillenormand was, or thought he was, utterly incapable of making a move, he the grandfather, toward his grandson. “I’d sooner croak,” he said. He did not think himself in the wrong in any way, but he never thought of Marius except with deep affection and the mute despair of an old man with one foot in the grave.

He was beginning to lose his teeth, which added to his sadness.

Though he never admitted it to himself, for it would have made him furious and ashamed, Monsieur Gillenormand had never loved any mistress the way he loved Marius.

He had them hang in his bedroom, on the wall opposite his bed, as the first thing he would see when he woke up, an old portrait of his other daughter, the one who had died, Madame Pontmercy, a portrait done when she was eighteen years old. He never tired of looking at this portrait. One day while he was studying it, he happened to say: “I think it’s a good likeness.” “Of my sister?” asked Mademoiselle Gillenormand. “Why, yes, it is.”

The old man added: “And of him, too.”

Once, as he was sitting with his knees pressed together and his eyes almost closed in an attitude of dejection, his daughter ventured to say to him: “Father, do you still bear as much of a grudge as ever toward—” She broke off, not daring to go any further.

“Who?”

“That poor Marius.”

He lifted his old head, slammed his bony wrinkled old fist on the table, and shouted in his crabbiest and most ringing voice: “Poor Marius, you say! That gentleman is a bounder, a nasty little rotter, an ungrateful upstart, with no heart, no soul, a puffed-up popinjay, a bad piece of work.” And he turned away so that his daughter could not see the tears that had welled up in his eyes. Three days later, he emerged from a silence that had lasted for four hours to tell his daughter point-blank: “I have the honour of beseeching Mademoiselle Gillenormand never to speak to me of him again.” Aunt Gillenormand gave up all attempts and arrived at this profound diagnosis: “My father never loved my sister much after her silly mistake. It is clear he detests Marius.” “After her silly mistake” meant: after she married the colonel.

Still, as you might well have surmised, Mademoiselle had failed in her attempt to substitute her favourite, the officer of the lancers, for Marius. Théodule had not taken as a replacement. Monsieur Gillenormand had not accepted the quid pro quo. A hole in the heart is not satisfied with a stopgap. Théodule, for his part, even with his nose on the inheritance, rebelled at the chore of pleasing. The old man bored the lancer and the lancer disgusted the old man. Lieutenant Théodule was doubtless cheery, but chatty; frivolous but common; a bon vivant, but one who mixed with a bad crowd; he had mistresses, it is true, and he talked about them a lot, also true, but he said nasty things about them. All his good points had their bad points. Monsieur Gillenormand was exasperated at his tales of casual amorous encounters near his barracks in the rue de Babylone. And then again, Lieutenant Gillenormand sometimes turned up in his uniform with the tricolour cockade. This made him quite simply insupportable. Old man Gillenormand had wound up telling his daughter: “I’ve had enough, of Théodule. You receive him if you like, I don’t have much time for men of war in times of peace. I don’t know if I don’t prefer sabreurs to sabre-draggers.2 The clattering of blades in battle is less pathetic, after all, than the racket scabbards make tapping on the pavement. And then, arching his back like a swashbuckler and lacing himself up like a sissy! Fancy wearing a corset under a cuirass—it’s too ridiculous for words. When you are a real man, you keep an equal distance from bravado and simpering affectation. Neither a braggart nor a pretty boy. You can keep your Théodule to yourself.” His daughter could try as she might to tell him, “But he is your grandnephew, after all.” It turned out that Monsieur Gillenormand, a grandfather to his fingertips, was no great-uncle at all.

Basically, as he was of sound mind and could make comparisons, Théodule only served to make him miss Marius all the more.

One evening—it was the fourth of June, though that did not stop old Gillenormand from having a roaring fire going in his fireplace—he had dismissed his daughter, who was quietly sewing in the next room. He was alone in his room with the pastoral scenes, his feet up on his firedogs, half wrapped round in his vast nine-panel Coromandel screen, leaning on his table where two candles burned under a green shade, swallowed up in his tapestry armchair, a book in his hand, but not reading. He was decked out, in his usual style, as an incroyable—a dandy—and he looked like an antique portrait of Garat.3 This would have caused him to be followed in the street, but his daughter always bundled him up whenever he went out in a vast quilted bishop’s overcoat that hid his clothes. At home, except when he got up or went to bed, he never wore a dressing gown. “They make a man look old,” he said.

Old Gillenormand was thinking of Marius lovingly and bitterly, and as usual, bitterness dominated. His embittered tenderness always ended up boiling over into outrage. He had reached the point where you try to come to grips with and accept what is tearing you apart. He was busy explaining to himself that there was no longer any reason for Marius to come back, that if he had needed to come back, he would have done so already, that he had to give up hoping for that. He tried to get used to the idea that it was over and that he would die without seeing “that gentleman” again. But his whole nature rebelled; his old paternal feelings could not allow it. “I don’t believe it!” he said; it was his painful refrain. “I don’t believe he’s never coming back!” His bald head had sunk onto his chest and he vaguely levelled at the ashes in his hearth a woeful yet cranky glance.

As he was in the depths of this reverie, his old servant Basque came in and asked him: “Is Monsieur able to receive Monsieur Marius?”

The old man jerked upright, ashen and like a corpse jumping under a galvanic shock. All his blood had rushed to his heart. He stammered: “Monsieur Marius what?” “I don’t know,” answered Basque, intimidated and thrown by his master’s look. “I didn’t see him. It was Nicolette who came and told me that there is a young man and to say that it’s Monsieur Marius.” Old Gillenormand stuttered in a voice just above a whisper: “Sh-ssh-ow him in.”

And he remained in the same position, his head wobbly, his eyes riveted to the door. It opened again. A young man entered. It was Marius.

Marius stopped at the door as if waiting to be asked in.

His almost wretchedly shabby getup could not be seen in the obscurity created by the lampshade. Only his face could be made out, calm and grave, but strangely sad.

Old Gillenormand, overcome with amazement and joy, remained so dazzled for a few moments he was unable to see anything more than a bright light, as when you are confronted by an apparition. He was ready to pass out; he saw Marius through a blinding haze. It really was him, it really was Marius!

At last! After four years! He seized him, so to speak, sized him up, in a single glance. He found him handsome, noble, distinguished, grown-up, a mature man, with a correct demeanor and a charming air. He wanted to open his arms, to call him, to run to him, his heart was melting in ravishment, affectionate words welled up inside him and overflowed from his breast; finally, all this tenderness made itself felt and reached his lips, but out of that warring urge that was the very basis of his nature, harsh words came out. He said abruptly: “What have you come here for?” Marius answered, embarrassed: “Monsieur …”

Monsieur Gillenormand would have liked Marius to throw himself into his arms. He was annoyed with Marius and with himself. He felt he was being brusque and that Marius was being cold. It was for the old man an unbearable and infuriating anxiety to feel himself so loving and so tearful inside yet not to be able to be anything but hard on the outside. His bitterness returned. He interrupted Marius in a gruff tone: “So why are you here?” That “so” signified: if you have not come to give me a hug and a kiss. Marius looked at his grandfather, whose pallor had turned his face to marble.

“Have you come to say you’re sorry? Do you admit now that you were wrong?”

He thought he was putting Marius on the right track and that the “boy” was about to give in. Marius flinched; he was being asked to disown his father. He looked at the floor and answered: “No, Monsieur.” “Well then,” cried the old man impetuously with a pain that was poignant and full of anger, “what do you want with me?” Marius clasped his hands, took a step forward, and said in a weak and quivering voice: “Monsieur, have pity on me.” These words stirred Monsieur Gillenormand; if they’d been said earlier, he would have relented, but they came too late. The grandfather got up, he leaned on his walking stick with both hands; his lips were white, his head wobbled, but he dominated the bowed Marius with his height.

“Pity on you, Monsieur! It’s the adolescent asking for pity from the old man of ninety-one! You are just starting out in life, I’m about to leave it; you go off to shows, to balls, to cafés, to billiards, you’re witty, you please the ladies, you’re a good-looking boy; I, I sit there spitting on my embers in the middle of summer; you are rich with the only riches that count, I’ve got all the impoverishments of old age, infirmity, isolation! You’ve got all your thirty-two teeth, a good stomach, a keen eye, strength; I don’t even have white hair now, I’ve lost my teeth, I’m losing my legs, I’m losing my memory, there are three street names I always get wrong, the rue Charlot, the rue du Chaume, and the rue Saint-Claude, that’s where I’m at; you have the whole future before you, full of sunshine, while I can hardly see what’s in front of my nose anymore, I’ve gone so far into the night; you are in love, that goes without saying, I’m not loved by anyone in the world, and you ask me for pity! By Jove, Molière overlooked this one.4 If this is how you jest at the Palais, you lawyers, I offer you my sincere compliments. You are true comedians.” And the old man went on in a voice both wrathful and grave: “Right, then, what do you want from me?” “Monsieur,” Marius said, “I know that my presence annoys you, but I’ve only come to ask you for one thing, and then I will go at once.” “You are a noodle!” said the old man. “Who said you were to go?”

This was a translation of the tender words in his innermost heart: Just say you’re sorry, why don’t you! Throw your arms around my neck! Monsieur Gillenormand realized that Marius would leave him in a few moments, that his unpleasant welcome had put him off, that his harshness was driving him away, he told himself all that and his pain only intensified and, since pain for him turned immediately to anger, his harshness only intensified. He wanted Marius to understand, but Marius did not understand, which made the old man furious. He went on: “Really! You deserted me, me, your grandfather, you left my house to go God knows where, you upset your aunt, you’ve gone and led—one can very well guess, it’s much more fun—the life of a bachelor, playing the fop, coming home at all hours, kicking up your heels, you haven’t given me the slightest sign of life, you’ve run up debts without even telling me to pay them,5 you’ve turned yourself into a smasher of windows and a rowdy hooligan and now, after four long years, you turn up on my doorstep and this is all you have to say to me!” This violent way of pushing his grandson into a show of affection produced only silence with Marius; Monsieur Gillenormand folded his arms, a gesture that, with him, was particularly imperious, and he spat out bitterly at Marius: “Let’s get it over with. You’ve come to ask me something, you say? Well then, what? What is it? Speak.” “Monsieur,” said Marius, with the look of a man knowing he is about to plummet over a precipice, “I’ve come to ask your permission to marry.”6 Monsieur Gillenormand rang. Basque cracked the door open.

“Send my daughter in.”

A second later the door opened again, Mademoiselle Gillenormand did not come in, but showed herself at the doorway; Marius was standing, mute, his arms hanging, with the face of a criminal, Monsieur Gillenormand was pacing up and down the length of the room. He turned to his daughter and said to her: “Nothing. It’s Monsieur Marius. Say hello. Monsieur wants to marry. That’s all. Off you go.” The old man’s clipped, hoarse tone of voice announced a strange fullness of feeling. The aunt threw Marius a bewildered look, seemed to scarcely recognize him, did not let a movement or a word escape her, and disappeared at a snort of fury from her father faster than a straw scuttled by a hurricane.

Meanwhile old Gillenormand had gone back to lean against the mantel-piece.

“Marry! At twenty-one! You’ve arranged it! You’ve nothing left to do now but to ask my permission! A mere formality. Do have a seat, Monsieur. Well now, you’ve been through a revolution since the last time I had the honour of seeing you. The Jacobins came out on top. You must have been happy about that. Aren’t you a republican—since you are a baron? You are made for each other. The republic must be the icing on the cake of our barony. Were you decorated for July? Did you help storm the Louvre7 a little, Monsieur? Very close to here, rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the rue des Nonnains-d’Hyères, there is a cannonball lodged in a third-storey wall of a house with this inscription: July 28, 1830. Go and have a look at it. That makes a good impression. Ah, they do such nice things, don’t they, your friends! Speaking of which, aren’t they putting up a fountain to replace the monument of Monsieur le duc de Berry?8 And so, just like that, you want to get married? To whom? May one ask, without being indiscreet, to whom?” He paused, but before Marius had a chance to answer, he erupted violently: “For heaven’s sake, do you have any standing? A fortune behind you? How much do you make in the legal profession?” “Nothing,” said Marius with an almost fierce firmness and resolve.

“Nothing? All you have to live on is the twelve hundred livres9 I give you?”

Marius did not answer. Monsieur Gillenormand continued: “So, I take it the girl is rich?” “Like me.”

“What! No dowry?”

“No.”

“Any expectations?”

“I think not.”

“Not a rag on her back! And what does the father do?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what is her name?”

“Mademoiselle Fauchelevent.”

“Fauchele-what?”

“Fauchelevent.”

“Phh!” went the old man.

“Monsieur!” cried Marius.

Monsieur Gillenormand cut him off in the tone of a man talking to himself.

“That’s right, twenty-one years old, no standing, twelve hundred livres a year, Madame la baronne Pontmercy will go and ask for two sous’ worth of parsley at the fruit-seller’s.” “Monsieur,” Marius cut in wildly, now clutching at the last vanishing straw of hope, “I beg you! I beseech you, in heaven’s name, I join my hands together in prayer, Monsieur, I throw myself at your feet, allow me to marry her.” The old man let out a laugh, shrill and grim, through which he coughed and spoke.

“Ha! Ha! Ha! You said to yourself: Damn it! I’ll have to go and look up that doddering old fogey, that drivelling old goat! What a pity I’m not twenty-five yet! What a nice respectable notice I’d chuck him then! How well I’d make do without him! Never mind, I’ll say to him: Old noodle, you are only too happy to see me, I want to marry, I want to marry Mamselle Nobody, daughter of Monsieur Nothing, I have no shoes, she has no chemise, no matter, I want to throw my career to the dogs, my future, my youth, my life, I want to sink into destitution with a wife around my neck, that’s what I have in mind, you must consent! And, just like that, the old fossil will consent … Go to it, my boy, as you will, tie your millstone round your neck, marry your Pousselevent, your Coupelevent … Never, Monsieur! Never!” “Father!”

“Never!”

At the tone in which that never was uttered, Marius lost all hope. He rose and slowly crossed the room, head bowed, unsteady on his feet, more like a man about to die than one taking his leave. Monsieur Gillenormand followed him with his eyes and the moment the door opened and Marius was about to go out, he darted forward four steps with that senile vivacity imperious and spoiled old men have, grabbed Marius by the collar, marched him back energetically into the room, threw him into an armchair and said to him: “Tell me about it!” It was that single word father escaping Marius’s lips that had brought about this revolution. Marius stared at him, amazed. Monsieur Gillenormand’s mobile face no longer expressed anything other than a rough and ineffable bonhomie. The stern ancestor had made way for the grandfather.

“Come on, let’s talk, tell me about your love life, you chatterbox, tell all! Heavens! What geese these young men are!” “Father!” said Marius once more.

The old man’s whole face lit up with an indescribable radiance.

“Yes, that’s the way! Call me father and you’ll see!”

There was now something so good, so soft, so open, so paternal in this brusqueness that Marius was made dizzy and almost drunk by the sudden shift from discouragement to hope. He was sitting near the table; the light from the candles brought out the dilapidated state of his clothes and old father Gillenormand was studying them, flabbergasted.

“Well then, father,” said Marius.

“For heaven’s sake,” Monsieur Gillenormand broke in. “You really haven’t got a sou, have you?! You’re rigged out like a thief.” He fumbled in a drawer and pulled out a purse, which he put on the table.

“Here, there’s a hundred louis, buy yourself a hat.”

“Father,” Marius plowed on, “my good, dear father, if you only knew! I love her. You can’t imagine, the first time I saw her was in the Luxembourg, she used to go there; in the beginning, I didn’t pay her much attention and then I don’t know how it happened, but I fell in love with her. Oh, how unhappy it made me! In the end, well, now I see her every day, at her place, her father doesn’t know, imagine, they are about to go away, we see each other in the garden in the evening, her father wants to take her away to England, so I said to myself: I’ll go and see my grandfather and tell him all about it. I’d go mad first, I’d die, I’d get sick, I’d throw myself in the river. I absolutely have to marry her, I’d go mad otherwise. So, well, that’s the whole truth, I don’t think I’ve left anything out. She lives in a garden where there’s a gate, rue Plumet. That’s over by the Invalides.” Old father Gillenormand had sat down next to Marius, beaming with joy. While listening to him and savouring the sound of his voice, he savoured at the same time a good long pinch of snuff. At the words rue Plumet, he stopped inhaling and let the rest of his snuff fall on his knees.

“Rue Plumet? You say rue Plumet? Let me see, now! I’ll be! Isn’t there a barracks over that way? Yes, that’s it. Your cousin Théodule has told me about her—You know, the lancer, the officer—A peach, my dear friend, a peach! Lordy, yes, rue Plumet. It’s what used to be called the rue Blomet. Now it’s coming back to me. I’ve heard talk about this lass at the gate of the rue Plumet. In a garden. A real Pamela.10 Nothing wrong with your taste. They say she’s nice and clean. Between you and me, I think that nincompoop of a lancer had a try at wooing her. I don’t know how far it went. When it comes down to it, that’s neither here nor there. Besides, you can’t take him at his word, he’s such a braggart. Marius! I think it’s wonderful that a young man like you should be in love. You’re the right age for it. I like you better in love than a Jacobin. I like you better smitten by a skirt—by Jove! by twenty skirts—than by Monsieur Robespierre. For my part, I must admit that the only sansculottes I’ve ever loved are the women. Pretty girls are pretty girls, for pity’s sake! There’s nothing wrong with that. As for this little lass, she sees you behind papa’s back. That’s how it should be. I’ve had affairs like that myself, too. More than one. Do you know what you do? You don’t go in too hard; you don’t go asking for trouble; no talk of a wedding and Monsieur le maire and his sash. You’ve got a head on your shoulders—use it. It’s as simple as that. You have to show some common sense. Err by all means, mortals, but do not marry. You come and find the grandfather, who’s not a bad old stick at heart, and who always has a few rolls of louis lying around in an old drawer, and you say to him: Grandfather, this is how it is. And the grandfather says: It’s quite simple. Youth profits and old age provides. I was young once, and one day you will be old. Go to it, my boy, you’ll hand this on to your grandson. Here are two hundred pistoles. Have fun, for heaven’s sake. Nothing better! That’s how the business should be conducted. Don’t marry, but don’t let that stop you. Do you get my meaning?” Marius, absolutely dumbstruck, unable to articulate a single sound, shook his head to say no. The old man burst out laughing, gave him a wink of his tired old eye, and a rap on the knee, looked him straight in the eye, beaming mysteriously, and told him, with the most affectionate shrug of the shoulders: “Make her your mistress, you silly goose!” Marius blanched. He had not been able to make head or tail of anything his grandfather had just been saying. That rigmarole about the rue Blomet, Pamela, barracks, lancers, had gone over his head. Nothing of such a fantasy could have any bearing on Cosette, who was as pure as a lily. The old man was rambling. But this rambling had ended in a word Marius understood only too well—a word that was a mortal insult to Cosette. That phrase “make her your mistress” stabbed the strict young man’s heart like a sword.

He stood up, picked up his hat, which was on the floor, and walked to the door with firm and assured tread. There he turned round, bowed deeply to his grandfather, lifted his head high again, and said: “Five years ago, you insulted my father, today you insult my wife. I will never ask you for anything again, Monsieur. Adieu.” Old Gillenormand, stupefied, opened his mouth, reached out his arms, attempted to get up; but before he could utter a word, the door had shut again and Marius was gone.

The old man remained for a few moments without moving and as though thunderstruck; he could not talk or breathe, as though a fist was closing around his gullet. Finally, he tore himself out of his armchair, ran to the door as fast as a person can run at ninety-one, flung it open and yelled: “Help! Help!” His daughter appeared, then the servants. He shouted at them, with a terrible rattle in his voice: “Run after him! Catch him! What did I do to him? He’s gone mad! He’s going! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! This time he won’t come back!” He rushed to the window that looked on the street, opened it with his shaky old hands, leaned out down to the waist while Basque and Nicolette held him from behind, and cried: “Marius! Marius! Marius! Marius!” But Marius was already out of hearing, was at that very moment turning the corner of the rue Saint-Louis.

The old man clapped his hands on his temples two or three times in anguish, turned away from the window and flopped into an armchair, pulseless, speechless, tearless, nodding his head and moving his lips like a half-wit, with nothing left in his eyes or his heart but a deep mournful sensation that resembled night.