This being the case, is every social danger dissipated? Certainly not.

There is no Jacquerie, and society may be reassured on that side; the

blood will not again rush to its head, but it must pay attention to the

way in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be apprehended, but

there is consumption, and social consumption is called wretchedness.

People die as well when undermined as when struck by lightning. We

shall never grow weary of repeating, that to think first of all of the

disinherited and sorrowful classes, to relieve, ventilate, enlighten,

and love them, to magnificently enlarge their horizon, to lavish upon

them education in every shape, to offer them the example of labor,

and never that of indolence, to lessen the weight of the individual

burden by increasing the notion of the universal object, to limit

poverty without limiting wealth, to create vast fields of public and

popular activity, to have, like Briareus, a hundred hands to stretch

out on all sides to the crushed and the weak, to employ the collective

power in opening workshops for every arm, schools for every aptitude,

and laboratories for every intellect, to increase wages, diminish the

toil, and balance the debit and credit, that is to say, proportion

the enjoyment to the effort, and the satisfaction to the wants,--in

a word, to evolve from the social machine, on behalf of those who

suffer and those who are ignorant, more light and more comfort,--is,

and sympathetic souls must not forget it, the first of brotherly

obligations, and, let egotistic hearts learn the fact, the first of

political necessities; And all this, we are bound to add, is only a

beginning, and the true question is this, labor cannot be law, without

being a right. But this is not the place to dwell on such a subject.

If nature is called Providence, society ought to call itself foresight.

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than natural

amelioration; knowledge is a viaticum; thinking is a primary necessity,

and truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reason fasting for knowledge

and wisdom grows thin, and we must pity minds that do not eat quite

as much as stomachs. If there be anything more poignant than a body

pining away for want of bread, it is a mind that dies of hunger for

enlightenment. The whole of our progress tends toward the solution,

and some day people will be stupefied As the human race ascends, the

deepest strata will naturally emerge from the zone of distress, and the

effacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation of

the level. We would do wrong to doubt this blessed solution. The past,

we grant, is very powerful at the present hour, and is beginning again.

This rejuvenescence of a corpse is surprising. It seems victorious;

this dead man is a conqueror. Behold him advancing and arriving! he

arrives with his legion, superstitions; with his sword, despotism; with

his barrier, ignorance; and during some time past he has gained ten

battles. He advances, he threatens, he laughs, he is at our gates. But

we have no reason to despair; let us sell the field on which Hannibal

is encamped. What can we, who believe, fear? A recoil of ideas is no

more possible than it is for a river to flow up a hill. But those

who desire no future ought to reflect; by saying no to progress they

do not condemn the future, but themselves; and they give themselves

a deadly disease by inoculating themselves with the past. There is

only one way of refusing to-morrow, and that is, by dying. We wish

for no death,--that of the body as late as possible, and that of

the soul never. Yes, the sphinx will speak, and the problem will be

solved; the people sketched by the eighteenth century will be finished

by the nineteenth. He is an idiot who doubts it. The future, the

speedy bursting into flower of universal welfare, is a divinely fatal

phenomenon. Immense and combined impulsions pushing together govern

human facts, and lead them all within a given time to the logical

state, that is to say, to equilibrium, or in other words, to equity. A

force composed of earth and heaven results from humanity and governs

it; this force is a performer of miracles, and marvellous denouements

are as easy to it as extraordinary incidents. Aided by science, which

comes from man, and the event, which comes from another source, it

is but little frightened by those contradictions in the posture of

problems which seem to the vulgar herd impossibilities. It is no less

skilful in producing a solution from the approximation of ideas than

in producing instruction from the approximation of facts, and we may

expect anything and everything from the mysterious power of progress,

which, on fine days, confronts the East and the West in a sepulchre,

and makes the Imams hold conference with Bonaparte in the interior of

the Great Pyramid. In the meanwhile, there is no halt, no hesitation,

no check, in the grand forward march of minds. Social philosophy is

essentially the source of peace; it has for its object, and must have

as result, the dissolution of passions by the study of antagonisms. It

examines, scrutinizes, and analyzes, and then it recomposes; and it

proceeds by the reducing process, by removing hatred from everything.

It has more than once occurred, that a society has been sunk by the

wind which is let loose on men. History is full of the shipwrecks of

peoples and empires; one day, that stranger, the hurricane, passes, and

carries away manners, laws, and religions. The civilizations of India,

Chaldæa, Persia, Assyria, and Egypt have disappeared in turn; why? We

are ignorant. What are the causes of these disasters? We do not know.

Could those societies have been saved? Was it any fault of their own?

Did they obstinately adhere to some fatal vice which destroyed them?

What amount of suicide is there in these terrible deaths of a nation

and a race? These are unanswerable questions, for darkness covers the

condemned civilizations. They have been under water since they sank,

and we have no more to say; and it is with a species of terror that

we see in the background of that sea which is called the past, and

behind those gloomy waves, centuries, those immense vessels,--Babylon,

Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, and Rome,--sunk by the terrific blast which

blows from all the mouths of the darkness. But there was darkness then,

and we have light; and if we are ignorant of the diseases of ancient

civilizations, we know the infirmities of our own, and we contemplate

its beauties and lay bare its deformities. Wherever it is wounded we

probe it; and at once the suffering is decided, and the study of the

cause leads to the discovery of the remedy. Our civilization, the work

of twenty centuries, is at once the monster and the prodigy, and is

worth saving; it will be saved. To aid it is much, and to enlighten it

is also something. All the labors of modern social philosophy ought

to converge to this object; and the thinker of the present day has a

grand duty to apply the stethoscope to civilization. We repeat it,

this auscultation is encouraging; and we intend to finish these few

pages, which are an austere interlude in a mournful drama, by laying a

stress on this encouragement. Beneath the social mortality the human

imperishableness is felt, and the globe does not die because here and

there are wounds in the shape of craters and ringworms in the shape of

solfatari and a volcano which breaks out and scatters its fires around.

The diseases of the people do not kill the man.

And yet some of those who follow the social clinics shake their heads

at times, and the strongest, the most tender, and the most logical,

have their hours of dependency. Will the future arrive? It seems as

if we may almost ask this question on seeing so much terrible shadow.

There is a sombre, face-to-face meeting of the egotists and the

wretched. In the egotist we trace prejudices, the cloudiness of a caste

education, appetite growing with intoxication, and prosperity that

stuns, a fear of suffering which in some goes so far as an aversion

from the sufferers, an implacable satisfaction, and the feeling of

self so swollen that it closes the soul. In the wretched we find

covetousness, envy, the hatred of seeing others successful, the great

bounds of the human beast toward gorging, hearts full of mist, sorrow,

want, fatality, and foul and common ignorance. Must we still raise our

eyes to heaven? Is the luminous point which we notice there one of

those which die out? The ideal is frightful to look on thus lost in the

depths, small, isolated, imperceptible, and brilliant, but surrounded

by all those great black menaces monstrously collected around it; for

all that, though, it is in no more danger than a star in the yawning

throat of the clouds.

BOOK VIII.

ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS.

CHAPTER I.

BRIGHT LIGHT.

The reader has of course understood that Éponine, on recognizing

through the railings the inhabitant of the house in the Rue Plumet,

to which Magnon sent her, began by keeping the bandits aloof from the

house, then led Marius to it; and that after several days of ecstasy

before the railings, Marius, impelled by that force which attracts iron

to the loadstone, and the lover toward the stones of the house in which

she whom he loves resides, had eventually entered Cosette's garden, as

Romeo did Juliet's. This had even been an easier task for him than for

Romeo; for Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, while Marius had merely

to move one of the bars of the decrepit railing loose in its rusty

setting, after the fashion of the teeth of old people. As Marius was

thin, he easily passed. As there never was anybody in the street, and

as Marius never entered the garden save at night, he ran no risk of

being seen. From that blessed and holy hour when a kiss affianced these

two souls, Marius went to the garden every night. If, at this moment

of her life, Cosette had fallen in love with an unscrupulous libertine,

she would have been lost; for there are generous natures that surrender

themselves, and Cosette was one of them. One of the magnanimities of a

woman is to yield; and love, at that elevation where it is absolute,

is complicated by a certain celestial blindness of modesty. But what

dangers you incur, ye noble souls! You often give the heart and we take

the body; your heart is left you, and you look at it in the darkness

with a shudder. Love has no middle term: it either saves or destroys,

and this dilemma is the whole of human destiny. No fatality offers this

dilemma of ruin or salvation more inexorably than does love, for love

is life, if it be not death; it is a cradle, but also a coffin. The

same feeling says yes and no in the human heart, and of all the things

which God has made, the human heart is the one which evolves the most

light, and, alas I the most darkness. God willed it that the love which

Cosette encountered was one of those loves which save. So long as the

month of May of that year, 1832, lasted, there were every night in this

poor untrimmed garden, and under this thicket, which daily became more

fragrant and more thick, two beings composed of all the chastities and

all the innocences, overflowing with all the felicities of heaven,

nearer to the archangels than to man, pure, honest, intoxicated, and

radiant, and who shone for each other in the darkness. It seemed to

Cosette as if Marius had a crown, and to Marius as if Cosette had a

glory. They touched each other, they looked at each other, they took

each other by the hand, they drew close to each other; but there was

a distance which they never crossed. Not that they respected it, but

they were ignorant of it. Marius felt a barrier in Cosette's purity,

and Cosette felt a support in the loyalty of Marius. The first kiss had

also been the last; since then Marius had never gone beyond touching

Cosette's hand or neck-handkerchief, or a curl with his lips. Cosette

was to him a perfume, and not a woman, and he inhaled her. She refused

nothing, and he asked for nothing; Cosette was happy and Marius

satisfied. They lived in that ravishing state which might be called

the dazzling of a soul by a soul; it was the ineffable first embrace

of two virginities in the ideal, two swans meeting on the Jungfrau. At

this hour of love, the hour when voluptuousness is absolutely silenced

by the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic Marius,

would have sooner been able to go home with a street-walker than raise

Cosette's gown as high as her ankle. Once in the moonlight Cosette

stooped to pick up something on the ground, and her dress opened and

displayed her neck. Marius turned his eyes away.

What passed between these two lovers? Nothing; they adored each other.

At night, when they were there, this garden seemed a living and sacred

spot. All the flowers opened around them and sent them their incense;

and they opened their souls and spread them over the flowers. The

wanton and vigorous vegetation quivered, full of sap and intoxication,

around these two innocents, and they uttered words of love at which the

trees shivered. What were these words? Breathings, nothing more; but

they were sufficient to trouble and affect all this nature. It is a

magic power which it would be difficult to understand, were we to read

in a book this conversation made to be carried away and dissipated like

smoke beneath the leaves by the wind. Take away from these whispers of

two lovers the melody which issues from the soul, and accompanies them

like a lyre, and what is left is only a shadow, and you say, "What! is

it only that?" Well, yes, child's-play, repetitions, laughs at nothing,

absurdities, foolishness,--all that is the most sublime and profound in

the world! the only things which are worth the trouble of being said

and being listened to. The man who has never heard, the man who has

never uttered these absurdities and poor things is an imbecile and a

wicked man. Said Cosette to Marius,--

"Do you know that my name is Euphrasie?"

"Euphrasie? No, it is Cosette."

"Oh, Cosette is an ugly name, which was given me when I was little; but

my real name is Euphrasie. Don't you like that name?"

"Yes; but Cosette is not ugly."

"Do you like it better than Euphrasie?"

"Well--yes."

"In that case, I like it better too. That is true, Cosette is pretty.

Call me Cosette."

Another time she looked at him intently, and exclaimed,--

"You are handsome, sir; you are good-looking; you have wit; you are not

at all stupid; you are much more learned than I; but I challenge you

with, 'I love you.'"

And Marius fancied that he heard a strophe sung by a star. Or else she

gave him a little tap when he coughed, and said,--

"Do not cough, sir; I do not allow anybody to cough in my house without

permission. It is very wrong to cough and frighten me. I wish you to be

in good health, because if you were not I should be very unhappy, and

what would you have me do?"

And this was simply divine.

Once Marius said to Cosette,--

"Just fancy; I supposed for a while that your name was Ursule."

This made them laugh the whole evening. In the middle of another

conversation he happened to exclaim,--

"Oh! one day at the Luxembourg I felt disposed to finish breaking an

invalid!"

But he stopped short, and did not complete the sentence, for he

would have been obliged to allude to Cosette's garter, and that was

impossible. There was a strange feeling connected with the flesh,

before which this immense innocent love recoiled with a sort of holy

terror. Marius imagined life with Cosette like this, without anything

else,--to come every evening to the Rue Plumet, remove the old

complacent bar of the president's railings, sit down elbow to elbow

on this bench, look through the trees at the scintillation of the

commencing night, bring the fold in his trouser-knee into cohabitation

with Cosette's ample skirts, to caress her thumb-nail, and to inhale

the same flower in turn forever and indefinitely. During this tune the

clouds passed over their heads; and each time the wind blows it carries

off more of a man's thoughts than of clouds from the sky. We cannot

affirm that this chaste, almost stern love was absolutely without

gallantly. "Paying compliments" to her whom we love is the first way

of giving caresses and an attempted semi-boldness. A compliment is

something like a kiss through a veil, and pleasure puts its sweet point

upon it, while concealing itself. In the presence of the delight the

heart recoils to love more. The cajoleries of Marius, all saturated

with chimera, were, so to speak, of an azure blue. The birds when they

fly in the direction of the angels must hear words of the same nature,

still, life, humanity, and the whole amount of positivism of which

Marius was capable were mingled with it It was what is said in the

grotto, as a prelude to what will be said in the alcove,--a lyrical

effusion, the strophe and the sonnet commingled, the gentle hyperboles

of cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a posy, and

exhaling a subtle and celestial perfume, an ineffable prattling of

heart to heart.

"Oh!" Marius muttered, "how lovely you are! I dare not look at you, and

that is the reason why I contemplate you. You are a grace, and I know

not what is the matter with me. The hem of your dress, where the end of

your slipper passes through, upsets me. And then, what an enchanting

light when your thoughts become visible, for your reason astonishes me,

and you appear to me for instants to be a dream. Speak, I am listening

to you, and admiring you. Oh, Cosette, how strange and charming it

is; I am really mad. You are adorable, and I study your feet in the

microscope and your soul with the telescope."

And Cosette made answer,--

"And I love you a little more through all the time which has passed

since this morning."

Questions and answers went on as they could in this dialogue, which

always agreed in the subject of love, like the elder-pith balls on the

nail. Cosette's entire person was simplicity, ingenuousness, whiteness,

candor, and radiance; and it might have been said of her that she was

transparent. She produced on every one who saw her a sensation of April

and daybreak, and she had dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation

of the light of dawn in a woman's form. It was quite simple that

Marius, as he adored, should admire. But the truth is, that this little

boarding-school Miss, just freshly turned out of a convent, talked with

exquisite penetration, and made at times all sorts of true and delicate

remarks. Her chattering was conversation; and she was never mistaken

about anything, and conversed correctly. Woman feels and speaks with

the infallibility which is the tender instinct of the heart. No one

knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.

Gentleness and depth, in those things the whole of woman is contained,

and it is heaven. And in this perfect felicity tears welled in their

eyes at every moment. A lady-bird crushed, a feather that fell from a

nest, a branch of hawthorn broken, moved their pity, and then ecstasy,

gently drowned by melancholy, seemed to ask for nothing better than

to weep. The most sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness which

becomes at times almost insupportable. And by the side of all this--for

contradictions are the lightning sport of love--they were fond of

laughing with a ravishing liberty, and so familiarly that, at times,

they almost seemed like two lads. Still, even without these two hearts

intoxicated with chastity being conscious of it, unforgettable nature

is ever there, ever there with its brutal and sublime object; and

whatever the innocence of souls may be, they feel in the most chaste

_tête-à-tête_ the mysterious and adorable distinction which separates a

couple of lovers from a pair of friends.

They idolized each other. The permanent and the immutable exist,--a

couple love, they laugh, they make little pouts with their lips,

they intertwine their fingers, and that does not prevent eternity.

Two lovers conceal themselves in a garden in the twilight, in the

invisible, with the birds and the roses; they fascinate each other in

the darkness with their souls which they place in their eyes; they

mutter, they whisper, and during this period immense constellations of

planets fill infinity.

CHAPTER II.

THE GIDDINESS OF PERFECT BLISS.

Cosette and Marius lived vaguely in the intoxication of their madness,

and they did not notice the cholera which was decimating Paris in that

very month. They had made as many confessions to each other as they

could; but they had not extended very far beyond their names. Marius

had told Cosette that he was an orphan, Pontmercy by name, a lawyer by

profession, and gaining a livelihood by writing things for publishers;

his father was a colonel, a hero, and he, Marius, had quarrelled with

his grandfather, who was very rich. He also incidentally remarked that

he was a baron; but this did not produce much effect on Cosette. Marius

a baron? She did not understand it, and did not know what the word

meant, and Marius was Marius to her. For her part, she confided to him

that she had been educated at the convent of the Little Picpus; that

her mother was dead, like his; that her father's name was Fauchelevent,

that he was very good and gave a great deal to the poor, but was

himself poor, and deprived himself of everything, while depriving her

of nothing. Strange to say, in the species of symphony which Marius

had lived in since he found Cosette again, the past, even the most

recent, had become so confused and distant to him that what Cosette

told him completely satisfied him. He did not even dream of talking to

her about the nocturnal adventure in the garret, the Thénardiers, the

burning, the strange attitude and singular flight of her father. Marius

momentarily forgot all this; he did not know at night what he had done

in the morning, where he had breakfasted, or who had spoken to him; he

had a song in his ears which rendered him deaf to every other thought,

and he only existed during the hours when he saw Cosette. As he was in

heaven at that time, it was perfectly simple that he should forget the

earth. Both of them bore languidly the undefinable weight of immaterial

joys; that is the way in which those somnambulists called lovers live.

Alas! who is there that has not experienced these things? Why does an

hour arrive when we emerge from this azure, and why does life go on

afterwards?

Love almost takes the place of thought. Love is, indeed, an ardent

forgetfulness. It is absurd to ask passion for logic; for there is

no more an absolute logical concatenation in the human heart than

there is a perfect geometric figure in the celestial mechanism. For

Cosette and Marius nothing more existed than Marius and Cosette; the

whole universe around them had fallen into a gulf, and they lived

in a golden moment, with nothing before them, nothing behind them.

Marius scarce remembered that Cosette had a father. It was blotted

from his brain by his bedazzlement. Of what did these lovers talk? As

we have seen, of flowers, swallows, the setting sun, the rising moon,

and all the important things. They had told themselves everything

except everything; for the everything of lovers is nothing. Of what

use would it be to talk of her father, the realities, that den, those

bandits, that adventure? And was it quite certain that the nightmare

had existed? They were two, they adored each other, and there was only

that, there was nothing else. It is probable that this unconsciousness

of death behind us is inherent to the arrival in Paradise. Have we seen

demons? Are there any? Have we trembled? Have we suffered? We no longer

know, and there is a roseate cloud over it all.

Hence these two beings lived in this way, very high up, and with all

the unverisimilitude which there is in nature; neither at the nadir

nor at the zenith, but between man and the seraphs, above the mud and

below the ether, in the clouds. They were not so much flesh and bone,

as soul and ecstasy from head to foot, already too sublimated to walk

on earth, and still too loaded with humanity to disappear in ether,

and held in suspense like atoms which are waiting to be precipitated;

apparently beyond the pale of destiny, and ignorant of that rut,

yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow; amazed, transported, and floating at

moments with a lightness sufficient for a flight in the infinitude, and

almost ready for the eternal departure. They slept awake in this sweet

lulling; oh, splendid lethargy of the real over-powered by the ideal!

At times Cosette was so beautiful that Marius closed his eyes before

her. They best way of gazing at the soul is with closed eyes. Marius

and Cosette did not ask themselves to what this would lead them, and

looked at each other as if they had already arrived. It is a strange

claim on the part of men to wish that love should lead them somewhere.

CHAPTER III.

THE BEGINNING OF THE SHADOW.

Jean Valjean suspected nothing; for Cosette, not quite such a dreamer

as Marius, was gay, and that sufficed to render Jean Valjean happy.

Cosette's thoughts, her tender preoccupations, and the image of Marius

which filled her soul, removed none of the incomparable purity of her

splendid, chaste, and smiling forehead. She was at the age when the

virgin wears her love as the angel wears its lily. Jean Valjean was,

therefore, happy; and, besides, when two lovers understand each other,

things always go well, and any third party who might trouble their

love is kept in a perfect state of blindness by a small number of

precautions, which are always the same with all lovers. Hence Cosette

never made any objections; if he wished to take a walk, "Very good, my

little papa," and if he stayed at home, very good, and if he wished to

spend the evening with Cosette, she was enchanted. As he always retired

at ten o'clock at night, on those occasions Marius did not reach the

garden till after that hour, when he heard from the street Cosette

opening the door. We need hardly say that Marius was never visible by

day, and Jean Valjean did not even remember that Marius existed. One

morning, however, he happened to say to Cosette, "Why, the back of your

dress is all white!" On the previous evening Marius in a transport had

pressed Cosette against the wall. Old Toussaint, who went to bed at an

early hour, only thought of sleeping so soon as her work was finished,

and was ignorant of everything, like Jean Valjean.

Marius never set foot in the house when he was with Cosette; they

concealed themselves in a niche near the steps so as not to be seen

or heard from the street, and sat there, often contenting themselves

with the sole conversation of pressing hands twenty times a minute, and

gazing at the branches of the trees. At such moments, had a thunderbolt

fallen within thirty feet of them, they would not have noticed it, so

profoundly was the revery of the one absorbed and plunged in the revery

of the other. It was a limpid purity, and the houses were all white,

and nearly all alike. This species of love is a collection of lily

leaves and dove's feathers. The whole garden was between them and the

street, and each time that Marius came in and out he carefully restored

the bar of the railings, so that no disarrangement was visible. He went

away generally at midnight, and went back to Courfeyrac's lodgings.

Courfeyrac said to Bahorel,--

"Can you believe it? Marius returns home at present at one in the

morning."

Bahorel answered,--

"What would you have? There is always a bombshell inside a seminarist."

At times Courfeyrac crossed his arms, assumed a stern air, and said to

Marius,--

"Young man, you are becoming irregular in your habits."

Courfeyrac, who was a practical man, was not pleased with this

reflection of an invisible Paradise cast on Marius; he was but little

accustomed to unpublished passions, hence he grew impatient, and at

times summoned Marius to return to reality. One morning he cast this

admonition to him,--

"My dear fellow, you produce on me the effect at present of being

a denizen of the moon, in the kingdom of dreams, the province of

illusion, whose chief city is soap-bubble. Come, don't play the

prude,--what is her name?"

But nothing could make Marius speak, and his nails could have been

dragged from him more easily than one of the three sacred syllables of

which the ineffable name _Cosette_ was composed. True love is luminous

as the dawn, and silent as the tomb. Still Courfeyrac found this change

in Marius, that he had a beaming taciturnity. During the sweet month

of May, Marius and Cosette knew this immense happiness,--to quarrel

and become reconciled, to talk for a long time, and with the most

minute details, about people who did not interest them the least in the

world,--a further proof that in that ravishing opera which is called

love, the libretto is nothing. For Marius it was heaven to listen to

Cosette talking of dress; for Cosette to listen to Marius talking

politics, to listen, knee against knee, to the vehicles passing along

the Rue de Babylone, to look at the same planet in space, or the same

worm glistening in the grass, to be silent together, a greater pleasure

still than talking, etc.

Still various complications were approaching. One evening Marius was

going to the rendezvous along the Boulevard des Invalides; he was

walking as usual with his head down, and as he was turning the corner

of the Rue Plumet, he heard some one say close to him,--

"Good-evening, Monsieur Marius."

He raised his head and recognized Éponine. This produced a singular

effect; he had not once thought of this girl since the day when she led

him to the Rue Plumet; he had not seen her again, and she had entirely

left his mind. He had only motives to be grateful to her, he owed her

his present happiness, and yet it annoyed him to meet her. It is an

error to believe that passion, when it is happy and pure, leads a man

to a state of perfection; it leads him simply, as we have shown, to a

state of forgetfulness. In this situation, man forgets to be wicked,

but he also forgets to be good, and gratitude, duty, and essential and

material recollections, fade away. At any other time Marius would have

been very different to Éponine, but, absorbed by Cosette, he had not

very clearly comprehended that this Éponine was Éponine Thénardier, and

that she bore a name written in his father's will,--that name to which

he would have so ardently devoted himself a few months previously. We

show Marius as he was, and his father himself slightly disappeared in

his mind beneath the splendor of his love. Hence he replied with some

embarrassment,--

"Ah, is it you, Éponine?"

"Why do you treat me so coldly? Have I done you any injury?"

"No," he answered.

Certainly he had nothing against her; far from it. Still he felt that

he could not but say "you" to Éponine, now that he said "thou" to

Cosette. As he remained silent, she exclaimed,--

"Tell me--"

Then she stopped, and it seemed as if words failed this creature, who

was formerly so impudent and bold. She tried to smile and could not, so

continued,--

"Well?"

Then she was silent again, and looked down on the ground.

"Good-night, Monsieur Marius," she suddenly said, and went away.

CHAPTER IV.

CAB RUNS IN ENGLISH AND BARKS IN SLANG.

The next day--it was June 3, 1832, a date to which we draw attention

owing to the grave events which were at that moment hanging over the

horizon of Paris in the state of lightning-charged clouds--Marius at

nightfall was following the same road as on the previous evening, with

the same ravishing thoughts in his heart, when he saw between the

boulevard trees Éponine coming toward him. Two days running,--that was

too much; so he sharply turned back, changed his course, and went to

the Rue Plumet by the Rue Monsieur. This caused Éponine to follow him

as far as the Rue Plumet, a thing she had never done before; hitherto,

she had contented herself with watching him as he passed along the

boulevard, without attempting to meet him: last evening was the first

time that she ventured to address him. Éponine followed him, then,

without his suspecting it: she saw him move the railing-bar aside and

step into the garden.

"Hilloh!" she said, "he enters the house."

She went up to the railing, felt the bars in turn, and easily

distinguished the one which Marius had removed; and she muttered in a

low voice, and with a lugubrious accent,--"None of that, Lisette!"

She sat down on the stone-work of the railing, close to the bar, as if

she were guarding it. It was exactly at the spot where the railings

joined the next wall, and there was there a dark corner, in which

Éponine entirely disappeared. She remained thus for more than an hour

without stirring or breathing, absorbed in thought. About ten o'clock

at night, one of the two or three passers along the Rue Plumet, an old

belated citizen, who was hurrying along the deserted and ill-famed

street, while passing the railing, heard a dull menacing voice saying,--

"I am not surprised now that he comes every evening."

The passer-by looked around him, saw nobody, did not dare to peer into

this dark corner, and felt horribly alarmed. He redoubled his speed,

and was quite right in doing so, for in a few minutes six men, who were

walking separately, and at some distance from each other, under the

walls, and who might have been taken for a drunken patrol, entered the

Rue Plumet: the first who reached the railings stopped and waited for

the rest, and a second after, all six were together, and began talking

in whispered slang.

"It's here," said one of them.

"Is there a cab [dog] in the garden?" another asked.

"I don't know. In any case I have brought a bullet which we will make

it eat."

"Have you got some mastic to break a pane?"

"Yes."

"The railings are old," remarked the fifth man, who seemed to have the

voice of a ventriloquist.

"All the better," said the second speaker; "it will make no noise when

sawn, and won't be so hard to cut through."

The sixth, who had not yet opened his mouth, began examining the

railings as Éponine had done an hour ago, and thus reached the bar

which Marius had unfastened. Just as he was about to seize this bar,

a hand suddenly emerging from the darkness clutched his arm; he felt

himself roughly thrust back, and a hoarse voice whispered to him,

"There's a cab." At the same time he saw a pale girl standing in front

of him. The man had that emotion which is always produced by things

unexpected; his hair stood hideously on end. Nothing is more formidable

to look at than startled wild beasts. Their affrighted look is hideous.

He fell back and stammered,--

"Who is this she-devil?"

"Your daughter."

It was, in truth, Éponine speaking to Thénardier. Upon her apparition,

the other five men, that is to say, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet,

Montparnasse, and Brujon, approached noiselessly, without hurry or

saying a word, but with the sinister slowness peculiar to these men of

the night. Some hideous tools could be distinguished in their hands,

and Gueulemer held a pair of those short pincers which burglars call

_fauchons_ (small scythes).

"Well, what are you doing here? What do you want? Are you mad?"

Thénardier exclaimed, as far as is possible to exclaim in a whisper.

"Have you come to prevent us from working?"

Éponine burst into a laugh and leaped on his neck. "I am here, my

little papa, because I am here; are not people allowed to sit down on

the stones at present? It is you who oughtn't to be here; and what have

you come to do, since it is a biscuit? I told Magnon so, and there is

nothing to be done here. But embrace me, my good little papa, it is

such a time since I saw you. You are out, then?"

Thénardier tried to free himself from Éponine's arms, and growled,--

"There, there, you have embraced me. Yes, I am out, and not in. Now be

off."

But Éponine did not loose her hold, and redoubled her caresses.

"My dear papa, how ever did you manage? You must have been very clever

to get out of that scrape, so tell me all about it. And where is mamma?

Give me some news of her."

Thénardier answered,--

"She's all right. I don't know; leave me and be off, I tell you."

"I do not exactly want to go off," Éponine said with the pout of a

spoiled child; "you send me away, though I haven't seen you now for

four months, and I have scarce had time to embrace you."

And she caught her father again round the neck.

"Oh, come, this is a bore," said Babet.

"Make haste," said Gueulemer, "the police may pass."

The ventriloquial voice hummed,--

"Nous n'sommes pas le jour de l'an,

A bécoter papa, maman."

Éponine turned to the five bandits:--

"Why, that's Monsieur Brujon. Good-evening, Monsieur Babet;

good-evening, Monsieur Claquesous. What, don't you know me, Monsieur

Gueulemer? How are you, Montparnasse?"

"Yes, they know you," said Thénardier; "but now good-night, and be off;

leave us alone."

"It is the hour of the foxes, and not of the chickens," said

Montparnasse.

"Don't you see that we have work here?" Babet added.

Éponine took Montparnasse by the hand. "Mind," he said, "you will cut

yourself, for I have an open knife."

"My dear Montparnasse," Éponine replied very gently, "confidence

ought to be placed in people, and I am my father's daughter, perhaps.

Monsieur Babet, Monsieur Gueulemer, I was ordered to examine into this

affair."

It is remarkable that Éponine did not speak slang; ever since she had

known Marius that frightful language had become impossible to her. She

pressed Gueulemer's great coarse fingers in her little bony hand, which

was as weak as that of a skeleton, and continued,--"You know very well

that I am no fool, and people generally believe me. I have done you a

service now and then; well, I have made inquiries, and you would run a

needless risk. I swear to you that there is nothing to be done in this

house."

"There are lone women," said Gueulemer.

"No, they have moved away."

"Well, the candles haven't," Babet remarked; and he pointed over the

trees to a light which was moving about the garret. It was Toussaint,

who was up so late in order to hang up some linen to dry. Éponine made

a final effort.

"Well," she said, "they are very poor people, and there isn't a penny

piece in the house."

"Go to the devil," cried Thénardier; "when we have turned the house

topsy-turvy, and placed the cellar at top and the attics at the bottom,

we will tell you what there is inside, and whether they are _balles,

ronds, or broques_ [francs, sous, or liards]."

And he thrust her away that he might pass.

"My kind M. Montparnasse," Éponine said, "I ask you, who are a good

fellow, not to go in."

"Take care, you'll cut yourself," Montparnasse replied.

Thénardier remarked, with that decisive accent of his,--

"Decamp, fairy, and leave men to do their business."

Éponine let go Montparnasse's hand, which she had seized again, and

said,--

"So you intend to enter this house?"

"A little," the ventriloquist said with a grin.

She leaned against the railings, faced these six men armed to the

teeth, to whom night gave demoniac faces, and said in a firm, low

voice,--

"Well, I will not let you!"

They stopped in stupefaction, but the ventriloquist completed his

laugh. She continued,--

"Friends, listen to me, for it's now my turn to speak. If you enter

this garden or touch this railing I will scream, knock at doors, wake

people; I will have you all six seized, and call the police."

"She is capable of doing it," Thénardier whispered to the ventriloquist

and Brujon.

She shook her head, and added,--

"Beginning with my father."

Thénardier approached her.

"Not so close, my good man," she said.

He fell back, growling between his teeth, "Why, what is the matter?"

and added, "chienne."

She burst into a terrible laugh.

"As you please, but you shall not enter; but I am not the daughter of

a dog, since I am the whelp of a wolf. You are six, but what do I care

for that? You are men and I am a woman. You won't frighten me, I can

tell you, and you shall not enter this house because it does not please

me. If you come nearer I bark; I told you there was a dog, and I am it.

I do not care a farthing for you, so go your way, for you annoy me! Go

where you like, but don't come here, for I oppose it. Come on, then,

you with your stabs and I with my feet."

She advanced a step toward the bandits and said, with the same

frightful laugh,--

"Confound it! I'm not frightened. This summer I shall be hungry, and

this winter I shall be cold. What asses these men must be to think they

can frighten a girl! Afraid of what? You have got dolls of mistresses

who crawl under the bed when you talk big, but I am afraid of nothing!"

She fixed her eye on Thénardier, and said,--"Not even of you, father."

Then she continued, as she turned her spectral, bloodshot eyeballs on

each of the bandits in turn,--

"What do I care whether I am picked up to-morrow on the pavement of the

Rue Plumet stabbed by my father, or am found within a year in the nets

of St. Cloud, or on Swan's Island, among old rotting corks and drowned

dogs?"

She was compelled to break off, for she was attacked by a dry cough,

and her breath came from her weak, narrow chest like the death-rattle.

She continued,--

"I have only to cry out and people will come, patatras. You are six,

but I am the whole world."

Thénardier moved a step toward her.

"Don't come near me," she cried.

He stopped, and said gently,--

"Well, no; I will not approach you; but do not talk so loud. Do you

wish to prevent us from working, my daughter? And yet we must earn a

livelihood. Do you no longer feel any affection for your father?"

"You bore me," said Éponine.

"Still we must live; we must eat--"

"Burst!"

This said, she sat down on the coping of the railings and sang,--

"Mon bras si dodu,

Ma jambe bien faite,

Et le temps perdu."

She had her elbow on her knee, and her chin in her hand, and balanced

her foot with a careless air. Her ragged gown displayed her thin

shoulder-blades, and the neighboring lamp lit up her profile and

attitude. Nothing more resolute or more surprising could well be

imagined. The six burglars, amazed and savage at being held in check

by a girl, went under the shadow of the lamp and held council, with

humiliated and furious shrugs of their shoulders. She, however, looked

at them with a peaceful and stern air.

"There's something the matter with her," said Babet; "some reason for

it. Is she fond of the cab? It's a pity to miss the affair. There are

two women who live alone, an old cove who lives in a yard, and very

decent curtains up to the windows. The old swell must be a sheney, and

I consider the affair a good one."

"Well, do you fellows go in," Montparnasse exclaimed, "and do the

trick. I will remain here with the girl, and if she stirs--"

He let the knife which he held in his hand glisten in the lamp-light.

Thénardier did not say a word, and seemed ready for anything they

pleased. Brujon, who was a bit of an oracle, and who, as we know, "put

up the job," had not yet spoken, and seemed thoughtful. He was supposed

to recoil at nothing, and it was notorious that he had plundered a

police office through sheer bravado. Moreover, he wrote verses and

songs, which gave him a great authority. Babet questioned him.

"Have you nothing to say, Brujon?"

Brujon remained silent for a moment, then tossed his head in several

different ways, and at length decided on speaking,--

"Look here. I saw this morning two sparrows fighting, and to-night I

stumble over a quarrelsome woman: all that is bad, so let us be off."

They went away, and while doing so Montparnasse muttered,--

"No matter; if you had been agreeable I would have cut her throat."

Babet replied,--

"I wouldn't; for I never strike a lady."

At the corner of the street they stopped, and exchanged in a low voice

this enigmatical dialogue.

"Where shall we go and sleep to-night?"

"Under Pantin [Paris]."

"Have you your key about you, Thénardier?"

"Of course."

Éponine, who did not take her eyes off them, saw them return by the

road along which they had come. She rose and crawled after them, along

the walls and the houses. She followed them thus along the boulevard;

there they separated, and she saw the six men bury themselves in the

darkness, where they seemed to fade away.

CHAPTER V.

THINGS OF THE NIGHT.

After the departure of the bandits the Rue Plumet resumed its calm,

nocturnal aspect. What had just taken place in this street would not

have astonished a forest, for the thickets, the coppices, the heather,

the interlaced branches, and the tall grass, exist in a sombre way;

the savage crowd catches glimpses there of the sudden apparitions

of the invisible world; what there is below man distinguishes there

through the mist what is beyond man, and things unknown to us living

beings confront each other there in the night. Bristling and savage

nature is startled by certain approaches, in which it seems to feel the

supernatural; the forces of the shadow know each other and maintain

a mysterious equilibrium between themselves. Teeth and claws fear

that which is unseizable, and blood-drinking bestiality, voracious,

starving appetites in search of prey, the instincts armed with nails

and jaws, which have for their source and object the stomach, look

at and sniff anxiously the impassive spectral lineaments prowling

about in a winding-sheet or standing erect in this vaguely-rustling

robe, and which seems to them to live a dead and terrible life. These

brutalities, which are only matter, have a confused fear at having

to deal with the immense condensed obscurity in an unknown being. A

black figure barring the passage stops the wild beast short; what comes

from the cemetery intimidates and disconcerts what comes from the den;

ferocious things are afraid of sinister things, and wolves recoil on

coming across a ghoul.

CHAPTER VI.

MARIUS ACTUALLY GIVES COSETTE HIS ADDRESS.

While this sort of human-faced dog was mounting guard against the

railing, and six bandits fled before a girl, Marius was by Cosette's

side. The sky had never been more star-spangled and more charming, the

trees more rustling, or the smell of the grass more penetrating; never

had the birds fallen asleep beneath the frondage with a softer noise;

never had the universal harmonies of serenity responded better to the

internal music of the soul; never had Marius been more enamoured,

happier, or in greater ecstasy. But he had found Cosette sad, she had

been crying, and her eyes were red. It was the first cloud in this

admirable dream. Marius's first remark was,--

"What is the matter with you?"

And she replied,--

"I will tell you."

Then she sat down on the bench near the house, and while he took his

seat, all trembling, by her side, she continued,--

"My father told me this morning to hold myself in readiness, for he had

business to attend to, and we were probably going away."

Marius shuddered from head to foot. When we reach the end of

life, death signifies a departure, but at the beginning, departure

means death. For six weeks past Marius had slowly and gradually

taken possession of Cosette; it was a perfectly ideal but profound

possession. As we have explained, in first love men take the soul

long before the body; at a later date they take the body before the

soul, and at times they do not take the soul at all,--the Faublas

and Prudhommes add, because there is no such thing, but the sarcasm

is fortunately a blasphemy. Marius, then, possessed Cosette in the

way that minds possess; but he enveloped her with his entire soul,

and jealously seized her with an incredible conviction. He possessed

her touch, her breath, her perfume, the deep flash of her blue eyes,

the softness of her skin when he touched her hand, the charming mark

which she had on her neck, and all her thoughts. They had agreed

never to sleep without dreaming of each other, and had kept their

word. He, therefore, possessed all Cosette's dreams. He looked at her

incessantly, and sometimes breathed on the short hairs which she had

on the back of her neck, and said to himself that there was not one of

those hairs which did not belong to him. He contemplated and adored the

things she wore, her bows,--her cuffs, her gloves, and slippers,--like

sacred objects of which he was the master. He thought that he was the

lord of the small tortoise-shell combs which she had in her hair; and

he said to himself, in the confused stammering of delight that came on,

that there was not a seam of her dress, not a mesh of her stockings,

not a wrinkle in her bodice, which was not his. By the side of Cosette

felt close to his property, near his creature, who was at once his

despot and his slave. It seemed that they had so blended their souls

that if they had wished to take them back it would have been impossible

for them to recognize them. This is mine--no, it is mine--I assure you

that you are mistaken. This is really I--what you take for yourself

is myself; Marius was something which formed part of Cosette, and

Cosette was something that formed part of Marius. Marius felt Cosette

live in him; to have Cosette, to possess Cosette, was to him not very

different from breathing. It was in the midst of this faith, this

intoxication, this virgin, extraordinary, and absolute possession, and

this sovereignty, that the words "We are going away" suddenly fell on

him, and the stern voice of reality shouted to him, "Cosette is not

thine." Marius awoke. For six weeks, as we said, he had been living out

of life, and the word "depart" made him roughly re-enter it. He could

not find a word to say, and Cosette merely noticed that his hand was

very cold. She said to him in her turn,--

"What is the matter with you?"

He answered, in so low a voice that Cosette could scarce hear him,--

"I do not understand what you said."

She continued,--

"This morning my father told me to prepare my clothes and hold myself

ready; that he would give me his linen to put in a portmanteau; that he

was obliged to make a journey; that we were going away; that we must

have a large trunk for myself and a small one for him; to get all this

ready within a week, and that we should probably go to England."

"Why, it is monstrous!" Marius exclaimed.

It is certain that at this moment, in Marius's mind, no abuse of power,

no violence, no abomination of the most prodigious tyrants, no deed of

Busiris, Tiberius, or Henry VIII., equalled in ferocity this one,--M.

Fauchelevent taking his daughter to England because he had business to

attend to. He asked, in a faint voice,--

"And when will you start?"

"He did not say when."

"And when will you return?"

"He did not tell me."

And Marius rose and said coldly,--

"Will you go, Cosette?"

Cosette turned to him, her beautiful eyes full of agony, and answered,

with a species of wildness,--

"Where?"

"To England; will you go?"

"What can I do?" she said, clasping her hands.

"Then you will go?"

"If my father goes."

"So you are determined to go?"

Cosette seized Marius's hand and pressed it as sole reply.

"Very well," said Marius; "in that case I shall go elsewhere."

Cosette felt the meaning of this remark even more than she comprehended

it; she turned so pale that her face became white in the darkness, and

stammered,--

"What do you mean?"

Marius looked at her, then slowly raised his eyes to heaven, and

replied,--

"Nothing."

When he looked down again he saw Cosette smiling at him; the smile of

the woman whom we love has a brilliancy which is visible at night.

"How foolish we are! Marius, I have an idea."

"What is it?"

"Follow us if we go away! I will tell you whither, and you can join me

where I am."

Marius was now a thoroughly wide-awake man, and had fallen back into

reality; hence he cried to Cosette,--

"Go with you! Are you mad? Why, it would require money, and I have

none! Go to England! Why, I already owe more than ten louis to

Courfeyrac, one of my friends, whom you do not know! I have an old hat,

which is not worth three francs, a coat with buttons missing in front,

my shirt is all torn, my boots let in water, I am out at elbows, but I

have not thought of it for six weeks, and did not tell you. Cosette, I

am a wretch; you only see me at night and give me your love: were you

to see me by day you would give me a sou. Go to England! Why, I have

not enough to pay for the passport!"

He threw himself against a tree, with his arms over his head and his

forehead pressed to the bark, neither feeling the wood that grazed his

skin nor the fever which spotted his temples, motionless and ready to

fall, like the statue of despair. He remained for a long time in this

state--people would remain for an eternity in such abysses. At length

he turned and heard behind a little stifled, soft, and sad sound; it

was Cosette sobbing; she had been crying for more than two hours by

the side of Marius, who was reflecting. He went up to her, fell on his

knees, seized her foot, which peeped out from under her skirt, and

kissed it. She let him do so in silence, for there are moments when a

woman accepts, like a sombre and resigned duty, the worship of love.

"Do not weep," he said.

She continued,--

"But I am perhaps going away, and you are not able to come with me."

He said, "Do you love me?"

She replied by sobbing that Paradisaic word, which is never more

charming than through tears, "I adore you."

He pursued, with an accent which was an inexpressible caress,--

"Do not weep. Will you do so much for me as to check your tears?"

"Do you love me?" she said.

He took her hand.

"Cosette, I have never pledged my word of honor to any one, because it

frightens me, and I feel that my father is by the side of it. Well, I

pledge you my most sacred word of honor that if you go away I shall

die."

There was in the accent with which he uttered these words such a solemn

and calm melancholy that Cosette trembled, and she felt that chill

which is produced by the passing of a sombre and true thing. In her

terror she ceased to weep.

"Now listen to me," he said; "do not expect me to-morrow."

"Why not?"

"Do not expect me till the day after."

"Oh, why?"

"You will see."

"A day without your coming!--oh, it is impossible!"

"Let us sacrifice a day, to have, perhaps, one whole life."

And Marius added in a low voice and aside,--"He is a man who makes no

change in his habits, and he never received anybody before the evening."

"What man are you talking about?" Cosette asked.

"I? I did not say anything."

"What do you hope for, then?"

"Wait till the day after to-morrow."

"Do you desire it?"

"Yes, Cosette."

He took her head between his two hands, as she stood on tiptoe to reach

him and tried to see his hopes in his eyes. Marius added,--

"By the bye, you must know my address, for something might happen; I

live with my friend Courfeyrac, at No. 16, Rue de la Verrerie."

He felt in his pockets, took out a knife, and scratched the address on

the plaster of the wall. In the mean while Cosette had begun looking

in his eyes again.

"Tell me your thought, Marius, for you have one. Tell it to me. Oh,

tell it to me, so that I may pass a good night!"

"My thought is this: it is impossible that God can wish to separate us.

Expect me the day after to-morrow."

"What shall I do till then?" Cosette said. "You are in the world, and

come and go; how happy men are! but I shall remain all alone. Oh, I

shall be so sad! What will you do to-morrow night, tell me?"

"I shall try something."

"In that case I shall pray to Heaven, and think of you, so that you may

succeed. I will not question you any more, as you do not wish it, and

you are my master. I will spend my evening in singing the song from

'Euryanthe,' of which you are so fond, and which you heard one night

under my shutters. But you will come early the next evening, and I

shall expect you at nine o'clock exactly. I warn you. Oh, good Heaven!

how sad it is that the days are so long! You hear; I shall be in the

garden as it is striking nine."

"And I too."

And without saying a word, moved by the same thought, carried away

by those electric currents which place two lovers in continual

communication, both intoxicated with voluptuousness, even in their

grief, fell into each other's arms without noticing that their lips

were joined together, while their upraised eyes, overflowing with

ecstasy and full of tears, contemplated the stars. When Marius left,

the street was deserted, for it was the moment when Éponine followed

the bandits into the boulevard. While Marius dreamed with his head

leaning against a tree an idea had crossed his mind,--an idea, alas!

which himself considered mad and impossible. He had formed a violent

resolution.

CHAPTER VII.

AN OLD HEART AND A YOUNG HEART FACE TO FACE.

Father Gillenormand at this period had just passed his ninety-first

birthday, and still lived with his daughter at No. 6, Rue des

Filles-de-Calvaire, in the old house which was his own property. He

was, it will be remembered, one of those antique old men whose age

falls on without bending them, and whom even sorrow cannot bow. Still,

for some time past his daughter had said, "My father is breaking." He

no longer slapped the servants, or rapped so violently with his cane

the staircase railing where Basque kept him waiting. The Revolution

of July had not exasperated him for more than six months, and he had

seen almost with tranquillity in the _Moniteur_ this association of

words, M. Humblot-Conté, Peer of France. The truth is, that the old

man was filled with grief; he did not bend, he did not surrender, for

that was not possible either with his moral or physical nature; but

he felt himself failing inwardly. For four years he had been awaiting

Marius with a firm foot,--that is really the expression,--with the

conviction that the wicked young scape-grace would ring his bell some

day; and now he had begun to say to himself, when depressed, that

Marius might remain away a little too long. It was not death that was

insupportable to him, but the idea that perhaps he might not see Marius

again. This idea had never occurred to him till one day, and at present

it rose before him constantly, and chilled him to death. Absence, as

ever happens in natural and true feelings, had only heightened the

grandfather's love for the ungrateful boy who had gone away like that.

It is on December nights, when the thermometer is almost down at zero,

that people think most of the sun. M. Gillenormand was, or fancied

himself, utterly incapable of taking a step toward his grandson; "I

would rot first," he said to himself. He did not think himself at all

in the wrong, but he only thought of Marius with profound tenderness,

and the dumb despair of an old man who is going down into the valley

of the shadows. He was beginning to lose his teeth, which added to his

sorrow. M. Gillenormand, without confessing it to himself, however,

for he would have been furious and ashamed of it, had never loved a

mistress as he loved Marius. He had hung up in his room, as the first

thing he might see on awaking, an old portrait of his other daughter,

the one who was dead, Madame de Pontmercy, taken when she was eighteen.

He incessantly regarded this portrait, and happened to say one day,

while gazing at it,--

"I can notice a likeness."

"To my sister?" Mlle. Gillenormand remarked; "oh, certainly."

The old man added, "And to him too."

When he was once sitting, with his knees against each other, and his

eyes almost closed in a melancholy posture, his daughter ventured to

say to him,--

"Father, are you still so furious against--" She stopped, not daring to

go further.

"Against whom?" he asked.

"That poor Marius."

He raised his old head, laid his thin wrinkled fist on the table, and

cried, in his loudest and most irritated accent,--

"Poor Marius, you say! That gentleman is a scoundrel, a scamp, a little

vain ingrate, without heart or soul, a proud and wicked man!"

And he turned away, so that his daughter might not see a tear which he

had in his eyes. Three days later he interrupted a silence which had

lasted four hours to say to his daughter gruffly,--

"I had had the honor of begging Mademoiselle Gillenormand never to

mention his name to me."

Aunt Gillenormand gave up all attempts, and formed this profound

diagnostic: "My father was never very fond of my sister after her

folly. It is clear that he detests Marius." "After her folly" meant,

"since she married the Colonel." Still, as may be conjectured,

Mademoiselle Gillenormand failed in her attempt to substitute her

favorite, the officer of lancers, in Marius's place. Théodule had

met with no success, and M. Gillenormand refused to accept the

_qui pro quo;_ for the vacuum in the heart cannot be stopped by a

bung. Théodule, on his side, while sniffing the inheritance, felt a

repugnance to the labor of pleasing, and the old gentleman annoyed

the lancer, while the lancer offended the old gentleman. Lieutenant

Théodule was certainly gay but gossiping, frivolous but vulgar, a good

liver but bad company; he had mistresses, it is true, and he talked

a good deal about them, it is also true, but then he talked badly.

All his qualities had a defect, and M. Gillenormand was worn out

with listening to the account of the few amours he had had round his

barracks in the Rue de Babylone. And then Lieutenant Théodule called

sometimes in uniform with the tricolor cockade, which rendered him

simply impossible. M. Gillenormand eventually said to his daughter, "I

have had enough of Théodule, for I care but little for a warrior in

peace times. You can receive him if you like, but for my part I do not

know whether I do not prefer the sabrers to the trailing of sabres,

and the clash of blades in a battle is less wretched, after all, than

the noise of scabbards on the pavement. And then, to throw up one's

head like a king of clubs, and to lace one's self like a woman, to wear

stays under a cuirass, is doubly ridiculous. When a man is a real man

he keeps himself at an equal distance from braggadocio and foppishness.

So keep your Théodule for yourself." Though his daughter said to him,

"After all, he is your grand-nephew," it happened that M. Gillenormand,

who was grandfather to the end of his nails, was not a grand-uncle

at all; the fact is, that as he was a man of sense and comparison,

Théodule only served to make him regret Marius the more.

One evening, it was the 4th of June, which did not prevent Father

Gillenormand from having an excellent fire in his chimney, he had

dismissed his daughter, who was sewing in the adjoining room. He was

alone in his apartment with the pastoral hangings, with his feet on the

andirons, half enveloped in his nine-leaved Coromandel screen, sitting

at a table on which two candles burned under a green shade, swallowed

up in his needle-worked easy-chair, and holding a book in his hand,

which he was not reading. He was dressed, according to his mode, as

an "Incroyable," and resembled an old portrait of Garat. This would

have caused him to be followed in the streets; but whenever he went

out, his daughter wrapped him up in a sort of episcopal wadded coat,

which hid his clothing. At home he never wore a dressing-gown, save

when he got up and went to bed. "It gives an old look," he was wont to

say. Father Gillenormand was thinking of Marius bitterly and lovingly,

and, as usual, bitterness gained the upper hand. His savage tenderness

always ended by boiling over and turning into indignation, and he was

at the stage when a man seeks to make up his mind and accept that

which lacerates. He was explaining to himself that there was no longer

any reason for Marius's return, that if he had meant to come home he

would have done so long before, and all idea of it must be given up.

He tried to form the idea that it was all over, and that he should die

without seeing that "gentleman" again. But his whole nature revolted,

and his old paternity could not consent. "What," he said, and it was

his mournful burden, "he will not come back!" and his old bald fell on

his chest, and he vaguely fixed a lamentable and irritated glance upon

the ashes on his hearth. In the depth of this reverie his old servant

Basque came in and asked,--

"Can you receive M. Marius, sir?"

The old man sat up, livid, and like a corpse which is roused by a

galvanic shock. All his blood flowed to his heart, and he stammered,--

"M. Marius! Who?"

"I do not know," Basque replied, intimidated and disconcerted by his

master's air, "for I did not see him. It was Nicolette who said to me

just now, 'There is a young man here; say it is M. Marius.'"

Father Gillenormand stammered in a low voice, "Show him in."

And he remained in the same attitude, with hanging head and eye fixed

on the door. It opened, and a young man appeared; it was Marius,

who stopped in the doorway as if waiting to be asked in. His almost

wretched clothes could not be seen in the obscurity produced by the

shade, and only his calm, grave, but strangely sorrowful face could be

distinguished. Father Gillenormand, as if stunned by stupor and joy,

remained for a few minutes seeing nothing but a brilliancy, as when an

apparition rises before us. He was ready to faint, and perceived Marius

through a mist. It was really he, it was really Marius! At length,

after four years! He took him in entirely, so to speak, at a glance,

and found him handsome, noble, distinguished, grown, a thorough man,

with a proper attitude and a charming air. He felt inclined to open his

arms and call the boy to him, his bowels were swelled with ravishment,

affectionate words welled up and overflowed his bosom. At length all

this tenderness burst forth and reached his lips, and through the

contrast which formed the basis of his character a harshness issued

from it. He said roughly,--

"What do you want here?"

Marius replied with an embarrassed air,--

"Sir--"

Monsieur Gillenormand would have liked for Marius to throw himself into

his arms, and he was dissatisfied both with Marius and himself. He felt

that he was rough and Marius cold, and it was an insupportable and

irritating anxiety to the old gentleman to feel himself so tender and

imploring within, and unable to be otherwise than harsh externally. His

bitterness returned, and he abruptly interrupted Marius.

"In that case, why do you come?"

The "in that case" meant "if you have not come to embrace me," Marius

gazed at his ancestor's marble face.

"Sir--"

The old gentleman resumed in a stern voice,--

"Have you come to ask my pardon? Have you recognized your error?"

He believed that he was putting Marius on the right track, and that

"the boy" was going to give way. Marius trembled, for it was a

disavowal of his father that was asked of him, and he lowered his eyes

and replied, "No, sir."

"Well, in that case," the old man exclaimed impetuously, and with a

sharp sorrow full of anger, "what is it you want of me?"

Marius clasped his hands, advanced a step, and said, in a weak,

trembling voice,--

"Take pity on me, sir."

This word moved M. Gillenormand; had it come sooner it would have

softened him, but it came too late. The old gentleman rose, and rested

both hands on his cane; his lips were white, his forehead shook, but

his lofty stature towered over the stooping Marius.

"Pity on you, sir! The young man asks pity of an old man of ninety-one!

You are entering life, and I am leaving it; you go to the play, to

balls, to the coffee-house, the billiard-table; you are witty, you

please women, you are a pretty fellow, while I spit on my logs in the

middle of summer; you are rich with the only wealth there is, while I

have all the poverty of old age, infirmity, and isolation. You have

your two-and-thirty teeth, a good stomach, a quick eye, strength,

appetite, health, gayety, a forest of black hair, while I have not

even my white hair left. I have lost my teeth, I am losing my legs,

I am losing my memory, for there are three names of streets which I

incessantly confound,--the Rue Charlot, the Rue du Chaume, and the Rue

St. Claude. Such is my state; you have a whole future before you, full

of sunshine, while I am beginning to see nothing, as I have advanced

so far into night. You are in love, that is a matter of course, while

I am not beloved by a soul in the world, and yet you ask me for pity!

By Jove! Molière forgot that. If that is the way in which you lawyers

jest at the palais, I compliment you most sincerely upon it, for you

are droll fellows."

And the octogenarian added, in a serious and wrathful voice,--

"Well; what is it you want of me?"

"I am aware, sir," said Marius, "that my presence here displeases you;

but I have only come to ask one thing of you, and then I shall go away

at once."

"You are a fool!" the old man said. "Who told you to go away?"

This was the translation of the tender words which he had at the bottom

of his heart. "Ask my pardon, why don't you? and throw your arms round

my neck." M. Gillenormand felt that Marius was going to leave him

in a few moments, that his bad reception offended him, and that his

harshness expelled him; he said all this to himself, and his grief

was augmented by it, and as his grief immediately turned into passion

his harshness grew the greater. He had wished that Marius should

understand, and Marius did not understand, which rendered the old

gentleman furious. He continued,--

"What! you insulted me, your grandfather; you left my house to go the

Lord knows whither; you broke your aunt's heart; you went away to lead

a bachelor's life,--of course that's more convenient,--to play the fop,

come home at all hours, and amuse yourself; you have given me no sign

of life; you have incurred debts without even asking me to pay them;

you have been a breaker of windows and a brawler; and at the end of

four years you return to my house and have nothing more to say to me

than that!"

This violent way of forcing the grandson into tenderness only produced

silence on the part of Marius. M. Gillenormand folded his arms,--a

gesture which with him was peculiarly imperious,--and bitterly

addressed Marius,--

"Let us come to an end. You have come to ask something of me, you say.

Well, what is it? Speak!"

"Sir," said Marius, with the look of a man who feels that he is going

to fall over a precipice, "I have come to ask your permission to marry."

M. Gillenormand rang the bell, and Basque poked his head into the door.

"Send my daughter here."

A second later the door opened again, and Mlle. Gillenormand did not

enter, but showed herself. Marius was standing silently, with drooping

arms and the face of a criminal, while M. Gillenormand walked up and

down the room. He turned to his daughter and said to her,--

"It is nothing. This is M. Marius; wish him good-evening. This

gentleman desires to marry That will do. Be off!"

The sound of the old man's sharp, hoarse voice announced a mighty

fury raging within him. The aunt looked at Marius in terror, seemed

scarce to recognize him, did not utter a syllable, and disappeared

before her father's breath like a straw before a hurricane. In the mean

while M. Gillenormand had turned back, and was now leaning against the

mantel-piece.

"You marry! at the age of one-and-twenty! You have settled all that,

and have only a permission to ask, a mere formality! Sit down, sir.

Well, you have had a revolution since I had the honor of seeing you

last; the Jacobins had the best of it, and you are of course pleased.

Are you not a republican since you became a baron? Those two things go

famously together, and the republic is a sauce for the barony. Are you

one of the decorated of July? Did you give your small aid to take the

Louvre, sir? Close by, in the Rue St. Antoine, opposite the Rue des

Nonaindières, there is a cannon-ball imbedded in the wall of a house

three stories up, with the inscription, 'July 28, 1830.' Go and look at

it, for it produces a famous effect. Ah! your friends do very pretty

things! By the way, are they not erecting a fountain on the site of the

Duc de Berry's monument? So you wish to marry? May I ask, without any

indiscretion, who the lady is?"

He stopped, and before Marius had time to answer, he added violently,--

"Ah! have you a profession, a fortune? How much do you earn by your

trade as a lawyer?"

"Nothing," said Marius, with a sort of fierceness and almost stern

resolution.

"Nothing? Then you have only the twelve hundred livres which I allow

you to live on?"

Marius made no reply, and M. Gillenormand continued,--

"In that case, I presume that the young lady is wealthy?"

"Like myself."

"What! no dowry?"

"No."

"Any expectations?"

"I do not think so."

"Quite naked! And what is the father?"

"I do not know."

"And what is her name?"

"Mademoiselle Fauchelevent."

"Mademoiselle Fauchewhat?"

"Fauchelevent."

"Ptt!" said the old gentleman.--

"Monsieur!" Marius exclaimed.

M. Gillenormand interrupted him, with the air of a man who is talking

to himself,--

"That is it, one-and-twenty, no profession, twelve hundred livres a

year, and the Baroness Pontmercy will go and buy two sous' worth of

parsley at the green-grocer's!"

"Sir," Marius replied in the wildness of the last vanishing hope, "I

implore you, I conjure you in Heaven's name, with clasped hands I throw

myself at your feet,--sir, permit me to marry her!"

The old man burst into a sharp, melancholy laugh, through which he

coughed and spoke,--

"Ah, ah, ah! you said to yourself, 'I'll go and see that old periwig,

that absurd ass! What a pity that I am not five-and-twenty yet! how I

would send him a respectful summons! Old fool, you are too glad to see

me; I feel inclined to marry Mamselle Lord-knows-who, the daughter of

Monsieur Lord-knows-what. She has no shoes and I have no shirt; that

matches. I am inclined to throw into the river my career, my youth, my

future, my life, and take a plunge into wretchedness with a wife round

my neck--that is my idea, and you must consent:' and the old fossil

will consent. Go in, my lad, fasten your paving-stone round your neck,

marry your Pousselevent, your Coupelevent,--never, sir, never!"

"Father--"

"Never!"

Marius lost all hope through the accent with which this "never" was

pronounced. He crossed the room slowly, with hanging head, tottering,

and more like a man that is dying than one who is going away. M.

Gillenormand looked after him, and at the moment when the door opened

and Marius was about to leave the room he took four strides with the

senile vivacity of an impetuous and spoiled old man, seized Marius by

the collar, pulled him back energetically into the room, threw him into

an easy-chair, and said,--

"Tell me all about it."

The word _father_ which had escaped from Marius's lips produced

this revolution. Marius looked at M. Gillenormand haggardly, but

his inflexible face expressed nought now but a rough and ineffable

goodness. The ancestor had made way for the grandfather.

"Well, speak; tell me of your love episodes, tell me all. Sapristi! how

stupid young men are!"

"My father!" Marius resumed.

The old gentleman's entire face was lit up with an indescribable

radiance.

"Yes, that is it, call me father, and you'll see."

There was now something so gentle, so good, so open, and so paternal in

this sharpness, that Marius, in this sudden passage from discouragement

to hope, was, as it were, stunned and intoxicated. As he was seated

near the table the light of the candles fell on his seedy attire, which

Father Gillenormand studied with amazement.

"Well, father," said Marius.

"What!" M. Gillenormand interrupted him, "have you really no money? You

are dressed like a thief."

He felt in a drawer and pulled out a purse, which he laid on the table.

"Here are one hundred louis to buy a hat with."

"My father," Marius continued, "my kind father. If you only knew how I

love her! You cannot imagine it. The first time I saw her was at the

Luxembourg, where she came to walk. At the beginning I paid no great

attention to her, and then I know not how it happened, but I fell in

love with her. Oh, how wretched it made me! I see her now every day at

her own house, and her father knows nothing about it. Just fancy, they

are going away; we see each other at night in the garden; her father

means to take her to England; and then I said to myself, 'I will go

and see my grandfather and tell him about it.' I should go mad first,

I should die, I should have a brain fever, I should throw myself into

the water. I must marry her, or else I shall go mad. That is the whole

truth, and I do not believe that I have forgotten anything. She lives

in a garden with a railing to it, in the Rue Plumet: it is on the side

of the Invalides."

Father Gillenormand was sitting radiantly by Marius's side: while

listening and enjoying the sound of his voice he enjoyed at the same

time a lengthened pinch of snuff. At the words "Rue Plumet" he broke

off inhaling, and allowed the rest of the snuff to fall on his knees.

"Rue Plumet! Did you say Rue Plumet? Only think! Is there not a barrack

down there? Oh yes, of course there is: your cousin Théodule, the

officer, the lancer, told me about it--a little girl, my dear fellow,

a little girl! By Jove! yes, Rue Plumet, which used formerly to be

called Rue Blomet. I remember it all now, and I have heard about the

petite behind the railings in the Rue Plumet. In a garden, a Pamela.

Your taste is not bad. I am told she is very tidy. Between ourselves,

I believe that ass of a lancer has courted her a little; I do not

exactly know how far matters have gone, but, after all, that is of no

consequence. Besides, there is no believing him; he boasts. Marius,

I think it very proper that a young man like you should be in love,

for it becomes your age, and I would sooner have you in love than a

Jacobin. I would rather know you caught by a petticoat, ay, by twenty

petticoats, than by Monsieur de Robespierre. For my part, I do myself

the justice of saying that, as regards sans-culottes, I never loved

any but women. Pretty girls are pretty girls, hang it all! and there

is no harm in that. And so she receives you behind her father's back,

does she? That's all right, and I had affairs of the same sort, more

than one. Do you know what a man does in such cases? He does not regard

the matter ferociously, he does not hurl himself into matrimony,

or conclude with marriage and M. le Maire in his scarf. No, he is,

although foolish, a youth of spirits and of good sense. Glide, mortals,

but do not marry. Such a young man goes to his grandfather, who is

well inclined after all, and who has always a few rolls of louis in an

old drawer, and he says to him, 'Grandpapa, that's how matters stand;'

and grandpapa says, 'It is very simple; youth must make and old age

break. I have been young and you will be old. All right, my lad, you

will requite it to your grandson. Here are two hundred pistoles; go

and amuse yourself, confound you!' That is the way in which the matter

should be arranged; a man does not marry, but that is no obstacle: do

you understand?"

Marius, petrified and incapable of uttering a word, shook his head in

the negative. The old gentleman burst into a laugh, winked his aged

eyelid, tapped him on the knee, looked at him in both eyes with a

mysterious and radiant air, and said with the tenderest shrug of the

shoulders possible,--

"You goose! make her your mistress!"

Marius turned pale; he had understood nothing of what his grandfather

had been saying, and this maundering about the Rue Blomet, Pamela, the

barracks, the lancer, had passed before Marius like a phantasmagoria.

Nothing of all this could affect Cosette, who was a lily, and the old

gentleman was wandering. But this divagation had resulted in a sentence

which Marius understood, and which was a mortal insult to Cosette, and

the words, _Make her your mistress_, passed through the pure young

man's heart like a sword-blade. He rose, picked up his hat which was

on the ground, and walked to the door with a firm, assured step. Then

he turned, gave his grandfather a low bow, drew himself up again, and

said,--

"Five years ago you outraged my father; to-day you outrage my wife. I

have nothing more to ask of you, sir; farewell!"

Father Gillenormand, who was stupefied, opened his mouth, stretched

out his arms, strove to rise, and ere he was able to utter a word, the

door had closed again, and Marius had disappeared. The old gentleman

remained for a few minutes motionless, and as if thunderstruck, unable

to speak or breathe, as though a garroter's hand were compressing his

throat. At length he tore himself out of his easy-chair, ran to the

door as fast as a man can run at ninety-one, opened it, and cried,--

"Help! help!"

His daughter appeared, and then his servants; he went on with a

lamentable rattle in his throat,--

"Run after him! catch him up! How did I offend him? He is mad and going

away! Oh Lord, oh Lord! this time he will not return."

He went to the window which looked on the street, opened it with his

old trembling hands, bent half his body out of it, while Basque and

Nicolette held his skirts, and cried,--

"Marius! Marius! Marius! Marius!"

But Marius could not hear him, for at this very moment he was turning

the corner of the Rue St. Louis. The nonagenarian raised his hands

twice or thrice to his temples with an expression of agony, tottered

back, and sank into an easy-chair, pulseless, voiceless, and tearless,

shaking his head and moving his lips with a stupid air, and having

nothing left in his eyes or heart but a profound and gloomy rigidity

which resembled night.

BOOK IX.

WHERE ARE THEY GOING?

CHAPTER I.

JEAN VALJEAN.

That same day, about four in the afternoon, Jean Valjean was seated on

one of the most solitary slopes of the Champ de Mars. Either through

prudence, a desire to reflect, or simply in consequence of one of those

insensible changes of habits which gradually introduce themselves into

all existences, he now went out very rarely with Cosette. He had on

his workman's jacket and gray canvas trousers, and his long peaked

cap concealed his face. He was at present calm and happy by Cosette's

side; what had startled and troubled him for a while was dissipated;

but during the last week or fortnight anxieties of a fresh nature had

sprung up. One day, while walking along the boulevard, he noticed

Thénardier; thanks to his disguise, Thénardier did not recognize him,

but after that Jean Valjean saw him several times again, and now felt

a certainty that Thénardier was prowling about the quarter. This was

sufficient to make him form a grand resolution, for Thénardier present

was every peril at once; moreover, Paris was not quiet, and political

troubles offered this inconvenience to any man who had something in his

life to hide,--that the police had become very restless and suspicious,

and when trying to find a man like Pepin or Morey, might very easily

discover a man like Jean Valjean. He therefore resolved to leave Paris,

even France, and go to England; he had warned Cosette, and hoped to

be off within a week. He was sitting on the slope, revolving in his

mind all sorts of thoughts,--Thénardier, the police, the journey,

and the difficulty of obtaining a passport. From all these points of

view he was anxious; and lastly, an inexplicable fact, which had just

struck him, and from which he was still hot, added to his alarm. On

the morning of that very day he, the only person up in the house, and

walking in the garden before Cosette's shutters were opened, suddenly

perceived this line on the wall, probably scratched with a nail, 16

_Rue de la Verrerie_.

It was quite recent; the lines were white on the old black mortar, and

a bed of nettles at the foot of the wall was powdered with fine fresh

plaster. This had probably been inscribed during the night. What was

it,--an address, a signal for others, or a warning for himself? In

any case, it was evident that the secrecy of the garden was violated,

and that strangers entered it. He remembered the strange incidents

which had already alarmed the house, and his mind was at work on this

subject; but he was careful not to say a word to Cosette about the line

written on the wall, for fear of alarming her. In the midst of his

troubled thoughts he perceived, from a shadow which the sun threw, that

some one was standing on the crest of the slope immediately behind him.

He was just going to turn, when a folded paper fell on his knees, as if

a hand had thrown it over his head; he opened the paper and read these

words, written in large characters, and in pencil: LEAVE YOUR HOUSE.

Jean Valjean rose smartly, but there was no longer any one on the

slope; he looked round him, and perceived a person, taller than a child

and shorter than a man, dressed in a gray blouse and dust-colored

cotton-velvet trousers, bestriding the parapet, and slipping down into

the moat of the Champ de Mars. Jean Valjean at once went home very

thoughtfully.

CHAPTER II.

MARIUS.

Marius had left M. Gillenormand's house in a wretched state; he had

gone in with very small hopes, and came out with an immense despair.

However,--those who have watched the beginnings of the human heart will

comprehend it,--the lancer, the officer, the fop, cousin Théodule,

had left no shadow on his mind, not the slightest. The dramatic poet

might apparently hope for some complications to be produced by this

revelation, so coarsely made to the grandson by the grandfather; but

what the drama would gain by it truth would lose. Marius was at that

age when a man believes nothing that is wrong; later comes the age

when he believes everything. Suspicions are only wrinkles, and early

youth has none; what o'erthrows Othello glides over Candide. Suspect

Cosette? Marius could have committed a multitude of crimes more easily.

He began walking about the streets, the resource of those who suffer,

and he thought of nothing which he might have remembered. At two in

the morning he went to Courfeyrac's lodging and threw himself on his

mattress full dressed; it was bright sunshine when he fell asleep, with

that frightful oppressive sleep which allows ideas to come and go in

the brain. When he awoke he saw Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Feuilly, and

Combeferre, all ready to go out, and extremely busy. Courfeyrac said to

him,--

"Are you coming to General Lamarque's funeral?"

It seemed to him as if Courfeyrac were talking Chinese. He went out

shortly after them, and put in his pockets the pistols which Javert had

intrusted to him at the affair of February 3, and which still remained

in his possession. They were still loaded, and it would be difficult

to say what obscure notion he had in his brain when he took them up.

The whole day he wandered about, without knowing where; it rained at

times, but he did not perceive it; he bought for his dinner a halfpenny

roll, put it in his pocket, and forgot it. It appears that he took a

bath in the Seine without being conscious of it, for there are moments

when a man has a furnace under his skull, and Marius had reached one

of those moments. He hoped for nothing, feared nothing now, and had

taken this step since the previous day. He awaited the evening with a

feverish impatience, for he had but one clear idea left, that at nine

o'clock he should see Cosette. This last happiness was now his sole

future; after that came the shadow. At times, while walking along the

most deserted boulevards, he imagined that he could hear strange noises

in Paris; then he thrust his head out of his reverie, and said,--"Can

they be fighting?" At nightfall, at nine o'clock precisely, he was at

the Rue Plumet, as he had promised Cosette. He had not seen her for

eight-and-forty hours; he was about to see her again. Every other

thought was effaced, and he only felt an extraordinary and profound

joy. Those minutes in which men live ages have this sovereign and

admirable thing about them, that at the moment when they pass they

entirely occupy the heart.

Marius removed the railing and rushed into the garden. Cosette was

not at the place where she usually waited for him, and he crossed the

garden and went to the niche near the terrace. "She is waiting for me

there," he said; but Cosette was not there. He raised his eyes and saw

that the shutters of the house were closed; he walked round the garden,

and the garden was deserted. Then he returned to the garden, and, mad

with love, terrified, exasperated with grief and anxiety, he rapped at

the shutters, like a master who returns home at a late hour. He rapped,

he rapped again, at the risk of seeing the window open and the fathers

frowning face appear and ask him,--"What do you want?" This was nothing

to what he caught a glimpse of. When he had rapped, he raised his

voice, and called Cosette. "Cosette!" he cried: "Cosette!" he repeated

imperiously. There was no answer. It was all over; there was no one in

the garden, no one in the house. Marius fixed his desperate eyes on

this mournful house, which was as black, as silent, and more empty,

than a tomb. He gazed at the stone bench on which he had spent so many

adorable hours by Cosette's side; then he sat down on the garden steps,

with his heart full of gentleness and resolution; he blessed his love

in his heart, and said to himself that since Cosette was gone all left

him was to die. All at once he heard a voice which seemed to come from

the street, crying through the trees,--

"Monsieur Marius!"

He drew himself up.

"Hilloh!" he said.

"Monsieur Marius, are you there?"

"Yes."

"Monsieur Marius," the voice resumed, "your friends are waiting for you

at the barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie."

This voice was not entirely strange to him, and resembled Éponine's

rough, hoarse accents. Marius ran to the railings, pulled aside the

shifting bar, passed his head through, and saw some one, who seemed to

be a young man, running away in the gloaming.

CHAPTER III.

M. MABŒUF.

Jean Valjean's purse was useless to M. Mabœuf, who in his venerable

childish austerity had not accepted the gift of the stars; he had not

allowed that a star could coin itself into louis d'or, and he had not

guessed that what fell from heaven came from Gavroche. Hence he carried

the purse to the police commissary of the district, as a lost object,

placed by the finder at the disposal of the claimants. The purse was

really lost; we need hardly say that no one claimed it, and it did

not help M. Mabœuf. In other respects M. Mabœuf had continued

to descend: and the indigo experiments had succeeded no better at the

Jardin des Plantes than in his garden of Austerlitz. The previous

year he owed his housekeeper her wages; and now, as we have seen,

he owed his landlord his rent. The Government pawn-brokers' office

sold the copper-plates of his _Flora,_ at the expiration of thirteen

months, and a coppersmith had made stewpans of them. When his plates

had disappeared, as he could no longer complete the unbound copies of

his _Flora_, which he still possessed, he sold off plates and text to

a second-hand bookseller as defective. Nothing was then left him of

the labor of his whole life, and he began eating the money produced

by these copies. When he saw that this poor resource was growing

exhausted be gave up his garden, and did not attend to it; before,

and long before, he had given up the two eggs and the slice of beef

which he ate from time to time, and now dined on bread and potatoes.

He had sold his last articles of furniture, then everything; he had

in duplicate, in linen, clothes, and coverlids, and then his herbals

and plates; but he still had his most precious books, among them being

several of great rarity, such as the "Les Quadrins Historiques de la

Bible," the edition of 1560; "La Concordance des Bibles," of Pierre de

Besse; "Les Marguerites de la Marguerite," of Jean de la Haye, with a

dedication to the Queen of Navarre; the work on the "Duties and Dignity

of an Ambassador," by the Sieur de Villiers Hotman; a "Florilegium

Rabbinicum," of 1644; a Tibullus, of 1567, with the splendid imprint

"Venetiis, in ædibus Manutianis;" and lastly a Diogenes Laertius,

printed at Lyons in 1644, in which were the famous various readings

of the Vatican manuscript 411, of the thirteenth century, and those

of the two Venetian _codices_ 393 and 394, so usefully consulted by

Henri Estienne, and all the passages in the Doric dialect, only to

be found in the celebrated twelfth century manuscript of the Naples

library. M. Mabœuf never lit a fire in his room, and went to bed

with the sun, in order not to burn a candle: it seemed as if he no

longer had neighbors, for they shunned him when he went out, and

he noticed it. The wretchedness of a child interests a mother, the

wretchedness of a youth interests an old man, but the wretchedness of

an old man interests nobody, and it is the coldest of all distresses.

Still M. Mabœuf had not entirely lost his childlike serenity; his

eye acquired some vivacity when it settled on his books, and he smiled

when he regarded the Diogenes Laertius, which was a unique copy. His

glass case was the only furniture which he had retained beyond what was

indispensable. One day Mother Plutarch said to him,--

"I have no money to buy dinner with."

What she called dinner consisted of a loaf and four or five potatoes.

"Can't you get it on credit?" said M. Mabœuf.

"You know very well that it is refused me."

M. Mabœuf opened his bookcase, looked for a long time at all his

books in turn, as a father, obliged to decimate his children, would

look at them before selecting, then took one up quickly, put it under

his arm, and went out. He returned two hours after with nothing under

his arm, laid thirty sous on the table, and said,--

"You will get some dinner."

From this moment Mother Plutarch saw a dark veil, which was not

raised again, settle upon the old gentleman's candid face. The next

day, the next after that, and every day, M. Mabœuf had to begin

again; he went out with a book and returned with a piece of silver. As

the second-hand booksellers saw that he was compelled to sell, they

bought for twenty sous books for which he had paid twenty francs, and

frequently to the same dealers. Volume by volume his whole library

passed away, and he said at times, "And yet I am eighty years of age,"

as if he had some lurking hope that he should reach the end of his days

ere he reached the end of his books. His sorrow grew, but once he had a

joy: he went out with a Robert Estienne, which he sold for thirty-five

sous on the Quai Malaquais, and came home with an Aldus which he had

bought for forty sous in the Rue de Grès. "I owe five sous," he said

quite radiantly to Mother Plutarch, but that day he did not dine. He

belonged to the Horticultural Society, and his poverty was known. The

President of the Society called on him, promised to speak about him

to the Minister of Commerce and Agriculture, and did so. "What do you

say?" the minister exclaimed. "I should think so! an old savant! a

botanist! an inoffensive man! we must do something for him." The next

day M. Mabœuf received an invitation to dine with the minister,

and, trembling with joy, showed the letter to Mother Plutarch. "We are

saved!" he said. On the appointed day he went to the minister's, and

noticed that his ragged cravat, his long, square-cut coat, and shoes

varnished with white of egg, astounded the footman. No one spoke to

him, not even the minister, and at about ten in the evening, while

still waiting for a word, he heard the minister's wife, a handsome lady

in a low-necked dress, whom he had not dared to approach, ask, "Who

can that old gentleman be?" He went home afoot at midnight through the

pouring rain; he had sold an Elzevir to pay his hackney coach in going.

Every evening, before going to bed, he had fallen into the habit of

reading a few pages of his Diogenes Laertius; for he knew enough of

Greek to enjoy the peculiarities of the text which he possessed, and

had no other joy now left him. A few weeks passed away, and all at once

Mother Plutarch fell ill. There is one thing even more sad than having

no money to buy bread at a baker's, and that is, not to have money

to buy medicine at the chemist's. One night the doctor had ordered a

most expensive potion, and then the disease grew worse, and a nurse

was necessary. M. Mabœuf opened his bookcase, but there was nothing

left in it; the last volume had departed, and the only thing left him

was the Diogenes Laertius. He placed the unique copy under his arm and

went out,--it was June 4, 1832; he proceeded to Royol's successor at

the Porte St. Jacques, and returned with one hundred francs. He placed

the pile of five-franc pieces on the old servant's table? and entered

his bedroom without uttering a syllable. At dawn of the next day he

seated himself on the overturned post in his garden, and over the hedge

he might have been seen the whole morning, motionless, with drooping

head, and eyes vaguely fixed on the faded flower-beds. It rained

every now and then, but the old man did not seem to notice it; but

in the afternoon extraordinary noises broke out in Paris, resembling

musket-shots, and the clamor of a multitude. Father Mabœuf raised

his head, noticed a gardener passing, and said,--

"What is the matter?"

The gardener replied, with the spade on his back, and with the most

peaceful accent,--

"It's the riots."

"What! Riots?"

"Yes; they are fighting."

"Why are they fighting?"

"The Lord alone knows," said the gardener.

"In what direction?"

"Over by the arsenal."

Father Mabœuf went into his house, took his hat, mechanically sought

for a book to place under his arm, found none, said, "Ah, it is true!"

and went out with a wandering look.

BOOK X.

THE FIFTH OF JUNE, 1832.

CHAPTER I.

THE SURFACE OF THE QUESTION.

Of what is a revolt composed? Of nothing and of everything, of an

electricity suddenly disengaged, of a flame which suddenly breaks

out, of a wandering strength and a passing breath. This breath meets

with heads that talk, brains that dream, souls that suffer, passions

that burn, and miseries which yell, and carries them off with it.

Whither? It is chance work; through the State, through the laws,

through prosperity and the insolence of others. Irritated convictions,

embittered enthusiasms, aroused indignations, martial instincts

suppressed, youthful courage exalted, and generous blindnesses;

curiosity, a taste for a change, thirst for something unexpected, the

feeling which causes us to find pleasure in reading the announcement

of a new piece, or on hearing the machinist's whistle; vague hatreds,

rancors, disappointments, every vanity which believes that destiny

has been a bankrupt to it; straitened circumstances, empty dreams,

ambitions surrounded with escarpments, every man who hopes for an

issue from an overthrow, and, lastly, at the very bottom, the mob, that

mud which takes fire,--such are the elements of riot. The greatest and

the most infamous, beings who prowl about beyond the pale of everything

while awaiting an opportunity, gypsies, nameless men, highway

vagabonds, the men who sleep o' nights in a desert of houses with no

other roof but the cold clouds of heaven, those who daily ask their

bread of chance and not of toil; the unknown men of wretchedness and

nothingness, bare arms and bare feet, belong to the riot. Every man who

has in his soul a secret revolt against any act of the State, of life,

or of destiny, borders on riot; and so soon as it appears he begins to

quiver and to feel himself lifted by the whirlwind.

Riot is a species of social atmospheric waterspout, which is

suddenly formed in certain conditions of temperature, and which in

its revolutions mounts, runs, thunders, tears up, razes, crushes,

demolishes, and uproots, bearing with it grand and paltry natures,

the strong man and the weak mind, the trunk of a tree and the wisp of

straw. Woe to the man whom it carries as well as to the one it dashes

at, for it breaks one against the other. It communicates to those whom

it seizes a strange and extraordinary power; it fills the first comer

with the force of events and converts everything into projectiles; it

makes a cannon-ball of a stone, and a general of a porter. If we may

believe certain oracles of the crafty policy, a little amount of riot

is desirable from the governing point of view. The system is, that riot

strengthens those governments which it does not overthrow; it tries

the army; it concentrates the bourgeoisie, strengthens the muscles of

the police, and displays the force of the social framework. It is a

lesson in gymnastics, and almost hygiene; and power feels better after

a riot, as a man does after a rubbing down. Riot, thirty years ago,

was also regarded from other stand-points. There is for everything a

theory which proclaims itself as "common sense," a mediation offered

between the true and the false: explanation, admonition, and a somewhat

haughty extenuation which, because it is composed of blame and apology,

believes itself wisdom, and is often nothing but pedantry. An entire

political school, called the "Juste milieu," emanated from this, and

between cold water and hot water there is the lukewarm-water party.

This school, with its false depth entirely superficial, which dissects

effects without going back to causes, scolds, from the elevation of

semi-science, the agitations of the public streets.

If we listen to this school we hear: "The riots which complicated the

deed of 1830 deprived that grand event of a portion of its purity.

The revolution of July was a fine blast of the popular wind, suddenly

followed by a blue sky, and the riot caused a cloudy sky to reappear,

and compelled the revolution, originally so remarkable through

unanimity, to degenerate into a quarrel. In the revolution of July, as

in every progress produced by a jerk, there were secret fractures; the

riot rendered them perceptible. After the revolution of July only the

deliverance was felt, but after the riots the catastrophe was felt.

Every riot closes shops, depresses the funs, consternates the Stock

Exchange, suspends trade, checks business, and entails bankruptcies;

there is no money, trade is disconcerted, capital is withdrawn, labor

is at a discount, there is fear everywhere, and counter-strokes take

place in every city, whence come gulfs. It is calculated that the

first day of riot costs France twenty millions of francs, the second

forty, and the third sixty. Hence a riot of three days costs one

hundred and twenty millions; that is to say, if we only regard the

financial result, is equivalent to a disaster, shipwreck, or lost

action, which might annihilate a fleet of sixty vessels of the line.

Indubitably, riots, historically regarded, had their beauty; the war

of the paving-stones is no less grand or pathetic than the war of

thickets; in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other the

heart of cities; one has Jean Chouan, the other has Jeanne. Riots

lit up luridly but splendidly all the most original features of the

Parisian character,--generosity, devotion, stormy gayety, students

proving that bravery forms a part of intellect, the National Guard

unswerving, bivouacs formed by shop-keepers, fortresses held by gamins,

and contempt of death in the passers-by. Schools and legions came

into collision, but, after all, there was only the difference of age

between the combatants, and they are the same race; the same stoical

men who die at the age of twenty for their ideas, and at forty for

their families; the army, ever sad in civil wars, opposed prudence to

audacity; and the riots, while manifesting the popular intrepidity,

were the education of the bourgeois courage. That is all very well,

but is all this worth the blood shed? And then add to the bloodshed

the future darkened, progress compromised, anxiety among the better

classes, honest liberals despairing, foreign absolutism delighted

at these wounds dealt to revolution by itself, and the conquered of

1830 triumphing and shouting, 'Did we not say so?' Add Paris possibly

aggrandized, France assuredly diminished. Add--for we must tell the

whole truth--the massacres which too often dishonored the victory of

order, which became ferocious, over liberty which went mad, and we must

arrive at the conclusion that riots have been fatal."

Thus speaks that wisdom, almost, with which the bourgeoisie, that

people, almost, are so readily contented. For our part, we regret the

word riots as being too wide, and consequently too convenient, and make

a distinction between one popular movement and another; we do not ask

ourselves whether a riot costs as much as a battle. In the first place,

why a battle? Here the question of war arises. Is war less a scourge

than riot is a calamity? And then, are all riots calamities? And even

supposing that July 14 cost one hundred and twenty millions, the

establishment of Philip V. in Spain cost France two billions, and even

were the price equal we should prefer the 14th July. Besides, we reject

these figures, which seem reasons and are only words, and a riot being

given, we examine it in itself. In all that the doctrinaire objection

we have just reproduced says, the only question is the effect, and we

seek for the cause.

CHAPTER II.

THE BOTTOM OF THE QUESTION.

There is riot, and there is insurrection; they are two passions, one

of which is just, the other unjust. In democratic States, the only

ones based on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction usurps

power; in that case the whole people rises, and the necessary demand

for its rights may go so far as taking up arms. In all the questions

which result from collective sovereignty, the war of all against

the fraction is insurrection, and the attack of the fraction on the

masses is a riot; according as the Tuileries contain the king or the

convention, they are justly or unjustly attacked. The same guns pointed

at the mob are in the wrong on August 14, and in the right on the 14th

Vendémiaire. Their appearance is alike, but the base is different; the

Swiss defend what is false, and Bonaparte what is true. What universal

suffrage has done in its liberty and its sovereignty cannot be undone

by the street. It is the same in matters of pure civilization, and

the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted yesterday, may be perturbed

to-morrow. The same fury is legitimate against Terray and absurd

against Turgot. Smashing engines, pillaging store-houses, tearing

up rails, the demolition of docks, the wrong ways of multitudes,

the denial of popular justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by the

scholars, and Rousseau expelled from Switzerland by stones,--all this

is riot Israel rising against Moses, Athens against Phocion, Rome

against Scipio, are riots, while Paris attacking the Bastille is

insurrection. The soldiers opposing Alexander, the sailors mutinying

against Christopher Columbus, are the same revolt,--an impious revolt;

why? Because Alexander does for Asia with the sword what Columbus does

for America with the compass; Alexander, like Columbus, finds a world.

These gifts of a world to civilization are such increments of light,

that any resistance in such a case is culpable. At times the people

breaks its fidelity to itself, and the mob behaves treacherously to

the people. Can anything, for instance, be stranger than the long and

sanguinary protest of the false salt-makers, a legitimate chronic

revolt which at the decisive moment, on the day of salvation, and

in the hour of the popular victory, espouses the throne, turns into

chouannerie, and from an insurrection against the government becomes

a riot for it? These are gloomy masterpieces of ignorance. The false

salt-maker escapes from the royal gallows, and with the noose still

round his neck mounts the white cockade. "Death to the salt taxes"

brings into the world, "Long live the king." The killers of St.

Bartholomew, the murderers of September, the massacrers of Avignon, the

assassins of Coligny, of Madame de Lamballe, the assassins of Brune,

the Miquelets, the Verdets, and the Cadenettes, the Companions of Jehu,

and the Chevaliers du Brassard,--all this is riot. The Vendée is a

grand Catholic riot The sound of right in motion can be recognized, and

it does not always come from the trembling of the overthrown masses;

there are mad furies and cracked bells, and all the tocsins do not

give the sound of bronze. The commotion of passions and ignorances

differs from the shock of progress. Rise, if you like, but only to

grow, and show me in what direction you are going, for insurrection

is only possible with a forward movement. Any other uprising is bad,

every violent step backwards is riot, and recoiling is an assault upon

the human race. Insurrection is the outburst of the fury of truth; the

paving-stones which insurrection tears up emit the spark of right, and

they only leave to riot their mud. Danton rising against Louis XVI. is

insurrection; Hébert against Danton is riot.

Hence it comes that if insurrection in given cases may be, as Lafayette

said, the most holy of duties, riot may be the most fatal of attacks.

There is also some difference in the intensity of caloric; insurrection

is often a volcano, a riot often a straw fire. Revolt, as we have said,

is sometimes found in the power. Polignac is a rioter, and Camille

Desmoulins is a government. At times insurrection is a resurrection.

The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely

modern fact, and all history anterior to that fact being for four

thousand years filled with violated right and the suffering of the

peoples, each epoch of history brings with it the protest which is

possible to it. Under the Cæsars there was no insurrection, but there

was Juvenal. The _facit indignatio_ takes the place of the Gracchi.

Under the Cæsars there is the Exile of Syene, and there is also the

man of the "Annals." We will not refer to the immense Exile of Patmos,

who also crushes the real world with a protest in the name of the

ideal world, converts a vision into an enormous satire, and casts on

Rome-Nineveh, Rome-Babylon, and Rome-Sodom the flashing reflection of

the Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal. We

cannot understand him, for he is a Jew, and writes in Hebrew; but the

man who writes the "Annals" is a Latin, or, to speak more correctly,

a Roman. As the Neros reign in the black manner, they must be painted

in the same. Work produced by the graver alone would be pale, and so

a concentrated biting prose must be poured into the lines. Despots

are of some service to thinkers, for chained language is terrible

language, and the writer doubles and triples his style when silence

is imposed by a master on the people. There issues from this silence

a certain mysterious fulness which filters and fixes itself in bronze

in the thought. Compression in history produces conciseness in the

historian, and the granitic solidity of certain celebrated prose is

nothing but a pressure put on by the tyrant. Tyranny forces the writer

into contraction of the diameter, which is increase of strength. The

Ciceronian period, scarce sufficient for Verres, would be blunted

upon a Caligula. Though there is less breadth in the sentence, there

is more intensity in the blow, and Tacitus thinks with a drawn-back

arm. The honesty of a great heart condensed in justice and truth is

annihilating.

We must observe, by the way, that Tacitus is not historically

superimposed on Cæsar, and the Tiberii are reserved for him. Cæsar

and Tacitus are two successive phenomena, whose meeting seems to be

mysteriously prevented by Him who regulates the entrances and exits

on the stage of centuries. Cæsar is great, Tacitus is great, and God

spares these two grandeurs by not bringing them into collision. The

judge, in striking Cæsar, might strike too hard and be unjust, and God

does not wish that. The great wars of Africa and Spain, the Cilician

pirates destroyed, civilization introduced into Gaul, Britain, and

Germany,--all this glory covers the Rubicon. There is in this a species

of delicacy on the part of divine justice, hesitating to let loose on

the illustrious usurper the formidable historian, saving Cæsar from

the sentence of a Tacitus, and granting extenuating circumstances to

genius. Assuredly despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of

genius. There is corruption under illustrious tyrants, but the moral

plague is more hideous still under infamous tyrants. In such reigns

nothing veils the shame; and the producers of examples, Tacitus like

Juvenal, buffet more usefully in the presence of this human race this

ignominy, which has no reply to make. Rome smells worse under Vitellius

than under Sylla; under Claudius and Domitian there is a deformity of

baseness corresponding with the ugliness of the tyrant. The foulness of

the slaves is the direct product of the despots; a miasma is extracted

from these crouching consciences in which the master is reflected; the

public power is unclean, heads are small, consciences flat, and souls

vermin; this is the case under Caracalla, Commodus, and Heliogabalus,

while from the Roman senate under Cæsar there only issues the smell of

dung peculiar to eagles' nests. Hence the apparently tardy arrival of

Juvenal and Tacitus, for the demonstrator steps in at the hour for the

experiment to be performed.