I. SOLITUDE AND THE BARRACKS



Cosette's grief, so poignant still, and so acute four or five month; before, had, with-
out her knowledge even, entered upon convalescence. Nature, Spring, her youth, her
love for her father, the gaiety of the birds and the flowers, were filtering little by
little, day by day, drop by drop, into this soul so pure and so young, something which
almost resembled oblivion. Was the fire dying out entirely? or was it merely becoming
a bed of embers? The truth is, that she had scarcely anything left of that sorrowful
and consuming feeling.

One day she suddenly thought of Marius "What!" said she, "I do not think of him now."

In the course of that very week she noticed, passing before the grated gate of the
garden, a very handsome officer of lancers, waist like a wasp, ravishing uniform,
cheeks like a young girl's, sabre under his arm, waxed moustaches, polished schapska.
Moreover, fair hair, full blue eyes, plump, vain, insolent and pretty face: the very
opposite of Marius. A cigar in his mouth. Cosette thought that this officer doubtless
belonged to the regiment in barracks on the Rue de Babylon.

The next day, she saw him pass again. She noticed the hour. Dating from this time,
was it chance? she saw him pass almost every day.

The officer's comrades perceived that there was, in this garden so "badly kept," be-
hind that wretched old-fashioned grating, a pretty creature that always happened to
be visible on the mssago of the handsome lieutenant, who is not unknown to the reader,
and whose name was Theodule Gillenormand.

"Stop!" said they to him. "Here is a little girl who has her eye upon you; why don't
you look at her?"

"Do you suppose I have the time," answered the lancer, "to look at all the girls who
look at me?"

This was the very time when Marius was descending gloomily towards agony, and saying:
"If I could only see her again before I die!" Had his wish been realised, had he seen
Cosette at that moment looking at a lancer, he would not have been able to utter a
word, and would have expired of grief.

Whose fault was it? Nobody's.

Marius was of that temperament which sinks into grief, and remains there; Cosette was of
that which plunges in, and comes out again.

Cosette indeed was passing that dangerous moment, the fatal phase of feminine reverie
abandoned to itself, when the heart of an isolated young girl resembles the tendrils
of a vine which seize hold, as chance determines, of the capital of a column or the
signpost of a tavern. A hurried and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, whe-
ther she be poor or whether she be rich, for riches do not defend against a bad
choice; misalliances are formed very high; the real misalliance is that of souls; and,
even as more than one unknown young man, without name, or birth, or fortune, is a mar-
ble column which sustains a temple of grand sentiments and grand ideas, so you may
find a satiified and opulent man of the world, with polished boots and varnished
speech, who, if you look, not at the exterior but the interior, that is to say, at
what is reserved for the wife, is nothing but a stupid joist, darkly haunted by vio-
lent, impure, and debauched passions; the signpost of a tavern.

What was there in Cosette's soul? A soothed or sleeping passion; love in a wavering
state; something which was limpid, shining, disturbed to a certain depth, gloomy be-
low. The image of the handsome officer was reflected from the surface. Was there a
memory at the bottom? deep at the bottom? Perhaps, Cosette did not know.

A singular incident followed.



II. FEARS OF COSETTE


IN the first fortnight in April, Jean Valjean went on a journey. This, we know, hap-
pened with him from time to time, at very long intervals. He remained absent one or
two days at the most. Where did he go? nobody knew, not even Cosette. Once only, on
one of these trips, she had accompanied him in a fiacre as far as the corner of a little
cul-de-sac, on which she read: Impasse de la Planchette. There he got out, and the
fiacre took Cosette back to the Rue de Babylone. It was generally when money was
needed for the household expenses that Jean Valjean made these little journeys.

Jean Valjean then was absent. He had said: "I shall be back in three days."

In the evening, Cosette was alone in the parlour. To amuse herself, she had opened
her piano and began to sing, playing an accompaniment, the chorus from Euryanthe:
Hunters wandering in the woods! which is perhaps the finest piece in all music. All
at once it seemed to her that she heard a step in the garden.

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

She went to the window shutter which was closed and put her ear to it.

It appeared to her that it was a man's step, and that he was treading very softly.

She ran immediately up to the first story, into her room, opened a slide in her
blind, and looked into the garden. The moon was full. She could see as plainly as
in broad day.

There was nobody there.

She opened the window. The garden was absolutely silent and all that she could see
of the street was as deserted as it always was.

Cosette thought she had been mistaken. She had imagined she heard this noise. It
was a hallucination produced by Weber's sombre and majestic thorns, which opens be-
fore the mind startling depths, which trembles before the eye like a bewildering
forest, and in which we hear the crackling of the dead branches beneath the anxious
sup of the hunters dimly seen in the twilight.

She thought no more about it.

Moreover, Cosette by nature was not easily startled. There was in her veins the
blood of the gipsy and of the adventuress who goes bare-foot. It must he remembered
she was rather a lark than a dove. She was wild and brave at heart.

The next day, not so late, at nightfall, she was walking in the garden. In the midst
of the confused thoughts which filled her mind, she thought she heard for a moment
a sound like the sound of the evening before, as if somebody were walking in the
darkness under the trees, not very far from her, but she said to herself that no-
thing is more like a step in the grass than the rustling of two limbs against each
other, and she paid no attention to it. Moreover, she saw nothing.

She left "the bush;" she had to cross a little green grass-plot to reach the steps.
The moon, which had just risen behind her. projected, as Cosette came out from the
shrubbery, her shadow before her upon this grass-plot.

Cosette stood still, terrified.

By the side of her shadow, the moon marked out distinctly upon the sward another sha-
dow singularly frightful and terrible. a shadow with a round hat.

It was like the shadow of a ratan who might have been standing in the edge of the
shrubbery, a few steps behind Cosette.

For a moment she was unable to speak, or try, or call, or stir, or turn her head.

At last she summoned up all her courage and resolutely turned round.

There was nobody there.

She looked upon the ground. The shadow had disappeared. She returned into the shrub-
bery, boldly hunted through the corners, went as far as the gate, and found nothing.

She felt her Wood nn cold. Was this also a hallucination? What! two days in succes-
sion? One hallucination may pass, but two hal-lucinations? What made her most anxious
was that the shadow was certainly not a phantom. Phantoms never wear round hats.

The next day Jean Valjean returned. Cosette narrated to him what she thought she had
heard and seen. She expected to be reassured, and that her father would shrug his
shoulders and say: "You are a foolish little girl."

Jean Valjean became anxious.

"It may be nothing," said he to her.

He left her under some pretext and went into the garden, and she saw him examining
the gate very closely.

In the night she awoke; now she was certain, and she distinctly beard somebody walking
very near the steps under her window. She ran to her slide and opened it. There was in
fact a man in the garden with a big club in his hand. Just as she was about to cry out,
the moon lighted up the man's face. It was her father!

She went back to bed, saying: "So he is really anxious!"

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

The third night the moon was smaller and rose later, it might have been one o'clock in
the morning, she heard a loud burst of laughter and her father's voice calling her:

"Cosette!"

She sprang out of bed, threw on her dressingown, and opened her window.

Her father was below on the grass-plot.

"I woke you up to show you," said he. "Look, here is your shadow in a round hat."

And he pointed to a shadow on the sward made by the moon, and which really bore a close
resemblance to the appearance of a man in a round hat. It was a figure produced by a
sheet-iron stove-pipe with a cap which rose above a neighbouring roof.

Cosette also began to laugh, all her gloomy suppositions fell to the ground, and the
next day, while breakfasting with her father, she made merry over the mysterious garden
haunted by shadows of stove-pipes.

Jean Valjean became entirely calm again; as to Cosette, she did not notice very careful-
ly whether the stove-pipe was really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen,
or thought she saw, and whether the moon was in the same part of the sky. She made no
question about the oddity of a stove-pipe which is afraid of being caught in the act,
and which retires when you look at its shadow, for the shadow had disappeared when
Cosette turned round, and Cosette had really believed that she was certain' of that.
Cosette was fully reassured. The demonstration appeared to her complete, and the idea
that there could have been anybody walking in the garden that evening, or that night,
no longer entered her head.

A few days afterwards however, a new incident occurred.



III. ENRICHED BY THE COMMENTARIES OF TOUSSAINT



IN the garden, near the grated gate, on the street, there was a stone seat protected from
the gaze of the curious by a hedge, but which, nevertheless, by an effort, the arm of a
passer could reach through the grating and the hedge.

One evening in this same month of April, Jean Valjean had gone out; Cosette, after sunset,
had sat down on this seat. The wind was freshening in the trees, Cosctte was musing; a
vague sadness was coming over her little by little, that invincible sadnesi which evening
gives and which comes perhaps, who knows? from the mystery of the tomb hal f-opened at
that hour.

Fantine was perhaps in that shadow.

Cosette rose, slowly made the round of the garden, walking in the grass which was wet with
dew, and saying to herself through the kind of melancholy somnambulism in which she was
enveloped: "One really needs wooden shoes for the garden at this hour. I shall catch cold."

She returned to the seat.

Just as she was sitting down, she noticed in the place she had left.a stone of considerable
size which evidently was not there the moment before.

Cosette reflected upon this stone, asking herself what it meant. Suddenly, the idea that
this stone did not come upon the seat of itself, that somebody had put it there, that an
arm had passed through that grating, this idea came to her and made her afraid It was a
genuine., fear this time; there was the stone. No doubt was possible, she (ha not touch it,
fled without daring to look behind her, took refuge in the house, and immediately shut the
glass-door of the stairs with shutter, bar, and bolt. She asked Toussaint:

"Has my father come in?"

"Not yet, mademoiselle."

(We have noticed once for all Toussaint's stammering. Let us be permitted to indicate it no
longer. We dislike the musical notation of an infirmity.)

Jean Valjean, a man given to thought and a night-walker, frequently did not return till
quite late.

"Toussaint," resumed Cosette, "you are careful in the evening to bar the shutters well, u-
pon the garden at least, and to really put the little iron things into the little rings
which fasten?"

"Oh! never fear, mademoiselle."

Toussaint did not fail, and Cosette well knew it, but she could not help adding:

"Because it is so solitary about here!"

"For that matter," said Toussaint, "that is true. We would be assassinated before we would
have time to say Boo! And then, monsieur doesn't sleep in the house. But don't be afraid,
mademoiselle, I fasten the windows like Bastilles. Lone women! I am sure it is enough to
make us shudder! Just imagine it! to see men come into the room at night and say to you:
Hush! and set themselves to cutting your throat. It isn't so much the dying, people die,
that is all right, we know very well that we must die, but it is the horror of having such
people touch you. And then their knives, they must cut badly! O God!"

"Be still," said Cosette. "Fasten everything well."

Cosette, dismayed by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint, and perhaps also by the memory
of the apparitions of the previous week which came back to her, did not even dare to say
to her: "Go and look at the stone which somebody has laid on the seat!" for fear of open-
ing the garden door again, and lest "the men" would come in. She had all the doors and
windows artfully closed, made Toussaint go over the whole house from cellar to garret,
shut herself up in her room, drew her bolts, looked under her bed. lay down, and slept
badly. All night she saw the stone big as a mountain and full of eaves.

At sunrise--the peculiarity of sunrise is to nutke us laugh at all our terrors of the
night, and our laugh is always proportioned to the few we have had--at sunrise Cosette,
on waking, looked upon her fright as upon a nightmare, and said to herself: "What have I
been dreaming about? This is like those steps which I thought I heard at night last week
in the garden I It is like the shadow of the stovepipe! And am I going to be a coward now!"

The sun. which shone through the cracks of her shutters, and made the damask curtains pur-
ple, reassured. her to such an extent that it all vanished from her thoughts, even the
stone.

"There was no stone on the bench, any more than there was a man with a round hat in the
garden; I dreamed the stone as I did the rest."

She dressed herself, went down to the garden, mn to the bench, and felt a cold sweat. The
stone was there.

But this was only for a moment. What is fright by night is curiosity by day.

"Pshaw!" said she, "now let us see."

She raised the stone, which was pretty large. There was something underneath which resem-
bled a letter.

It was a white paper envelope. Cosette seized it; there was no address on the one side, no
wafer on the other. Still the envelope, although open, was not empty. Papers could be seen
in it.

Cosette examined it. There was no more fright, there was curi-osity no more; there was a
beginning of anxious interest.

Cosette took out of the envelope what it contained, a quire of paper, each page of which
was numbered and contained a few lines written in a rather pretty hand-writing, thought
Cosette, and very fine.

Cosette looked for a name, there was none; a signature, there was none. To whom was it
addressed? to her probably, since a hand had placed the packet upon her seat. From whom
did it come? An irresistible fascination took possession of her, she endeavoured to turn
her eyes away from these leaves which trembled in her hand, she looked at the sky, the
street, the acacias all steeped in light, some pigeons which were flying about a neigh-
bouring roof, then all at once her eye eagerly sought the manuscript, and she said to
herself that she must know what there was in it.

This is what she read:



IV. A HEART UNDER A STONE



THE reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to
God, this is love.

-----

Love is the salutation of the angel to the stars.

-----

How sad is the soul when it is sad from love!

-----

What a void is the absence of the being who alone fills the world! Oh! how true it is that
the beloved being becomes God! One would conceive that God would be jealous if the Father
of all had not evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love!

-----

A glimpse of a smile under a white crape hat with a lilac coronet is enough, for the soul
to enter into the palace of dreams.

-----

God is behind all things, but all things hide God. Things are black, creatures are opaque.
To love a being, is to render her transparent.

-----

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

-----

Separated lovers deceive absence by a thousand chimerical things which still have their real-
ity. They are prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they find a
multitude of mysterious means of correspondence. They commission the song of the birds, the
perfume of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighs of the wind,
the beams of the stars, the whole creation. And why not? All the works of God were made to
serve love. Love is powerful enough to charge all nature with its messages.

O Spring! thou art a letter which I write to her.

-----

The future belongs still more to the heart than to the mind. To love is the only thing which
can occupy and fill up eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible.

-----

Love partakes of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like it, it is a divine spark;
like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire which is with-
in us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and which nothing can extin-
guish. We feel it burn even in the marrow of our bones, and we see it radiate even to the
depths of the sky.

-----

O love! adorations! light of two minds which comprehend each other, of two hearts which are
interchanged, of two glances which interpenetrate! You will come to me, will you not, happi-
ness? Walks together in the solitudes! clays blessed and radiant! I have sometimes dreamed
that from time to time hours detached themselves from the life of the angels and came here
below to pass through the destiny of men.

-----

God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love one another, but to give them unending
duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is an augmentation indeed; but to increase
in its intensity the ineffable felicity which love gives to the soul in this world, is impos-
sible, even with God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the plenitude of man.

-----

You look at a star from two motives, because it is luminous and because it is impenetrable.
You have at your side a softer radiance and a greater mystery; woman.

-----

We all, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. If they fail us, the air fails us,
we stifle, then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible. The asphyxia of the soul.

-----

When love has melted and mingled two beings into an angelic and sacred unity, the secret of
life is found for them; they are then but the two terms of a single destiny; they are then but
the two wings of a single spirit. Love, soar!

-----

The day that a woman who is passing before you sheds a light upon you as she goes, you are
lost, you love. You have then but one thing to do: to think of her so earnestly that she will
be compelled to think of you.

-----

What love begins can be finished only by God.

True love is in despair and in raptures over a glove lost or a hands kerchief found, and it
requires eternity for its devotion and its hopes. It is composed at the same time of the infi-
nitely great and the infinitely small.

-----

If you are stone, be loadstone, if you are plant, be sensitive, if you are man, be love.

-----

Nothing suffices love. We have happiness, we wish for paradise; we have paradise, we wish for
Heaven.

O ye who love each other, all this is in love. Be wise enough to find it. Love has, as much
as Heaven, contemplation, and more than Heaven, passionate delight.

-----

"Does she still come to the Luxembourg?" "No, monsieur." "She hears mass in this church, does
she not?" "She comes here no more." "Does she still live in this house?" "She has moved away!"
"Whither has she gone to live?" "She did not say!"

What a gloomy thing, not to know the address of one's soul?

-----

Love has its childlikenesses, the other passions have their littlenesses. Shame on the passions
which render man little! Honour to that which makes him a child!

-----

There is a strange thing, do you know it? I am in the night. There is a being who has gone away
and carried the heavens with her.

-----

Oh! to be laid side by side in the same tomb; hand clasped in hand, and from time to time, in the
darkness, to caress a finger gently, that would Suffice for my eternity.

-----

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

-----

Love. A sombre starry transfiguration is mingled with this crucifixion. There is ecstasy in the
agony.

-----

0 joy of the birds! it is because they have their nest that they have their song.

-----

Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.

-----

Deep hearts, wise minds take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an unintelligible prep-
aration for the unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for man at the first step in
the interior of the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to discern the definite.
The definite, think of this word. The living see the infinite; the definite reveals itself only
to the dead. Meantime, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to him who shall have
loved bodies, forms. appearances only. Death will take all from him. Try to love souls, you shall
find them again.

-----

I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was thread-
bare--there were holes at his elbows; the water passed through his shoes and the stars through
his soul.

-----

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love! The heart becomes heroic
through passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests upon
anything but what is elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more spring up in it than a
nettle upon a glacier. The soul lofty and serene, inaccessible to common passions and common e-
motions, rising above the clouds and the shadows of this world, its follies, its falsehoods, its hates,
its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of the skies, and only feels more the deep and subter-
ranean commot ions of destiny, as the summit of the mountains feels the quaking of the earth.

-----

Were there not someone who loved, the sun would be extinguished.



V. COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER



DURING the reading, Cosette entered gradually into reverie. At the moment she raised her eyes
from the last line of the last page, the handsome officer, it was his hour, passed triumphant before
the grating. Cosette thought him hideous.

She began again to contemplate the letter. It was written in a ravishing hand-writing, thought
Cosette; in the same hand, but with different inks, sometimes very black, sometimes pale, as ink
is put into the ink-stand, and consequently on different days. It was then a thought which had
poured itself out there, sigh by sigh, irregularly, without order, without choice, without aim,
at hazard. Cosette had never read anything like it. This manuscript, in which she found still
more clearness than obscurity, had the effect upon her of a half-opened sanctuary. Each of these
mysterious lines was resplendent to her eyes, and flooded her heart with a strange light. The e-
ducation which she had received had always spoken to her of the soul and never of love, almost
like one who should speak of the brand and not of the flame. This manuscript of fifteen pages
revealed to her suddenly and sweetly the whole of love, the sorrow, the destiny, the life, the
eternity, the beginning, the end. It was like a hand which had opened and thrown suddenly upon
her a handful of sunbeams. She felt in these few lines a passionate, ardent, generous, honest
nature, a consecrated will, an immense sorrow and a boundless hope, an oppressed heart, a glad
ecstasy. What was this manuscript? a letter. A letter with no address, no name, no date, no sig-
nature, intense and disinterested, an enigma composed of truths, a message of love made to be
brought by an angel and read by a virgin, a rendezvous given beyond the earth, a love-letter
from a phantom to a shade. He was a calm yet exhausted absent one, who seemed ready to take
refuge in death, and who sent to the absent Her the secret of destiny, the key of life, love,
it bad been written with the foot in the grave and the finger in Heaven. These lines, fallen
one by one upon the paper, were what might be called drops of soul.

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

Cosette did not hesitate for a moment. One single man.

He!

Day had revived in her mind; all had appeared again. She felt a wonderful joy and deep anguish.
It was he! he who wrote to her!. he who was there! he whose arm had passed through that grating!
While she was forgetting him, he had found her again! But had she forgotten him? No, never! She
was mad to have thought so for a moment. She had always loved him, always adored him. The fire
had been covered and had smouldered for a time, but she clearly saw it had only sunk in the deep-
er, and now it burst out anew and fired her whole being. This letter was like a spark dropped
from that other soul into hers. She felt the conflagration rekindling. She was penetrated by e-
very word of the manuscript: "Oh, yes!" said she, "how I recognise all this! This is what I had
already read in his eyes."

As she finished it for the third time, Lieutenant Thaidule returned before the grating, and rat-
tled his spurs on the pavement. Cosette mechanically raised her eyes. She thought him flat, stu-
pid, silly, useless, conceited, odious, impertinent, and very ugly. The officer thought it his duty
to smile. She turned away insulted and indignant. She would have been glad to have thrown
something at his head.

She fled, went back to the house and shut herself up in her room to read over the manuscript a-
gain, to learn it by heart, and to muse. When she had read it well, she kissed it, and put it in
her bosom.

It was done. Cosette had fallen back into the profound seraphic love. The abyss of Eden had reo-
pened.

All that day Cosette was in a sort of stupefaction. She could hardly think, her ideas were like
a tangled skein in her brain. She could really conjecture nothing, she hoped while yet trembling,
what? vague things. She dared to promise herself nothing, and site would ref use herself nothing.
Pallors passed over her face and chills over her body. It seemed to her at moments that she was
entering the chimerical; she said to herself, "is it real?" then she felt of the beloved paper
under her dress, she pressed it against her heart, she felt its corners upon her flesh, and if
Jean Valjean had seen her at that moment, he would have shuddered before that luminous and un-
known joy which flashed from her eyes. "Oh, yes!" thought she, "it is indeed he! this comes from
him for me!"And she said to herself, that an intervention of angels, that a celestial chance had
restored him to her.

O transfigurations of love! O dreams! this celestial chance, this intervention of angels, was
that bullet of bread thrown by one robber to another robber, from the Charlemagne court to La
Fosse aux Lions, over the roofs of La Force.



VI. THE OLD ARE MADE TO GO OUT WHEN CONVENIENT



WHEN evening came, Jean Valjean went out; Cosette dressed herself. She arranged her hair in
the manner which best became her. auil she put on a dress the neck of which, as it had receiv-
ed one es to go out, opens his door, it is done, he is out of doors. You, if you wish to go out,
cut of the scissors too much; and as, by this slope, it allowed the turn of the neck to be
seen, was, as young girls say "a little immodest." It was not the least in the world immod-
est, but it was prettier than otherwise. She did all this without knowing why.

Did she intend to go out? no.

Did she expect a visit? no.

At dusk, she went down to the garden. Toussaint was busy in her kitchen, which looked out
upon the back-yard.

She began to walk under the branches, puffing them aside with her hand from time to time,
because there were some that were very low.

She thus reached the scat.

The stone was still there.

She sat clown, and laid her soft white hand upon that stone as if she would caress it and
thank it.

All at once, she bad that indefinable impression which we feel, though we see nothing, when
there is somebody standing behind us. Site turned her head and
arose.

It was he.

He was bareheaded. He appeared pale and thin. She hardly discerned his black dress. The twi-
light dimmed his fine forehead, and covered his eyes with darkness. He had, under a veil of
incomparable sweetness, something of death and of night. His face was lighted by the light of
a dying day, and by the thought of a departing soul.

It seemed as if he was not yet a phantom, and was now no longer a man.

His hat was lying a few steps distant in the shrubbery:

Cosette, ready to faint, did not titter a cry. She drew back slott for she felt herself at-
tracted forward. He did not stir. Through the sad and ineffable something which enwrapped
him, she felt the hmk of his eyes, which she did not see.

Cosette, in retreating, encountered a tree, and leaned against it.

But for this tree, she would have fallen.

Then she heard his voice, that voice which she had never really heard, hardly rising above
the rustling of the leaves, and murmuring:

'Pardon me, I am here. My heart is bursting, I could not live as I was, I have come. I
have you read what I placed there, on this sot? do you recognise me at all? do not be a-
fraid of me. It is a long time now, do you remember the day when you looked upon me? wac-
cIcsti the Luxembourg, near the Gladiator. And the day when yin before me? it Was the 16th
of June and the 2nd of July. It will soon be a year. For a very long time now, I have not
seen you at all. Iasked the chairkeeper, she told me that she saw you no more. You lived in
the Rue de l'Ouest, on the third floor front, in a new house,you see that I know! I fol-
lowed you. What was I to do? And then you disappeared. I thought I saw you pass once
when I was reading the papers under the arches of the Odeon. I ran. But no, It was a per-
son who had a hat like yours. At night, I come here. Do not be afraid, nobody sees me.
I come for a near look at your windows. I walk very softly that you may not hear, for
perhaps you would be afraid. The other evening I was behind you, you turned round, I
fled. Once I heard you sing. I was happy. Does it disturb you that I should hear you
sing through the shutter? it can do you no harm. It cannot, can it?

See, you are my angel, let me come sometimes; believe I am going to die. If you but knew!
I adore you! Pardon me, I am talking to you, I do not know what I am saying to you, per-
haps I annoy you, do I annoy you?"

"O mother!" said she.

And she sank down upon herself as if she were dying.

He caught her, she fell, he caught her in his arms, he grasped her tightly, unconscious
of what he was doing. He supported her even while tottering himself.

He felt as if his head were enveloped in smoke; flashes of light passed through his eye-
lids; his ideas vanished; it seemed to him that he was performing a religious act, and that
he was committing a profanation. Moreover, he did not feel one passionate emotion for this
ravishing woman, whose form he felt against his heart. He was lost in love.

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

"You love me, then?"

She answered in a voice so low that it was no more than a breath which could scarcely be
heard:

"Hush! you know it!"

And she hid her blushing head in the bosom of the proud and intoxicated young man.

He fell upon the seat, she by his side. There were no more words. The stars were beginning
to shine. How was it that their lips met? How is it that the birds sing, that the snow
melts, that the rose opens, that May blooms, that the dawn whitens behind the black trees
on the shivering summit of the hills??

One kiss, and that was all.

Both trembled, and they looked at each other in the darkness with brilliant eyes.

They felt neither the fresh night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp ground, nor the wet
grass, they looked at each other, and their hearts were full of thought. They had clasped
hands, without knowing it.

She did not ask him, she did not even think of it, in what way and by what means he had
succeeded in penetrating into the garde^ It. seemed so natural to her
that he should be there?

From time to time Marius', knee touched Cosette's knee, which gave them both a thrill.

At intervals, Cosette faltered out a word. Her soul trembled upon her lips like a drop of
dew upon a flower.

Gradually they began to talk. Overflow succeeded to silence, which is fulness. The night
was serene and splendid above their heads. These two beings, pure as spirits, told each
other all their dreams, their frenzies, their ecstasies, their chimeras, their despond-
encies, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other,
their despair when they had ceased to see each other. They confided to each other in an
intimacy of the ideal, which even now nothing could have increased, all that was most
hidden and most mysterious of themselves. They related to each other, with a candid faith
in their illusions, all that love, youth, and that remnant of childhood was theirs, sug-
gested to their thought. These two hearts poured themselves out into each other, so that
at the end of an hour, it was the young man who had the young girl's soul and the young
girl who bad the soul of the young man. They inter-penetrated, they enchanted, they
dazzled each other.

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

"What is your name?"

"My name is Marius," said he. "And yours?"

"My name is Cosette."

BOOK FIFTH:
THE END OF WHICH IS UNLIKE THE BEGINNING