Виктор Мари Гюго
Les Misérables, v. 4
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.
