________________________________________________
_ The reader has probably understood that Eponine, having recognized
through the gate, the inhabitant of that Rue Plumet whither
Magnon had sent her, had begun by keeping the ruffians away from
the Rue Plumet, and had then conducted Marius thither, and that,
after many days spent in ecstasy before that gate, Marius, drawn on
by that force which draws the iron to the magnet and a lover towards
the stones of which is built the house of her whom he loves,
had finally entered Cosette's garden as Romeo entered the garden
of Juliet. This had even proved easier for him than for Romeo;
Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, Marius had only to use a little
force on one of the bars of the decrepit gate which vacillated
in its rusty recess, after the fashion of old people's teeth.
Marius was slender and readily passed through.
As there was never any one in the street, and as Marius never
entered the garden except at night, he ran no risk of being seen.
Beginning with that blessed and holy hour when a kiss betrothed
these two souls, Marius was there every evening. If, at that period
of her existence, Cosette had fallen in love with a man in the least
unscrupulous or debauched, she would have been lost; for there are
generous natures which yield themselves, and Cosette was one of them.
One of woman's magnanimities is to yield. Love, at the height where
it is absolute, is complicated with some indescribably celestial
blindness of modesty. But what dangers you run, O noble souls!
Often you give the heart, and we take the body. Your heart remains
with you, you gaze upon it in the gloom with a shudder. Love has
no middle course; it either ruins or it saves. All human destiny
lies in this dilemma. This dilemma, ruin, or safety, is set forth
no more inexorably by any fatality than by love. Love is life,
if it is not death. Cradle; also coffin. The same sentiment says
"yes" and "no" in the human heart. Of all the things that God
has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light,
alas! and the most darkness.
God willed that Cosette's love should encounter one of the loves
which save.
Throughout the whole of the month of May of that year 1832,
there were there, in every night, in that poor, neglected garden,
beneath that thicket which grew thicker and more fragrant day by day,
two beings composed of all chastity, all innocence, overflowing with
all the felicity of heaven, nearer to the archangels than to mankind,
pure, honest, intoxicated, radiant, who shone for each other amid
the shadows. It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to
Marius that Cosette had a nimbus. They touched each other, they gazed
at each other, they clasped each other's hands, they pressed close
to each other; but there was a distance which they did not pass.
Not that they respected it; they did not know of its existence.
Marius was conscious of a barrier, Cosette's innocence; and Cosette
of a support, Marius' loyalty. The first kiss had also been
the last. Marius, since that time, had not gone further than to touch
Cosette's hand, or her kerchief, or a lock of her hair, with his lips.
For him, Cosette was a perfume and not a woman. He inhaled her.
She refused nothing, and he asked nothing. Cosette was happy,
and Marius was satisfied. They lived in this ecstatic state which
can be described as the dazzling of one soul by another soul.
It was the ineffable first embrace of two maiden souls in the ideal.
Two swans meeting on the Jungfrau.
At that hour of love, an hour when voluptuousness is absolutely mute,
beneath the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic Marius,
would rather have gone to a woman of the town than have raised
Cosette's robe to the height of her ankle. Once, in the moonlight,
Cosette stooped to pick up something on the ground, her bodice fell
apart and permitted a glimpse of the beginning of her throat.
Marius turned away his eyes.
What took place between these two beings? Nothing. They adored
each other.
At night, when they were there, that garden seemed a living and a
sacred spot. All flowers unfolded around them and sent them incense;
and they opened their souls and scattered them over the flowers.
The wanton and vigorous vegetation quivered, full of strength
and intoxication, around these two innocents, and they uttered words
of love which set the trees to trembling.
What words were these? Breaths. Nothing more. These breaths
sufficed to trouble and to touch all nature round about.
Magic power which we should find it difficult to understand were we
to read in a book these conversations which are made to be borne away
and dispersed like smoke wreaths by the breeze beneath the leaves.
Take from those murmurs of two lovers that melody which proceeds
from the soul and which accompanies them like a lyre, and what
remains is nothing more than a shade; you say: "What! is that all!"
eh! yes, childish prattle, repetitions, laughter at nothing,
nonsense, everything that is deepest and most sublime in the world!
The only things which are worth the trouble of saying and hearing!
The man who has never heard, the man who has never uttered
these absurdities, these paltry remarks, is an imbecile
and a malicious fellow. Cosette said to Marius:--
"Dost thou know?--"
[In all this and athwart this celestial maidenliness, and without
either of them being able to say how it had come about, they had
begun to call each other thou.]
"Dost thou know? My name is Euphrasie."
"Euphrasie? Why, no, thy name is Cosette."
"Oh! Cosette is a very ugly name that was given to me when I
was a little thing. But my real name is Euphrasie. Dost thou
like that name--Euphrasie?"
"Yes. But Cosette is not ugly."
"Do you like it better than Euphrasie?"
"Why, yes."
"Then I like it better too. Truly, it is pretty, Cosette.
Call me Cosette."
And the smile that she added made of this dialogue an idyl worthy
of a grove situated in heaven. On another occasion she gazed
intently at him and exclaimed:--
"Monsieur, you are handsome, you are good-looking, you are witty,
you are not at all stupid, you are much more learned than I am,
but I bid you defiance with this word: I love you!"
And Marius, in the very heavens, thought he heard a strain sung
by a star.
Or she bestowed on him a gentle tap because he coughed, and she
said to him:--
"Don't cough, sir; I will not have people cough on my domain without
my permission. It's very naughty to cough and to disturb me.
I want you to be well, because, in the first place, if you were
not well, I should be very unhappy. What should I do then?"
And this was simply divine.
Once Marius said to Cosette:--
"Just imagine, I thought at one time that your name was Ursule."
This made both of them laugh the whole evening.
In the middle of another conversation, he chanced to exclaim:--
"Oh! One day, at the Luxembourg, I had a good mind to finish
breaking up a veteran!" But he stopped short, and went no further.
He would have been obliged to speak to Cosette of her garter,
and that was impossible. This bordered on a strange theme, the flesh,
before which that immense and innocent love recoiled with a sort
of sacred fright.
Marius pictured life with Cosette to himself like this,
without anything else; to come every evening to the Rue Plumet,
to displace the old and accommodating bar of the chief-justice's gate,
to sit elbow to elbow on that bench, to gaze through the trees at
the scintillation of the on-coming night, to fit a fold of the knee
of his trousers into the ample fall of Cosette's gown, to caress
her thumb-nail, to call her thou, to smell of the same flower,
one after the other, forever, indefinitely. During this time,
clouds passed above their heads. Every time that the wind blows it
bears with it more of the dreams of men than of the clouds of heaven.
This chaste, almost shy love was not devoid of gallantry,
by any means. To pay compliments to the woman whom a man loves
is the first method of bestowing caresses, and he is half audacious
who tries it. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Voluptuousness mingles there with its sweet tiny point, while it
hides itself. The heart draws back before voluptuousness only to
love the more. Marius' blandishments, all saturated with fancy,
were, so to speak, of azure hue. The birds when they fly up yonder,
in the direction of the angels, must hear such words. There were
mingled with them, nevertheless, life, humanity, all the positiveness
of which Marius was capable. It was what is said in the bower,
a prelude to what will be said in the chamber; a lyrical effusion,
strophe and sonnet intermingled, pleasing hyperboles of cooing,
all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and exhaling
a celestial perfume, an ineffable twitter of heart to heart.
"Oh!" murmured Marius, "how beautiful you are! I dare not look at you.
It is all over with me when I contemplate you. You are a grace.
I know not what is the matter with me. The hem of your gown,
when the tip of your shoe peeps from beneath, upsets me. And then,
what an enchanted gleam when you open your thought even but a little!
You talk astonishingly good sense. It seems to me at times
that you are a dream. Speak, I listen, I admire. Oh Cosette!
how strange it is and how charming! I am really beside myself.
You are adorable, Mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope
and your soul with the telescope."
And Cosette answered:--
"I have been loving a little more all the time that has passed
since this morning."
Questions and replies took care of themselves in this dialogue,
which always turned with mutual consent upon love, as the little
pith figures always turn on their peg.
Cosette's whole person was ingenuousness, ingenuity, transparency,
whiteness, candor, radiance. It might have been said of Cosette
that she was clear. She produced on those who saw her the
sensation of April and dawn. There was dew in her eyes.
Cosette was a condensation of the auroral light in the form of a woman.
It was quite simple that Marius should admire her, since he adored her.
But the truth is, that this little school-girl, fresh from the convent,
talked with exquisite penetration and uttered, at times, all sorts
of true and delicate sayings. Her prattle was conversation.
She never made a mistake about anything, and she saw things justly.
The woman feels and speaks with the tender instinct of the heart,
which is infallible.
No one understands so well as a woman, how to say things that are,
at once, both sweet and deep. Sweetness and depth, they are the whole
of woman; in them lies the whole of heaven.
In this full felicity, tears welled up to their eyes every instant.
A crushed lady-bug, a feather fallen from a nest, a branch of
hawthorn broken, aroused their pity, and their ecstasy, sweetly mingled
with melancholy, seemed to ask nothing better than to weep.
The most sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness that is, at times,
almost unbearable.
And, in addition to this,--all these contradictions are the lightning
play of love,--they were fond of laughing, they laughed readily
and with a delicious freedom, and so familiarly that they sometimes
presented the air of two boys.
Still, though unknown to hearts intoxicated with purity, nature is always
present and will not be forgotten. She is there with her brutal and
sublime object; and however great may be the innocence of souls, one feels
in the most modest private interview, the adorable and mysterious
shade which separates a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.
They idolized each other.
The permanent and the immutable are persistent. People live,
they smile, they laugh, they make little grimaces with the tips of
their lips, they interlace their fingers, they call each other thou,
and that does not prevent eternity.
Two lovers hide themselves in the evening, in the twilight,
in the invisible, with the birds, with the roses; they fascinate
each other in the darkness with their hearts which they throw
into their eyes, they murmur, they whisper, and in the meantime,
immense librations of the planets fill the infinite universe. _
Read next: VOLUME IV: BOOK EIGHTH - ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS: CHAPTER II. The Bewilderment of Perfect Happiness
Read previous: VOLUME IV: BOOK SEVENTH - SLANG: CHAPTER IV. The Two Duties: To Watch and to Hope
Table of content of Les Miserables
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
