‘Oh, that’s just a silly name they gave me when I was a child. I’m really Euphrasia. Do you like Euphrasia?’
‘Yes… But I don’t think Cosette is silly.’
‘Do you like it better than Euphrasia?’
‘Well-yes.’
‘Then so do I. You’re quite right. It’s a nice name. So you must always call me Cosette.’
And the smile accompanying the words made of that scrap of conversation an idyll worthy of a woodland in Heaven.
Another time, after looking hard at him she exclaimed:
‘Allow me to tell you, Monsieur, that you’re good-looking, you’re very handsome, and you’re clever, not a bit stupid, much more learned than I am. But I can match you in one thing - I love you!’
Marius in his rapture might have been hearing the melody of the spheres.
Then again, when he happened to cough, she gave him a little reproving pat and said: ‘You’re not to cough. No one is allowed to cough in my house without permission. It’s naughty of you to cough and worry me. I want you to be well always, because if you aren’t I shall be very unhappy.’
He said to her once: ‘Do you know, at one time I thought your name was Ursula?’ This thought kept them amused for the rest of the evening.
And during another conversation he suddenly exclaimed:
‘Well, there was one time in the Luxembourg when I would have liked to break an army veteran’s neck.’
But he did not go on with that story. He could not have done so without mentioning her garter, and this was out of the question. There was a whole world, that of the flesh, from which their innocent love recoiled with a kind of religious awe.
It was thus, and with nothing added, that Marius envisaged his life with Cosette - his coming every evening to the Rue Plumet, wriggling through that convenient gate, sitting beside her on the bench, the fold of his trouser mingling with the spread of her skirts while they watched the growing glitter of starlight through the trees, softly stroking her thumb-nail, addressing her as ‘tu’, breathing with her the scent of the same flowers - all this was to continue indefinitely, to last for ever. Meanwhile the clouds drifted above their heads. When the wind blows it blows away more human dreams than clouds in the sky.
But that is not to say that this almost fiercely chaste love was wholly lacking in gallantry. No. To ‘pay compliments’ to the loved person is the first step on the way to caresses, tentative audacity trying out its wings. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil. Physical fulfilment makes its presence known, while still remaining hidden. The heart draws back from this fulfilment in order to love the more. Marius’s wooing, pervaded as it was with fantasy, was, so to speak, ethereal. The birds when they fly aloft in company with the angels must understand words such as he spoke. Yet there was life in them, manliness, all that was positive in Marius. They were words spoken in the grotto, the foreshadowing of those to be spoken in the alcove, lyrical effusions of mingled prose and poetry, soft flatteries, all love’s most delicate refinements arranged in a scented and subtle bouquet, the ineffable murmur of heart to heart.
‘How lovely you are!’ sighed Marius.’ I scarcely dare look at you, and so I have to contemplate you at a distance. You are grace itself and my senses reel even at the sight of your slipper beneath the hem of your skirt. And the light that dawns when I catch a glimpse of what you are thinking! Such good sense. There are moments when you seem to me a figure in a dream. Go on talking and let me listen. Oh, Cosette, how strange and wonderful it is! I think I am a little mad. I so worship you. I study your feet with a magnifying glass and your soul with a telescope.’
To which she replied:
‘I love you more with every minute that passes.’
Random conversations in which question and answer must take their chance, always returning to the subject of love, like those weighted dolls which always come upright.
Cosette’s whole being expressed artlessness and ingenuousness, a white transparency, candour and light. One might say of her that she was light itself. She conveyed to the beholder a sense of April and daybreak; there was dew in her eyes. She was the condensation of dawn light in a woman’s form.
It was natural that Marius should admire as well as adore her; but the truth is that the little schoolgirl, so newly shaped by the convent, talked with great sagacity and said many things that were both true and perceptive. Her very babblings had meaning. She saw clearly and was not easily deceived, being guided by the soft, infallible instinct of the feminine heart. Only women have this gift for saying things that are at once tender and profound. Tenderness and depth: all womanhood resides in these, and all Heaven.
In this state of utter felicity tears rose constantly to their eyes. A crushed insect, a feather fallen from a nest, a broken sprig of hawthorn, these things moved them to pity, and their rapture, always near to melancholy, found relief in tears. The sovereign manifestation of love is a sense of compassion that at times is well-nigh intolerable.
And with all this - for these contradictions form the lightning-play of love – they laughed constantly and unrestrainedly, so familiarly that they might have been a pair of boys at play. Yet even in hearts intoxicated with chastity Nature is always present, always in pursuit of her sublime, remorseless aims; and, however great the purity of souls, even in the most innocent of relationships the wonderful and mysterious difference is still to be felt which separates a pair of lovers from a pair of friends.
They adored each other; but still the permanent and the immutable subsist. We may love and laugh, pout, clasp hands, smile and exchange endearments, but that does not affect eternity. Two lovers hide in the dusk of evening, amid flowers and the twittering of birds, and enchant each other with their hearts shining in their eyes; but the stars in their courses still circle through infinite space.
II
The bemusement of perfect happiness
Thus, bathed in happiness, they lived untroubled by the world. They paid no heed to the epidemic of cholera which during that month ravaged Paris. They had told each other as much about themselves as they could, but it did not go very far beyond their names. Marius had told Cosette that he was an orphan, that his name was Marius Pontmercy, that he was a lawyer and that he got his living by working for publishers; that his father had been a colonel and a hero, and that he, Marius, had quarrelled with his grandfather, who was rich. He had also mentioned in passing that he was a baron, but this had made no impression on Cosette. Marius a baron? She had not understood, not knowing what the word meant. Marius was Marius. And on her side she had told him that she had been brought up in the Petit-Picpus convent, that her mother was dead, like his own, that her father was Monsieur Fauchelevent, that he was a good man who gave generously to the poor although he was poor himself, and that he denied himself everything while denying her nothing.
Strangely, to Marius in his present state of entrancement, all past events, even the most recent, seemed so misty and remote that he was quite satisfied with what Cosette told him. It did not occur to him even to mention the drama in the tenement, the Thénardiers, the burnt arm and the strange behaviour and remarkable disappearance of her father. All this had for the time being completely escaped his mind. He forgot in the evening what he had done in the morning, whether he had breakfasted, whether he had spoken to anyone. The trilling of birds deafened his ears to all other sounds; he was only really alive when he was with Cosette. And so, being in Heaven, it was easy for him to lose sight of earth. Both of them languorously bore the impalpable burden of unfleshly delights. It is thus that the sleep-walkers who are called lovers live.
Alas, who has not known that enchanted state? Why must the moment come when we emerge from that bliss, and why must life go on afterwards?
Loving is almost a substitute for thinking. Love is a burning forgetfulness of all other things. How shall we ask passion to be logical? Absolute logic is no more to be found in the human heart than you may find a perfect geometrical fi
gure in the structure of the heavens. Nothing else existed for Cosette and Marius except Marius and Cosette. The world around them had vanished in a cloud. They lived in a golden moment, seeing nothing ahead of them and nothing behind. Marius was scarcely conscious of the fact that Cosette had a father; his wits were drugged with happiness. So what did they talk about, those lovers? They talked about flowers and swallows, sunset and moonrise, everything that to them was important; about everything and about nothing. The everything of lovers is a nothing. But as for her father, real life, the gang of ruffians, and the adventure in the attic - why bother to talk about all that? Was it even certain that that nightmare had really happened? They were together and they adored each other and that was all that concerned them. Other things did not exist. It is probable that the vanishing of Hell at our backs is inherent in the coming of Paradise. Have we really seen devils? - are there such things? - have we trembled and suffered? We no longer remember. They are lost in a rosy haze.
The two of them lived in that exalted state, in all the make-believe that is a part of nature, neither at the nadir nor at the zenith; somewhere between mankind and the angels; above the mire but below the upper air - in the clouds; scarcely flesh and blood, but spirit and ecstasy from head to foot; too exalted to walk on earth but still too human to disappear into the blue, suspended in life like molecules in solution that await precipitation; seemingly beyond the reach of fate; escaped from the rut of yesterday, today, tomorrow; marvelling, breathless and swaying, at moments light enough to fly off into infinite space, almost ready to vanish into eternity.
They drowsed wide-eyed in that cradled state, in the splendid lethargy of the real overwhelmed by the ideal. Such was Cosette’s beauty that at moments Marius closed his eyes; and that is the best way to see the soul, with the eyes closed.
They did not ask where this was taking them; they felt that they had arrived. It is one of the strange demands of mankind that love must take them somewhere.
III
The first shadows
Jean Valjean suspected nothing.
Cosette, less given to dreaming than Marius, was gay, and that was enough to make him happy. The thoughts in Cosette’s mind, her tender preoccupations, the picture of Marius that dwelt in her heart, all this in no way diminished the purity of her chaste and smiling countenance. She was at the age when a virgin girl bears her love like an angel carrying a lily. So Valjean was easy in his mind. And then when two lovers are in perfect harmony everything is easy to them; any third party who might disturb their love is kept in ignorance by those small concealments which are practised by all lovers. Thus, Cosette never opposed any wish of Valjean’s. Did he want to go out? Yes, dear father. He would rather stay at home? Very well. He wanted to spend the evening with her? She was delighted. Since he always went to bed at ten, Marius on these occasions never entered the garden until after that hour, and after hearing Cosette open the door on to the terrace. It goes without saying that Marius never showed himself by daytime, and indeed Valjean had forgotten his existence. But it happened one morning that he remarked to Cosette: ‘Your back’s all white.’ The evening before Marius, in a moment of rapture, had pressed her against the wall.
Old Toussaint, who went to bed early and only wanted to sleep once her work was done, was as ignorant as Valjean of what was going on.
Marius never set foot in the house. He and Cosette were accustomed to hide in a recess near the steps, where they could not be seen or heard from the street, and being seated were often content merely to clasp hands in silence while they gazed up at the branches of the trees. A thunderbolt might have fallen a few yards away without their noticing, so absorbed was each in the other. A state of limpid purity. Hours that were all white and nearly all the same. Love-affairs such as this are like a collection of lily-petals and doves’ feathers.
The whole stretch of garden lay between them and the street. Every time Marius entered or left he carefully re-arranged the bars of the gate, so that the fact that they had been moved would not be noticed.
He left as a rule at midnight and walked back to Courfeyrac’s lodging. Courfeyrac said to Bahorel:
‘Would you believe it! Marius has taken to coming home at one in the morning!’
‘Well, what of it?’ said Bahorel. ‘Still waters run deep.’
And sometimes Courfeyrac would fold his arms and say sternly to Marius:
‘You’re going off the rails, young fellow-me-lad.’
Courfeyrac, being of a practical turn of mind, did not take kindly to this glow of a secret paradise that surrounded Marius. He was not accustomed to undisclosed raptures. They bored him, and from time to time he would try to bring Marius down to earth. He said to him on one occasion:
‘My dear fellow, you seem to me these days to be living on the moon, in the kingdom of dreams of which the capital is the City of Soap-Bubble. Be a good chap and tell me her name.’
But nothing would make Marius talk. Not even torture could have extracted from him the sacred syllables of the name, Cosette. True love is as radiant as the dawn and as silent as the tomb. But Courfeyrac perceived this change in Marius, seeing that his very secretiveness was radiant.
Throughout that mild month of May, Marius and Cosette discovered these tremendous sources of happiness: The happiness of quarrelling simply for the fun of making up; of discussing at length and in exhaustive detail persons in whom they took no interest whatever, which is one more proof that in the ravishing opera that is called love the libretto is of almost no importance. The happiness, for Marius, of listening to Cosette talk about frills and furbelows, and, for Cosette, of listening to Marius talk about politics. The happiness for both of them, while they sat with knee touching knee, of hearing the distant sound of traffic on the Rue de Babylone; looking upwards to speculate on the same star in the sky, or downwards to study the same glow-worm in the grass; of being silent together, which is even more delightful than to talk… And so on.
But meanwhile complications were looming.
One evening when Marius was on his way along the Boulevard des Invalides to keep their nightly rendezvous, walking as usual with his eyes on the ground, just as he was about to turn into the Rue Plumet a voice spoke to him.
‘Good evening, Monsieur Marius.’
He looked up and saw Éponine.
The encounter gave him a shock. He had not given the girl a thought since the day she had led him to the Rue Plumet; he had not seen her again, and the memory of her had completely slipped his mind. He had every reason to be grateful to her; he owed his present happiness to her, and yet it embarrassed him to meet her.
It is a mistake to suppose that the state of being in love, be it never so happy and innocent, makes a man perfect. As we have seen, it simply makes him forgetful. If he forgets to be evil, he also forgets to be good. The sense of gratitude and obligation, the recollection of everyday essentials, all this tends to disappear. At any other time Marius would have treated Éponine quite differently; but absorbed as he was in the thought of Cosette he scarcely remembered that her full name was Éponine Thénardier, that she bore a name bequeathed to him by his father and one which, a few months earlier, he had longed to serve. We have to depict Marius as he was. Even the memory of his father had faded a little in the splendour of his love-affair.
He said awkwardly:
‘Oh, it’s you, Éponine.’
‘Why do you speak to me in that cold way? Have I done something wrong?’
‘No,’ he said.
Certainly he had nothing against her - far from it. It was simply that, with all his warmth bestowed on Cosette he had none for Éponine.
He stayed silent and she burst out, ‘But why -?’ But then she stopped. It seemed that words had failed the once so brazen and heedless creature. She tried to smile but could not. She said ‘Well…’ and then again was wordless, standing with lowered eyes.
‘Good night, Monsieur Marius,’ she said abruptly, and left him.
IV
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The watchdog
The next day was 3 June 1832, a date which must be set down because of the grave events now impending, that loomed like thunderclouds over Paris. Marius that evening was going the same way as on the previous evening, his head filled with the same thoughts and his heart charged with the same happiness, when he saw Éponine coming towards him past the trees on the boulevard. Two days in succession was too much. He turned sharply off the boulevard and made for the Rue Plumet by way of the Rue Monsieur.
This caused Éponine to follow him as far as the Rue Plumet, a thing which she had not previously done. Hitherto she had been content to watch him on his way along the boulevard without seeking to attract his notice. The previous evening was the first time she had ventured to speak to him.
So, without his knowing it, she followed him, and saw him slip through the wrought-iron gate into the garden. ‘Well! He’s going into the house!’ she concluded, and, testing the bars of the gate, rapidly discovered his means of entry. ‘Not for you, dearie,’ she murmured sadly.
As though taking up guard duty, she sat down on the step at the point where the stone gatepost adjoined the neighbouring wall. It was a dark corner which hid her entirely. She stayed there for more than an hour without moving, her mind busy with its thoughts. At about ten o’clock one of the two or three persons accustomed to use the Rue Plumet, an elderly gentleman hastening to get away from that lonely and ill-famed street, heard a low resentful voice say, ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he came here every night!’ He looked round but could see no one, and, not daring to peer into the dark corner, hurried on in great alarm.
He did well to hurry, for a very short time afterwards six men entered the Rue Plumet. They came in single file, walking at some distance from one another and skirting the edge of the street like a scouting patrol. The first of them stopped at the wrought-iron gate, where he waited for the rest to catch up, until all six of them were gathered together.
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