COSETTE’S STATE of unhappiness, so acute and poignant only a few months earlier, was growing less, even in her own despite. Youth and springtime, her love for her father, the brightness of birds and flowers, were by gradual degrees fostering in that young and virginal spirit something akin to forgetfulness. Did it mean that the fire was quite extinguished, or were the embers still glowing beneath a crust of ashes? The fact is that now she scarcely ever felt any sharp stab of pain. One day, recalling Marius, she thought, ‘I don’t even think of him!’
It was a few days after this that she observed, passing their garden gate, a handsome young cavalry officer with a wasp waist and a waxed moustache, fair hair and blue eyes, and with a sabre at his side, splendidly elegant in his uniform, a dashing, vainglorious figure, in all respects the opposite of Marius. He was smoking a cigar. Cosette supposed that he belonged to the regiment then quartered in the barracks in the Rue de Babylone.
She saw him again next day, and noted the time. After that – could it have been by accident? – she saw him almost daily as he sauntered past.
The young man’s brother officers were not slow to detect that the overgrown garden behind that tiresome rococo gate harboured a good-looking wench who nearly always contrived to be on hand when the lieutenant (whom the reader has already met and whose name was Théodule Gillenormand) went that way.
‘There’s a girl who’s got her eye on you,’ they said. ‘You ought to give her a glance.’ To which he replied: ‘Do you really think I’ve time to stare at all the girls who stare at me?’
This happened at precisely the time when Marius, in the depths of despair, was saying to himself, ‘If I could see her just once more before I die!’ If he had had his wish and seen Cosette gazing at the young lancer he would have died on the spot.
Which of them was to be blamed? Neither. Marius was one of those who embrace sorrow and dwell in it; but Cosette was one of those who feel it deeply but recover.
Cosette, in any case, was going through that dangerous stage, fetal to womanhood left to its own devices, when the heart of a lonely girl resembles the tendrils of a vine which may attach itself, as chance dictates, to a marble column or an inn-sign. It is a brief, decisive phase, crucial for any motherless girl whether she be rich or poor, for riches are no defence against error. Misalliance may occur at any level, and the real misalliance is between souls. An unknown young man without birth or fortune may nevertheless be the marble pillar sustaining a temple of lofty sentiments and splendid thought, just as your opulent man of the world, if one looks not at his elegant exterior but at his inner nature, which is the special domain of women, may be no better than a witless wooden post, the resort of violent, drunken passions – an inn-sign, in short.
What was really the state of Cosette’s heart? It was a state of passion assuaged or slumbering; of love in flux, limpid and gleaming, tremulous to a certain depth, but sombre below this. The picture of the handsome officer was reflected on the surface, but did a memory still linger in the deepest depths? Perhaps she herself did not know.
And then a singular incident occurred.
During the first fortnight of April Jean Valjean went on a journey. As we know, it was a thing he occasionally did, at very long intervals. He would be away for a day or two, three at the most. No one knew where he went, not even Cosette; but on one occasion she had accompanied him in a fiacre as far as the corner of a small cul-de-sac bearing the name of the Impasse de la Planchette. Here he had got out and the fiacre had taken Cosette back to the Rue de Baby-lone. As a rule it was when the household was running short of money that he went on these excursions.
So Valjean was away, having said that he would be back in three days’ time. Cosette spent the evening alone in the salon, and to relieve the monotony she sat down at her piano-organ and played and sang the chorus, ‘Huntsmen astray in the woods!’ from Weber’s opera Euryanthe, which is perhaps the most beautiful piece of music ever composed. When she had finished she sat musing.
Suddenly she thought she heard the sound of footsteps in the garden.
It was ten o’clock. Her father was away and Toussaint was in bed. She went to one of the closed shutters and stood listening with her ear to it.
The footsteps sounded like those of a man walking very softly. Cosette ran up to her bedroom, opened the peep-hole in the shutter, and peered out. It was a night of full moon and everything was clearly visible.
There was no one to be seen. She opened the window. The garden was quite empty, and what little could be seen of the street was deserted as usual.
Cosette decided that she was mistaken and that the sound she thought she had heard had been simply an hallucination conjured up by Weber’s dark, magnificent chorus, with its terrifying depths, evoking in the minds of its audience the magical forest in which can be heard the snapping of twigs beneath the restless feet of huntsmen half-seen in the dusk.
She thought no more about it; but then, Cosette was not nervous by nature. There was gipsy blood in her veins, that of a barefooted adventuress. We may recall that she was more like a lark than a dove. She had a wild but courageous heart.
At a somewhat earlier hour next day, when it was only beginning to grow dark, she went out into the garden. Intruding upon her random thoughts, she fancied that now and then she heard a sound like that of the previous night, as though someone were walking under the trees quite close to her; but she told herself that nothing more resembled the sound of footsteps in the grass than the sound of two branches rubbing together, and, in any case, she could see nothing.
She emerged from the ‘shrubbery’ and began to cross the small patch of grass between it and the steps of the villa. The moon, which was at her back, threw her shadow across the grass as she entered its light. And suddenly she stood still, terror-struck.
Beside her own shadow was another and singularly alarming one, a shadow wearing a round hat; it looked like that of a man walking a few paces behind her.
She stayed motionless for a moment, unable to cry out or even to turn her head. Finally, summoning all her courage, she looked round.
There was no one to be seen; and, looking down, she saw that the shadow had vanished. She went bravely back into the shrubbery and searched it, venturing even as far as the gate, but she found nothing.
She was truly alarmed. Could this be another hallucination, the second in two days? She might believe in one hallucination, but to believe in two was not so easy. And, most disturbing, it could not have been a ghost. Ghosts do not wear round hats. Jean Valjean returned home next day and she told him what had happened, expecting to be reassured and to hear him say lightly, ‘You’re a silly child.’ But instead he looked troubled. ‘It can’t have been anything,’ he said.
He made an excuse to leave her and went out into the garden, and she saw him carefully examining the gate.
She awoke during the night, and this time she was certain. She could distinctly hear the sound of footsteps beneath her window. She ran to the peep-hole in the shutter and looked out. A man was standing in the garden with a heavy cudgel in his hand. She was about to utter a cry when the moonlight fell upon his face. It was her father. She got back into bed thinking, ‘He must be very worried!’
Jean Valjean passed all that night, and the two nights which followed, in the garden. She saw him through her peep-hole.
On the third night, at about one o’clock, when the moon was beginning to wane and rising later, she was awakened by a great burst of laughter and her father’s voice calling to her, ‘Cosette!’ She sprang out of bed, put on her dressing-gown and opened the window. Her father was standing on the lawn.
‘I woke you up to tell you everything’s all right,’ he said. ‘Look. Here’s your shadow in a round hat!’
He pointed to a shadow on the grass which did indeed look not unlike that of a man wearing a round hat. It was that of a cowled metal chimney belonging to a near-by house.
Cosette, too, began to laugh, with all her fears dispelled, and at breakfast next morning she was very gay on the subject of gardens haunted by the ghosts of chimney-stacks.
Jean Valjean recovered all his calm, and Cosette herself did not give much thought to the question of whether the chimney was really in the line of the shadow she had seen, or thought she had seen, or whether the moon was at the same point in the sky; nor did she question the singular behaviour of a chimney that beats a retreat when it is in danger of being caught – for the shadow had disappeared when she turned back to look for it, she was certain of that. She was quite convinced, and the notion that a stranger had entered their garden vanished from her thoughts.
But a few days later another incident occurred.
There was a stone seat in the garden, close by the railing along the street, sheltered by a hedgerow from the gaze of the passer-by but so near to it that it might have been touched, at a pinch, by anyone reaching an arm through the railing and the hedge. Cosette was sitting on it one evening that April when Valjean was out. She was musing, overtaken by that feeling of sadness that assails us in the dusk and which perhaps arises – who can say? – from the mystery of the grave, of which we have intimations at that hour. Perhaps her mother, Fantine, lurked somewhere in the shadows.
The breeze was freshening. She got up and walked slowly round the garden, through the dew-soaked grass, reflecting idly, in her mood of melancholy abstraction, that she should wear thicker shoes when she went out at that time or she would catch cold.
She returned to the bench, but as she was in the act of sitting down she noticed, in the place where she had been sitting before, a fairly large stone which had not been there a few minutes earlier. She stood looking at it, and it occurred to her, since the stone could not have got there by itself, that it must have been placed there by someone reaching through the hedge. The thought startled her, and this time she was genuinely alarmed. There could be no doubt about the reality of the stone. She did not touch it, but ran back into the house without looking round and hurriedly closed and barred the shutters and bolted the front door. She said to Toussaint:
‘Has my father come home?’
‘Not yet, Mademoiselle.’
(We have mentioned that Toussaint had a stammer, and we hope to be forgiven for not constantly reproducing it. We dislike the musical notation of an infirmity.)
Valjean, with his fondness for solitary nocturnal walks, often did not return until late at night.
‘You’re always careful to see that the shutters are properly barred, are you not, Toussaint?’ said Cosette. ‘Especially on the garden side. And you put those little metal pegs in the rings?’
‘Of course, Mademoiselle.’
It was a duty that Toussaint never neglected. Cosette was well aware of the fact, but she could not refrain from adding:
‘This is a very lonely spot.’
‘Well, that’s the truth,’ said Toussaint ‘We could be murdered in our beds before you could say knife, especially with Monsieur not sleeping in the villa. But you needn’t worry; I lock the place up as though it were a prison. It’s not a nice thing, two women alone in a house. Just imagine. You wake suddenly and there’s a man in your room, and he tells you to hold your tongue while he cuts your throat! It isn’t so much dying one’s afraid of, because we’ve all got to come to that, but it’s dreadful to think of being touched by those brutes. Besides which, their knives are probably blunt.’
‘That will do,’ said Cosette. ‘Just make sure of our locks and bars.’
Terrified by this vividly improvised drama, and perhaps recalling her visions of a week or two before, Cosette was afraid to ask Toussaint to go out and look at the stone on the garden bench, from fear that if they opened the front door a party of villains would burst in. After locking and bolting every door and window in the house, and sending Toussaint to inspect the attics and cellars, she locked herself in her bedroom, peered under the bed and that night slept badly, haunted in her dreams by a stone the size of a mountain that was filled with caves.
But the next morning – it being the property of the sunrise to cause us to laugh at our terrors of the night, and our laughter being always proportionate to our fears – Cosette dismissed the whole thing, saying to herself: ‘What was I thinking of? It’s the same as those footsteps I thought I heard, and the shadow that was nothing but a chimney-stack. Am I turning into a frightened kitten?’ And the sunlight, shining through the half-opened shutters and glowing redly through the curtains, so reassured her that she brushed it all away, even the stone. ‘It didn’t exist, any more than the man in the round hat. I simply imagined it.’
She dressed and ran out into the garden to the bench, and a shiver ran down her spine. The stone was still there.
But her alarm lasted only for a moment. What is terror after dark becomes merely curiosity by daylight. ‘Well,’ she thought. ‘Let me see.’
The stone was quite large. She picked it up and saw that there was something underneath it. It was a white envelope, unaddressed and unsealed. But it was not empty. There was something that looked like a sheaf of folded paper inside. Cosette explored it with her fingers, with a feeling that was no longer one of fear or simple curiosity, but rather the dawning of a new apprehension. Extracting the contents, she found them to be a small paper-covered notebook of which every page was numbered and bore a few lines of very small and, she thought, very elegant handwriting. She looked for a name but found none; the writing was unsigned. For whom was it intended? Presumably for herself, since it had been deposited on her garden bench. Where had it come from? Seized with an overpowering fascination, she sought in vain to look away from the written pages fluttering in her hand, staring at the sky and at the street, at the acacias, bathed in sunshine, and at the pigeons flying over a near-by roof; but her gaze was drawn irresistibly back to the manuscript; she had to know what it had to say.
What follows is what she read.
The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being, and the extension of a single being until it reaches God – that is love.
Love is the salute of the angels to the stars.
How sad the heart is when rendered sad by love!
How great is the void created by the absence of the being who alone fills the world. How true it is that the beloved becomes God. It is understandable that God would grow jealous if the Father of All Things had not so evidently created all things for the soul, and the soul for love.
It needs no more than a smile, glimpsed beneath a hat of white crêpe adorned with lilac, for the soul to be transported into the palace of dreams.
God is behind all things, but all things conceal God. Objects are black and human creatures are opaque. To love a person is to render them transparent.
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars – all the beauties of creation. And why should they not? All the works of God are designed to serve love, and love has the power to charge all nature with its messages.
Oh, spring, you are a letter which I send her!
The future belongs far more to the heart than to the mind. Love is the one thing that can fill and fulfil eternity. The infinite calls for the inexhaustible.
Love partakes of the soul, being of the same nature. Like the soul, it is the divine spark, incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is the fiery particle that dwells in us, immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine and nothing extinguish. We feel its glow in the marrow of our bones and see its brightness reaching to the depths of Heaven.
Oh, love, adoration, the rapture of two spirits which know each other, two hearts which are exchanged, two looks which interpenetrate! You will come to me, will you not, this happiness! To walk together in solitude! Blessed and radiant days! I have sometimes thought that now and then moments may be detached from the lives of angels to enrich the lives of men.
God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love except to make it unending. After a lifetime of love an eternity of love is indeed an increase; but to heighten the intensity, the ineffable happiness that love confers upon the spirit in this world, is an impossibility, even for God. God is the wholeness of Heaven; love is the wholeness of man.
We look up at a star for two reasons, because it shines and because it is impenetrable. But we have at our side a gentler radiance and a greater mystery, that of women.
Each of us, whoever he may be, has his breathing self. Lacking this, or lacking air, we suffocate. And then we the. To the for lack of love is terrible. It is the stifling of the soul.
When love has melted and merged two persons in a sublime and sacred unity, the secret of life has been revealed to them: they are no longer anything but the two aspects of a single destiny, the wings of a single spirit. To love is to soar!
On the day when a woman in passing sheds light for you as she goes, you are lost, you are in love. There is only one thing to be done, to fix your thoughts upon her so intently that she is compelled to think of you.
That which love begins can be completed only by God.
True love is plunged in despair or rapture by a lost glove or by a found handkerchief; but it needs eternity for all its devotion and its hopes. It is composed of both the infinitely great and the infinitely small.
If you are stone, be magnetic; if a plant, be sensitive; but if you are human be love.
Nothing satisfies love. We achieve happiness and long for Eden; we gain paradise and long for Heaven.
I say to you who love that all these things are contained in love. You must learn to find them. Love encompasses all Heaven, all contemplation, and, more than Heaven, physical delight.
‘Does she still visit the Luxembourg?’ … ‘No, Monsieur’ … ‘It is in this church, is it not, that she attends Mass? … ‘She does not come here any more’ … ‘Does she still live in this house?’ … ‘She has moved elsewhere’ … ‘Where has she gone to live?’ … ‘She did not say.’
How grievous not to know the address of one’s soul!
Love has its childishness; other passions have pettiness. Shame on the passions that make us petty; honour to the one that makes us a child!
A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. There is a person who, departing, took away the sun.
Oh, to lie side by isde in the same tomb and now and then caress with a finger-tip in the shades, that will do for my eternity!
You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love is to live by it.
Love! A dark and starry transfiguration is mingled with that torment. There is ecstasy in the agony.
Oh, the happiness of birds! It is because they have a nest that they have a song.
Love is a heavenly breath of the air of Paradise.
Deep hearts and wise minds accept life as God made it. It is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, his true one, begins for man on the first stair within the tomb. Something appears to him, and he begins to perceive the finality. Take heed of that word, finality. The living see infinity; the finality may be seen only by the dead. In the meantime, love and suffer, hope and meditate. Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.
I encountered in the street a penniless young man who was in love. His hat was old and his jacket worn, with holes at the elbows; water soaked through his shoes, but starlight flooded through his soul.
How wonderful it is to be loved, but how much greater to love! The heart becomes heroic through passion; it rejects everything that is not pure and arms itself with nothing that is not noble and great. An unworthy thought can no more take root in it than a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene spirit, immune from all base passion and emotion, prevailing over the clouds and shadows of this world, the follies, lies, hatreds, vanities and miseries, dwells in the azure of the sky and feels the deep and subterranean shifts of destiny no more than the mountain-peak feels the earthquake.
If there were no one who loved the sun would cease to shine.
As she read this Cosette grew more and more thoughtful. Just as she finished it the young cavalry officer swaggered past the gate, this being his regular time. She thought him odious.
She turned back to the notebook, and now she found the handwriting delightful, always the same hand but in ink that varied in intensity, being sometimes dense black and sometimes pale, as happens when one writes over a period of days and adds water from time to time to the ink. It seemed that these were thoughts that had overflowed on to paper, a string of sighs set down at random, without order or selection or purpose. Cosette had never before read anything like it. The manuscript, in which she saw more clarity than obscurity, affected her like the opening of a closed door. Each of its enigmatic lines, shining with splendour in her eyes, kindled a new awareness in her heart. Her teachers at the convent had talked much of the soul but never of earthly love, rather as one might talk of the poker without mentioning the fire. These fifteen handwritten pages had abruptly but gently opened her eyes to the nature of all love and suffering, destiny, life, eternity, the beginning and the end, as though a hand, suddenly opening, had released a shaft of light. She could discern the author behind them, his passionate, generous, and candid nature, his great unhappiness and great hope, his captive heart and overflowing ecstasy. What was this manuscript if not a letter? A letter unaddressed, without name or date or signature, urgent, with no demands, a riddle composed of truths, a token of love to be delivered by a winged messenger and read by virgin eyes, an appointment to meet in some place not on earth, the love-letter of a ghost written to a vision. A calm but passionate unknown, who seemed ready to take refuge in death, had sent to his absent beloved the secret of human destiny, the key to life and love. He had written with a foot in the tomb and a finger in the sky. The lines, falling haphazard on the paper, were like raindrops falling from a soul.
And where did they come from? Who was their author? Cosette had not a moment’s doubt. They could have come from only one person – from him.
The light of day was revived in her, everything was made good. She had a sense of inexpressible delight and anguish. It was he! He had been there, and it was his arm that had been thrust through the hedge! While she had been forgetful, he had searched and found her. But had she really forgotten him? Never! She was mad to have believed so, even for a moment. She had loved him from the first. The fire had been damped and had died down, but, as she now knew, it had only burned the more deeply in her, and now it had burst again into flame and the flame filled her whole being. The notebook was like a match flung by that other soul into her own, and she felt the fire break out again. She pored over the written words, thinking ‘How well I know them! I have read it all before in his eyes.’
As she finished reading it for the third time Lieutenant Théodule reappeared beyond the gate, clicking his heels on the cobbles. Cosette was forced to look up. She now thought him fatuous, uncouth, impertinent, and altogether repellent, and she turned her head away indignantly, wishing she could throw something at him.
She went back into the house and up to her bedroom, to read the notebook yet again, learn it by heart, ponder on it. At length she kissed it and hid it in her bosom. The matter was decided. Cosette was again plunged in the anguished ecstasies of love; the infinity of Eden had opened for her once again.
She lived through that day in a state of bemusement, scarcely thinking, a thousand fancies tumbling through her head. She could guess at nothing, and the hopes amid her tremors were all vague; she dared be sure of nothing, but she would not reject anything. Pallors sped over her face, and shivers ran through her body. At moments she felt that she must be dreaming and asked herself, ‘Can it be real?’ But then she touched the notebook under her dress and pressing it to her heart felt its shape against her flesh. If Jean Valjean had seen her at those moments he would have trembled at the new look in her eyes. ‘Oh, yes,’ she thought. ‘It can only be he; it comes to me from him!’ And she thought that an intervention of the angels, some celestial chance, had restored him to her.
The wonders conjured up by love! The fantasies! That intervention of the angels, that celestial chance, was like the hunk of bread tossed from one inmate to another, from one courtyard to another, over the walls of the prison of La Force.
Jean Valjean went out that evening, and Cosette dressed up.
She did her hair in the way that suited her best and put on a gown that had been cut a little low at the neck so that it allowed the beginning of her bosom to be seen and was, as young ladies say, ‘somewhat immodest’. It was not in the least immodest and more pretty than otherwise. She made these preparations without knowing why. Was she going anywhere? Was she expecing a visitor? No.
As evening fell she went into the garden. Toussaint was busy in the kitchen, which looked out on the back-yard. She walked under the trees, thrusting aside the branches now and then since some were very low. She came to the bench and found the stone still there.
She sat down and softly stroked it as though in gratitude. And suddenly she had that feeling that sometimes comes to us, of someone behind her. She looked round and started to her feet.
It was he.
He was bareheaded and he looked pale and thinner. His dark clothing was scarcely visible in the dusk which cast a veil over his forehead and buried his eyes in shadow; beneath his incomparable sweetness of expression there was something of death and something of the night, and his face was faintly illumined with the light of the dying day and the suggestion of a soul in flight, as though he were still not a ghost but no longer a living man. He had dropped his hat, which lay in the bushes.
Cosette, near to fainting, did not utter a sound. She drew slowly away, because she felt herself drawn towards him. He did not move, but something emanated from him, a kind of warmth and sadness which must be in the eyes that she could not see.
In withdrawing Cosette found herself with her back to a tree, and she leaned against it. Without it she would have fallen.
Then he began to speak, in that voice that she had never heard before, speaking so softly that it was scarcely raised above the rustle of the leaves.
‘Forgive me for being here. I have been in such distress, I could not go on living the way things were, and so I had to come. Did you read what I left on the bench? Do you perhaps recognize me? You mustn’t be afraid. It’s a long time ago, but do you remember the day when you first looked at me – in the Luxembourg, near the Gladiator? And the day when you walked past me? Those things happened on the 16th of June and the 2nd of July – nearly a year ago. After that I did not see you for a long time. I asked the woman who collects the chair-rents and she said she hadn’t seen you. You were living in a new house in the Rue de l’Ouest, on the third floor. I found out, you see. I followed you. What else could I do? And then you disappeared. I thought I saw you once when I was reading the newspapers under the Odéon arcade and I ran after you, but it wasn’t you, only someone wearing a hat like yours. I come here at night, but don’t worry, no one sees me. I come and look up at your windows, and I walk very quietly so as not to disturb you. I was behind you the other evening when you looked round, and I hid and ran for it. Once I heard you singing and it made me very happy. Does it matter to you if I listen to you singing through the shutters? It can do you no harm. But you don’t mind, do you? To me, you see, you’re an angel. You must let me come sometimes. I think I’m going to the. If you knew how I adore you! Forgive me for talking like this, I don’t know what I’m saying, perhaps I’m annoying you. Am I annoying you?’
‘Mother!’ she murmured, and sank down as though she herself were dying.
He caught her as she fell and clasped her tightly in his arms without knowing that he did so. He held her, trembling, feeling as though his head were filled with a mist in which lightnings flashed, feeling, in the tumult of his thoughts, that he was performing a religious rite that was also an act of profanation. For the rest, he felt no spark of physical desire for this enchanting girl whose body was now pressed so closely to his own. He was lost in love.
She took his hand and laid it against her heart, and he felt the shape of the notebook under her dress. He stammered:
‘Then – you love me?’
She answered in a voice so low that it was scarcely to be heard: ‘Of course! You know I do.’ And she hid her russet head against the breast of the triumphant and marvelling young man.
He fell back on to the bench with her at his side. Neither could speak. The stars, were beginning to show. How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
Both were trembling. They looked at each other with eyes shining in the dusk, unconscious of the cool of the night, the chill of the stone bench, the dampness of the earth, the dew on the grass; they looked at each other, their hearts filled with their thoughts. Without knowing it, they had clasped hands.
She did not ask him, or even wonder, how he had contrived to get into the garden. It seemed to her so right that he should be there. From time to time their knees touched and both quivered. Now and then Cosette stammered a word, her soul trembling on her lips like a dewdrop on the petal of a flower.
And gradually they began to speak. Outpouring followed the silence which is fulfilment. The night was calm and splendid above their heads. Pure as disembodied spirits, they told each other about themselves, their dreams and their follies, their delights, their fantasies, their failings; how they had come to love each other at a distance, to long for each other, and their despair when they no longer saw each other. In an intimacy which nothing could ever make more perfect they told each other of all that was most secret and hidden in themselves, recounting, with an innocent trust in their illusions, everything that love and youth, and the vestiges of childhood that still clung to them, put into their heads. Two hearts were exchanged, so that when an hour had passed they were a youth enriched with the soul of a girl and a girl enriched with a young man’s soul. Each pervaded, enchanted, and enraptured the other.
When they had finished, when everything had been said, she laid her head on his shoulder and asked:
‘What is your name?’
‘My name is Marius. And yours?’
‘Cosette.’