Cosette in her shadow, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire.
Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, slowly drew together
these two beings, all charged and all languishing with the stormy
electricity of passion, these two souls which were laden with love as
two clouds are laden with lightning, and which were bound to overflow
and mingle in a look like the clouds in a flash of fire.
The glance has been so much abused in love romances that it has finally
fallen into disrepute. One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two
beings fell in love because they looked at each other. That is the way
people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way. The rest is
nothing, but the rest comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these
great shocks which two souls convey to each other by the exchange of
that spark.
At that particular hour when Cosette unconsciously darted that glance
which troubled Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he had also
launched a look which disturbed Cosette.
He caused her the same good and the same evil.
She had been in the habit of seeing him for a long time, and she had
scrutinized him as girls scrutinize and see, while looking elsewhere.
Marius still considered Cosette ugly, when she had already begun to
think Marius handsome. But as he paid no attention to her, the young
man was nothing to her.
Still, she could not refrain from saying to herself that he had
beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, handsome teeth, a charming tone of
voice when she heard him conversing with his comrades, that he held
himself badly when he walked, if you like, but with a grace that was
all his own, that he did not appear to be at all stupid, that his whole
person was noble, gentle, simple, proud, and that, in short, though he
seemed to be poor, yet his air was fine.
On the day when their eyes met at last, and said to each other those
first, obscure, and ineffable things which the glance lisps, Cosette
did not immediately understand. She returned thoughtfully to the house
in the Rue de l’Ouest, where Jean Valjean, according to his custom, had
come to spend six weeks. The next morning, on waking, she thought of
that strange young man, so long indifferent and icy, who now seemed to
pay attention to her, and it did not appear to her that this attention
was the least in the world agreeable to her. She was, on the contrary,
somewhat incensed at this handsome and disdainful individual. A
substratum of war stirred within her. It struck her, and the idea
caused her a wholly childish joy, that she was going to take her
revenge at last.
Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious, though in
an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon. Women play with
their beauty as children do with a knife. They wound themselves.
The reader will recall Marius’ hesitations, his palpitations, his
terrors. He remained on his bench and did not approach. This vexed
Cosette. One day, she said to Jean Valjean: “Father, let us stroll
about a little in that direction.” Seeing that Marius did not come to
her, she went to him. In such cases, all women resemble Mahomet. And
then, strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is
timidity; in a young girl it is boldness. This is surprising, and yet
nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each
other and assuming, each the other’s qualities.
That day, Cosette’s glance drove Marius beside himself, and Marius’
glance set Cosette to trembling. Marius went away confident, and
Cosette uneasy. From that day forth, they adored each other.
The first thing that Cosette felt was a confused and profound
melancholy. It seemed to her that her soul had become black since the
day before. She no longer recognized it. The whiteness of soul in young
girls, which is composed of coldness and gayety, resembles snow. It
melts in love, which is its sun.
Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word
uttered in its terrestrial sense. On the books of profane music which
entered the convent, _amour_ (love) was replaced by _tambour_ (drum) or
_pandour_. This created enigmas which exercised the imaginations of the
_big girls_, such as: _Ah, how delightful is the drum! _ or, _Pity is
not a pandour_. But Cosette had left the convent too early to have
occupied herself much with the “drum.” Therefore, she did not know what
name to give to what she now felt. Is any one the less ill because one
does not know the name of one’s malady?
She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly. She
did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, useful or
dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited; she loved.
She would have been greatly astonished, had any one said to her: “You
do not sleep? But that is forbidden! You do not eat? Why, that is very
bad! You have oppressions and palpitations of the heart? That must not
be! You blush and turn pale, when a certain being clad in black appears
at the end of a certain green walk? But that is abominable!” She would
not have understood, and she would have replied: “What fault is there
of mine in a matter in which I have no power and of which I know
nothing?”
It turned out that the love which presented itself was exactly suited
to the state of her soul. It was a sort of admiration at a distance, a
mute contemplation, the deification of a stranger. It was the
apparition of youth to youth, the dream of nights become a reality yet
remaining a dream, the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at
last, but having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor
exigence, nor defect; in a word, the distant lover who lingered in the
ideal, a chimæra with a form. Any nearer and more palpable meeting
would have alarmed Cosette at this first stage, when she was still half
immersed in the exaggerated mists of the cloister. She had all the
fears of children and all the fears of nuns combined. The spirit of the
convent, with which she had been permeated for the space of five years,
was still in the process of slow evaporation from her person, and made
everything tremble around her. In this situation he was not a lover, he
was not even an admirer, he was a vision. She set herself to adoring
Marius as something charming, luminous, and impossible.
As extreme innocence borders on extreme coquetry, she smiled at him
with all frankness.
Every day, she looked forward to the hour for their walk with
impatience, she found Marius there, she felt herself unspeakably happy,
and thought in all sincerity that she was expressing her whole thought
when she said to Jean Valjean:—
“What a delicious garden that Luxembourg is!”
Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another. They did not
address each other, they did not salute each other, they did not know
each other; they saw each other; and like stars of heaven which are
separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing at each other.
It was thus that Cosette gradually became a woman and developed,
beautiful and loving, with a consciousness of her beauty, and in
ignorance of her love. She was a coquette to boot through her
ignorance.