Marius had left M. Gillenormand in despair. He had entered the house
with very little hope, and quitted it with immense despair.
However, and those who have observed the depths of the human heart will
understand this, the officer, the lancer, the ninny, Cousin Théodule,
had left no trace in his mind. Not the slightest. The dramatic poet
might, apparently, expect some complications from this revelation made
point-blank by the grandfather to the grandson. But what the drama
would gain thereby, truth would lose. Marius was at an age when one
believes nothing in the line of evil; later on comes the age when one
believes everything. Suspicions are nothing else than wrinkles. Early
youth has none of them. That which overwhelmed Othello glides innocuous
over Candide. Suspect Cosette! There are hosts of crimes which Marius
could sooner have committed.
He began to wander about the streets, the resource of those who suffer.
He thought of nothing, so far as he could afterwards remember. At two
o’clock in the morning he returned to Courfeyrac’s quarters and flung
himself, without undressing, on his mattress. The sun was shining
brightly when he sank into that frightful leaden slumber which permits
ideas to go and come in the brain. When he awoke, he saw Courfeyrac,
Enjolras, Feuilly, and Combeferre standing in the room with their hats
on and all ready to go out.
Courfeyrac said to him:—
“Are you coming to General Lamarque’s funeral?”
It seemed to him that Courfeyrac was speaking Chinese.
He went out some time after them. He put in his pocket the pistols
which Javert had given him at the time of the adventure on the 3d of
February, and which had remained in his hands. These pistols were still
loaded. It would be difficult to say what vague thought he had in his
mind when he took them with him.
All day long he prowled about, without knowing where he was going; it
rained at times, he did not perceive it; for his dinner, he purchased a
penny roll at a baker’s, put it in his pocket and forgot it. It appears
that he took a bath in the Seine without being aware of it. There are
moments when a man has a furnace within his skull. Marius was passing
through one of those moments. He no longer hoped for anything; this
step he had taken since the preceding evening. He waited for night with
feverish impatience, he had but one idea clearly before his mind;—this
was, that at nine o’clock he should see Cosette. This last happiness
now constituted his whole future; after that, gloom. At intervals, as
he roamed through the most deserted boulevards, it seemed to him that
he heard strange noises in Paris. He thrust his head out of his reverie
and said: “Is there fighting on hand?”
At nightfall, at nine o’clock precisely, as he had promised Cosette, he
was in the Rue Plumet. When he approached the grating he forgot
everything. It was forty-eight hours since he had seen Cosette; he was
about to behold her once more; every other thought was effaced, and he
felt only a profound and unheard-of joy. Those minutes in which one
lives centuries always have this sovereign and wonderful property, that
at the moment when they are passing they fill the heart completely.
Marius displaced the bar, and rushed headlong into the garden. Cosette
was not at the spot where she ordinarily waited for him. He traversed
the thicket, and approached the recess near the flight of steps: “She
is waiting for me there,” said he. Cosette was not there. He raised his
eyes, and saw that the shutters of the house were closed. He made the
tour of the garden, the garden was deserted. Then he returned to the
house, and, rendered senseless by love, intoxicated, terrified,
exasperated with grief and uneasiness, like a master who returns home
at an evil hour, he tapped on the shutters. He knocked and knocked
again, at the risk of seeing the window open, and her father’s gloomy
face make its appearance, and demand: “What do you want?” This was
nothing in comparison with what he dimly caught a glimpse of. When he
had rapped, he lifted up his voice and called Cosette.—“Cosette!” he
cried; “Cosette!” he repeated imperiously. There was no reply. All was
over. No one in the garden; no one in the house.
Marius fixed his despairing eyes on that dismal house, which was as
black and as silent as a tomb and far more empty. He gazed at the stone
seat on which he had passed so many adorable hours with Cosette. Then
he seated himself on the flight of steps, his heart filled with
sweetness and resolution, he blessed his love in the depths of his
thought, and he said to himself that, since Cosette was gone, all that
there was left for him was to die.
All at once he heard a voice which seemed to proceed from the street,
and which was calling to him through the trees:—
“Mr. Marius!”
He started to his feet.
“Hey?” said he.
“Mr. Marius, are you there?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Marius,” went on the voice, “your friends are waiting for you at
the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie.”
This voice was not wholly unfamiliar to him. It resembled the hoarse,
rough voice of Éponine. Marius hastened to the gate, thrust aside the
movable bar, passed his head through the aperture, and saw some one who
appeared to him to be a young man, disappearing at a run into the
gloom.