The lovers saw each other every day. Cosette came with M.
Fauchelevent.—“This is reversing things,” said Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, “to have the bride come to the house to do the courting
like this.” But Marius’ convalescence had caused the habit to become
established, and the armchairs of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,
better adapted to interviews than the straw chairs of the Rue de
l’Homme Armé, had rooted it. Marius and M. Fauchelevent saw each other,
but did not address each other. It seemed as though this had been
agreed upon. Every girl needs a chaperon. Cosette could not have come
without M. Fauchelevent. In Marius’ eyes, M. Fauchelevent was the
condition attached to Cosette. He accepted it. By dint of discussing
political matters, vaguely and without precision, from the point of
view of the general amelioration of the fate of all men, they came to
say a little more than “yes” and “no.” Once, on the subject of
education, which Marius wished to have free and obligatory, multiplied
under all forms lavished on every one, like the air and the sun in a
word, respirable for the entire population, they were in unison, and
they almost conversed. M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even with a
certain loftiness of language—still he lacked something indescribable.
M. Fauchelevent possessed something less and also something more, than
a man of the world.
Marius, inwardly, and in the depths of his thought, surrounded with all
sorts of mute questions this M. Fauchelevent, who was to him simply
benevolent and cold. There were moments when doubts as to his own
recollections occurred to him. There was a void in his memory, a black
spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony.—Many things had been
lost therein. He had come to the point of asking himself whether it
were really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, so serious and so
calm a man, in the barricade.
This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions and the
disappearances of the past had left in his mind. It must not be
supposed that he was delivered from all those obsessions of the memory
which force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to glance sadly
behind us. The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that
have vanished contains neither thought nor love. At times, Marius
clasped his face between his hands, and the vague and tumultuous past
traversed the twilight which reigned in his brain. Again he beheld
Mabeuf fall, he heard Gavroche singing amid the grape-shot, he felt
beneath his lips the cold brow of Éponine; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean
Prouvaire, Combeferre, Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose erect
before him, then dispersed into thin air. Were all those dear,
sorrowful, valiant, charming or tragic beings merely dreams? had they
actually existed? The revolt had enveloped everything in its smoke.
These great fevers create great dreams. He questioned himself; he felt
himself; all these vanished realities made him dizzy. Where were they
all then? was it really true that all were dead? A fall into the
shadows had carried off all except himself. It all seemed to him to
have disappeared as though behind the curtain of a theatre. There are
curtains like this which drop in life. God passes on to the following
act.
And he himself—was he actually the same man? He, the poor man, was
rich; he, the abandoned, had a family; he, the despairing, was to marry
Cosette. It seemed to him that he had traversed a tomb, and that he had
entered into it black and had emerged from it white, and in that tomb
the others had remained. At certain moments, all these beings of the
past, returned and present, formed a circle around him, and
overshadowed him; then he thought of Cosette, and recovered his
serenity; but nothing less than this felicity could have sufficed to
efface that catastrophe.
M. Fauchelevent almost occupied a place among these vanished beings.
Marius hesitated to believe that the Fauchelevent of the barricade was
the same as this Fauchelevent in flesh and blood, sitting so gravely
beside Cosette. The first was, probably, one of those nightmares
occasioned and brought back by his hours of delirium. However, the
natures of both men were rigid, no question from Marius to M.
Fauchelevent was possible. Such an idea had not even occurred to him.
We have already indicated this characteristic detail.
Two men who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of tacit
agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less rare than is
commonly supposed.
Once only, did Marius make the attempt. He introduced into the
conversation the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and, turning to M. Fauchelevent,
he said to him:
“Of course, you are acquainted with that street?”
“What street?”
“The Rue de la Chanvrerie.”
“I have no idea of the name of that street,” replied M. Fauchelevent,
in the most natural manner in the world.
The response which bore upon the name of the street and not upon the
street itself, appeared to Marius to be more conclusive than it really
was.
“Decidedly,” thought he, “I have been dreaming. I have been subject to
a hallucination. It was some one who resembled him. M. Fauchelevent was
not there.”’