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MARIUS, WHILE SEEKING A GIRL IN A BONNET, ENCOUNTERS A MAN
IN A CAP
Summer passed, then the autumn; winter came.
Neither M. Leblanc nor the young girl had again set foot in
the Luxembourg garden. Thenceforth, Marius had but one thought,--to
gaze once more on that sweet and adorable face.
He sought constantly, he sought everywhere; he found nothing.
He was no longer Marius, the enthusiastic dreamer, the firm,
resolute, ardent man, the bold defier of fate, the brain which
erected future on future, the young spirit encumbered with plans,
with projects, with pride, with ideas and wishes; he was a lost
dog. He fell into a black melancholy.
All was over.
Work disgusted him, walking tired him.
Vast nature, formerly so filled with forms, lights, voices,
counsels, perspectives, horizons, teachings, now lay empty before
him.
It seemed to him that everything had disappeared.
He thought incessantly, for he could not do otherwise; but
he no longer took pleasure in his thoughts.
To everything that they proposed to him in a whisper, he replied
in his darkness: "What is the use?"
He heaped a hundred reproaches on himself.
"Why did I follow her? I was so happy at the mere sight
of her!
She looked at me; was not that immense?
She had the air of loving me.
Was not that everything?
I wished to have, what?
There was nothing after that.
I have been absurd.
It is my own fault," etc., etc. Courfeyrac, to whom he
confided nothing,--it was his nature,-- but who made some little
guess at everything,--that was his nature,-- had begun by congratulating
him on being in love, though he was amazed at it; then, seeing
Marius fall into this melancholy state, he ended by saying to
him:
"I see that you have been simply an animal.
Here, come to the Chaumiere."
Once, having confidence in a fine September sun, Marius had
allowed himself to be taken to the ball at Sceaux by Courfeyrac,
Bossuet, and Grantaire, hoping, what a dream! that he might, perhaps,
find her there.
Of course he did not see the one he sought.--"But this
is the place, all the same, where all lost women are found,"
grumbled Grantaire in an aside.
Marius left his friends at the ball and returned home on foot,
alone, through the night, weary, feverish, with sad and troubled
eyes, stunned by the noise and dust of the merry wagons filled
with singing creatures on their way home from the feast, which
passed close to him, as he, in his discouragement, breathed in
the acrid scent of the walnut-trees, along the road, in order
to refresh his head.
He took to living more and more alone, utterly overwhelmed,
wholly given up to his inward anguish, going and coming in his
pain like the wolf in the trap, seeking the absent one everywhere,
stupefied by love.
On another occasion, he had an encounter which produced on
him a singular effect.
He met, in the narrow streets in the vicinity of the Boulevard
des Invalides, a man dressed like a workingman and wearing a cap
with a long visor, which allowed a glimpse of locks of very white
hair.
Marius was struck with the beauty of this white hair, and
scrutinized the man, who was walking slowly and as though absorbed
in painful meditation.
Strange to say, he thought that he recognized M. Leblanc.
The hair was the same, also the profile, so far as the cap
permitted a view of it, the mien identical, only more depressed.
But why these workingman's clothes? What was the meaning of
this?
What signified that disguise? Marius was greatly astonished.
When he recovered himself, his first impulse was to follow
the man; who knows whether he did not hold at last the clue which
he was seeking?
In any case, he must see the man near at hand, and clear up
the mystery. But the idea occurred to him too late, the man was
no longer there. He had turned into some little side street, and
Marius could not find him.
This encounter occupied his mind for three days and then was
effaced.
"After all," he said to himself, "it was probably
only a resemblance."
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