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THE EFFECTS OF DREAMS MINGLED WITH HAPPINESS
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 arm-chairs of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, better adapted
to interviews than the straw chairs of the Rue de l'Homme Arme,
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 Eponine;
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."'
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