The young men were comrades; the young girls were friends.
Such loves are always accompanied by such friendships.
Goodness and philosophy are two distinct things; the proof of this is that, after making all due allowances for these little irregular households, Favourite, Zephine, and Dahlia were philosophical young women, while Fantine was a good girl.
Good! some one will exclaim; and Tholomyes?
Solomon would reply that love forms a part of wisdom.
We will confine ourselves to saying that the love of Fantine was a first love, a sole love, a faithful love.
She alone, of all the four, was not called “thou” by a single one of them.
Fantine was one of those beings who blossom, so to speak, from the dregs of the people.
Though she had emerged from the most unfathomable depths of social shadow, she bore on her brow the sign of the anonymous and the unknown.
She was born at M. sur M. Of what parents?
Who can say?
She had never known father or mother.
She was called Fantine.
Why Fantine?
She had never borne any other name.
At the epoch of her birth the Directory still existed.
She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal name; the Church no longer existed.
She bore the name which pleased the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small child, running bare-legged in the street.
She received the name as she received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained.
She was called little Fantine.
No one knew more than that.
This human creature had entered life in just this way.
At the age of ten, Fantine quitted the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood.
At fifteen she came to Paris “to seek her fortune.”
Fantine was beautiful, and remained pure as long as she could.
She was a lovely blonde, with fine teeth.
She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on her head, and her pearls were in her mouth.
She worked for her living; then, still for the sake of her living,—for the heart, also, has its hunger,—she loved.
She loved Tholomyes.
An amour for him; passion for her.
The streets of the Latin quarter, filled with throngs of students and grisettes, saw the beginning of their dream.
Fantine had long evaded Tholomyes in the mazes of the hill of the Pantheon, where so many adventurers twine and untwine, but in such a way as constantly to encounter him again.
There is a way of avoiding which resembles seeking.
In short, the eclogue took place.
Blachevelle, Listolier, and Fameuil formed a sort of group of which Tholomyes was the head.
It was he who possessed the wit.
Tholomyes was the antique old student; he was rich; he had an income of four thousand francs; four thousand francs! a splendid scandal on Mount Sainte-Genevieve.
Tholomyes was a fast man of thirty, and badly preserved. He was wrinkled and toothless, and he had the beginning of a bald spot, of which he himself said with sadness, the skull at thirty, the knee at forty.
His digestion was mediocre, and he had been attacked by a watering in one eye.
But in proportion as his youth disappeared, gayety was kindled; he replaced his teeth with buffooneries, his hair with mirth, his health with irony, his weeping eye laughed incessantly.
He was dilapidated but still in flower.
His youth, which was packing up for departure long before its time, beat a retreat in good order, bursting with laughter, and no one saw anything but fire.
He had had a piece rejected at the Vaudeville.
He made a few verses now and then.
In addition to this he doubted everything to the last degree, which is a vast force in the eyes of the weak.
Being thus ironical and bald, he was the leader.
Iron is an English word.
Is it possible that irony is derived from it?
One day Tholomyes took the three others aside, with the gesture of an oracle, and said to them:—
“Fantine, Dahlia, Zephine, and Favourite have been teasing us for nearly a year to give them a surprise.