He inhaled her.
She refused nothing, and he asked nothing.
Cosette was happy, and Marius was satisfied.
They lived in this ecstatic state which can be described as the dazzling of one soul by another soul.
It was the ineffable first embrace of two maiden souls in the ideal. Two swans meeting on the Jungfrau.
At that hour of love, an hour when voluptuousness is absolutely mute, beneath the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic Marius, would rather have gone to a woman of the town than have raised Cosette’s robe to the height of her ankle.
Once, in the moonlight, Cosette stooped to pick up something on the ground, her bodice fell apart and permitted a glimpse of the beginning of her throat.
Marius turned away his eyes.
What took place between these two beings?
Nothing.
They adored each other.
At night, when they were there, that garden seemed a living and a sacred spot.
All flowers unfolded around them and sent them incense; and they opened their souls and scattered them over the flowers.
The wanton and vigorous vegetation quivered, full of strength and intoxication, around these two innocents, and they uttered words of love which set the trees to trembling.
What words were these?
Breaths.
Nothing more.
These breaths sufficed to trouble and to touch all nature round about.
Magic power which we should find it difficult to understand were we to read in a book these conversations which are made to be borne away and dispersed like smoke wreaths by the breeze beneath the leaves.
Take from those murmurs of two lovers that melody which proceeds from the soul and which accompanies them like a lyre, and what remains is nothing more than a shade; you say:
“What! is that all!” eh! yes, childish prattle, repetitions, laughter at nothing, nonsense, everything that is deepest and most sublime in the world!
The only things which are worth the trouble of saying and hearing!
The man who has never heard, the man who has never uttered these absurdities, these paltry remarks, is an imbecile and a malicious fellow.
Cosette said to Marius:—
“Dost thou know?—”
[In all this and athwart this celestial maidenliness, and without either of them being able to say how it had come about, they had begun to call each other thou.]
“Dost thou know?
My name is Euphrasie.”
“Euphrasie?
Why, no, thy name is Cosette.”
“Oh!
Cosette is a very ugly name that was given to me when I was a little thing.
But my real name is Euphrasie. Dost thou like that name—Euphrasie?”
“Yes. But Cosette is not ugly.”
“Do you like it better than Euphrasie?”
“Why, yes.”
“Then I like it better too.
Truly, it is pretty, Cosette.
Call me Cosette.”
And the smile that she added made of this dialogue an idyl worthy of a grove situated in heaven.
On another occasion she gazed intently at him and exclaimed:—
“Monsieur, you are handsome, you are good-looking, you are witty, you are not at all stupid, you are much more learned than I am, but I bid you defiance with this word: I love you!”
And Marius, in the very heavens, thought he heard a strain sung by a star.
Or she bestowed on him a gentle tap because he coughed, and she said to him:—
“Don’t cough, sir; I will not have people cough on my domain without my permission.
It’s very naughty to cough and to disturb me.
I want you to be well, because, in the first place, if you were not well, I should be very unhappy.
What should I do then?”
And this was simply divine.
Once Marius said to Cosette:—