These periodical five francs were a double riddle to Courfeyrac who lent and to Thenardier who received them.
“To whom can they go?” thought Courfeyrac.
“Whence can this come to me?” Thenardier asked himself.
Moreover, Marius was heart-broken.
Everything had plunged through a trap-door once more.
He no longer saw anything before him; his life was again buried in mystery where he wandered fumblingly.
He had for a moment beheld very close at hand, in that obscurity, the young girl whom he loved, the old man who seemed to be her father, those unknown beings, who were his only interest and his only hope in this world; and, at the very moment when he thought himself on the point of grasping them, a gust had swept all these shadows away.
Not a spark of certainty and truth had been emitted even in the most terrible of collisions.
No conjecture was possible.
He no longer knew even the name that he thought he knew.
It certainly was not Ursule. And the Lark was a nickname.
And what was he to think of the old man?
Was he actually in hiding from the police?
The white-haired workman whom Marius had encountered in the vicinity of the Invalides recurred to his mind.
It now seemed probable that that workingman and M. Leblanc were one and the same person.
So he disguised himself?
That man had his heroic and his equivocal sides.
Why had he not called for help?
Why had he fled?
Was he, or was he not, the father of the young girl?
Was he, in short, the man whom Thenardier thought that he recognized?
Thenardier might have been mistaken.
These formed so many insoluble problems.
All this, it is true, detracted nothing from the angelic charms of the young girl of the Luxembourg.
Heart-rending distress; Marius bore a passion in his heart, and night over his eyes.
He was thrust onward, he was drawn, and he could not stir.
All had vanished, save love.
Of love itself he had lost the instincts and the sudden illuminations.
Ordinarily, this flame which burns us lights us also a little, and casts some useful gleams without.
But Marius no longer even heard these mute counsels of passion. He never said to himself:
“What if I were to go to such a place?
What if I were to try such and such a thing?”
The girl whom he could no longer call Ursule was evidently somewhere; nothing warned Marius in what direction he should seek her.
His whole life was now summed up in two words; absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.
To see her once again; he still aspired to this, but he no longer expected it.
To crown all, his poverty had returned.
He felt that icy breath close to him, on his heels.
In the midst of his torments, and long before this, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is more dangerous than discontinued work; it is a habit which vanishes.
A habit which is easy to get rid of, and difficult to take up again.
A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses.
It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are sometimes severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh vapor which corrects the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps here and there, binds together and rounds off the angles of the ideas.
But too much dreaming sinks and drowns.
Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to fall entirely from thought into reverie!
He thinks that he can re-ascend with equal ease, and he tells himself that, after all, it is the same thing.
Error!
Thought is the toil of the intelligence, reverie its voluptuousness.
To replace thought with reverie is to confound a poison with a food.
Marius had begun in that way, as the reader will remember.
Passion had supervened and had finished the work of precipitating him into chim?ras without object or bottom.
One no longer emerges from one’s self except for the purpose of going off to dream.