“What have I done?”
However, nothing of all this was perceptible to Cosette.
No ill-temper, no harshness.
His face was always serene and kind.
Jean Valjean’s manners were more tender and more paternal than ever.
If anything could have betrayed his lack of joy, it was his increased suavity.
On her side, Cosette languished.
She suffered from the absence of Marius as she had rejoiced in his presence, peculiarly, without exactly being conscious of it.
When Jean Valjean ceased to take her on their customary strolls, a feminine instinct murmured confusedly, at the bottom of her heart, that she must not seem to set store on the Luxembourg garden, and that if this proved to be a matter of indifference to her, her father would take her thither once more.
But days, weeks, months, elapsed.
Jean Valjean had tacitly accepted Cosette’s tacit consent.
She regretted it.
It was too late.
So Marius had disappeared; all was over. The day on which she returned to the Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there. What was to be done?
Should she ever find him again?
She felt an anguish at her heart, which nothing relieved, and which augmented every day; she no longer knew whether it was winter or summer, whether it was raining or shining, whether the birds were singing, whether it was the season for dahlias or daisies, whether the Luxembourg was more charming than the Tuileries, whether the linen which the laundress brought home was starched too much or not enough, whether Toussaint had done “her marketing” well or ill; and she remained dejected, absorbed, attentive to but a single thought, her eyes vague and staring as when one gazes by night at a black and fathomless spot where an apparition has vanished.
However, she did not allow Jean Valjean to perceive anything of this, except her pallor.
She still wore her sweet face for him.
This pallor sufficed but too thoroughly to trouble Jean Valjean.
Sometimes he asked her:—
“What is the matter with you?”
She replied:
“There is nothing the matter with me.”
And after a silence, when she divined that he was sad also, she would add:—
“And you, father—is there anything wrong with you?”
“With me?
Nothing,” said he.
These two beings who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching an affection, and who had lived so long for each other now suffered side by side, each on the other’s account; without acknowledging it to each other, without anger towards each other, and with a smile.
CHAPTER VIII—THE CHAIN-GANG
Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two.
Youth, even in its sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.
At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile.
It is the property of grief to cause the childish side of man to reappear.
He had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was escaping from him.
He would have liked to resist, to retain her, to arouse her enthusiasm by some external and brilliant matter.
These ideas, puerile, as we have just said, and at the same time senile, conveyed to him, by their very childishness, a tolerably just notion of the influence of gold lace on the imaginations of young girls.
He once chanced to see a general on horseback, in full uniform, pass along the street, Comte Coutard, the commandant of Paris.
He envied that gilded man; what happiness it would be, he said to himself, if he could put on that suit which was an incontestable thing; and if Cosette could behold him thus, she would be dazzled, and when he had Cosette on his arm and passed the gates of the Tuileries, the guard would present arms to him, and that would suffice for Cosette, and would dispel her idea of looking at young men.
An unforeseen shock was added to these sad reflections.
In the isolated life which they led, and since they had come to dwell in the Rue Plumet, they had contracted one habit.
They sometimes took a pleasure trip to see the sun rise, a mild species of enjoyment which befits those who are entering life and those who are quitting it.
For those who love solitude, a walk in the early morning is equivalent to a stroll by night, with the cheerfulness of nature added.
The streets are deserted and the birds are singing.
Cosette, a bird herself, liked to rise early.
These matutinal excursions were planned on the preceding evening.
He proposed, and she agreed.
It was arranged like a plot, they set out before daybreak, and these trips were so many small delights for Cosette.
These innocent eccentricities please young people.
Jean Valjean’s inclination led him, as we have seen, to the least frequented spots, to solitary nooks, to forgotten places.
There then existed, in the vicinity of the barriers of Paris, a sort of poor meadows, which were almost confounded with the city, where grew in summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn, after the harvest had been gathered, presented the appearance, not of having been reaped, but peeled.