Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [241]
He passed the bench, went to the end of the walk, which was quite near, then turned and passed again before the beautiful girl. This time he was very pale. Indeed, he was experiencing nothing that was not very disagreeable. He walked away from the bench and from the young girl, and although his back was turned, he imagined that she was looking at him, and that made him stumble.
He made no effort to approach the bench again, he stopped midway along the walk, and sat down there—a thing which he never did—casting many side glances, and thinking, in the most indistinct depths of his mind, that after all it must be difficult for persons whose white hat and black dress he admired, to be absolutely insensitive to his glossy trousers and his new coat.
At the end of a quarter of an hour, he rose, as if to recommence his walk towards this bench, which was encircled by a halo. He, however, stood silent and motionless. For the first time in fifteen months, he said to himself, that this gentleman, who sat there every day with his daughter, had undoubtedly noticed him, and probably thought his assiduity very strange. For the first time, also, he felt a certain irreverence in designating this unknown man, even in the silence of his thought, by the nickname of M. Leblanc.
He remained thus for some minutes with his head down tracing designs on the ground with a little stick which he had in his hand.
Then he turned abruptly away from the bench, away from Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter, and went home.
That day he forgot to go to dinner. At eight o‘clock in the evening he discovered it, and as it was too late to go down to the Rue Saint Jacques, “No matter,” said he, and he ate a piece of bread.
He did not retire until he had carefully brushed and folded his coat.
5
SUNDRY THUNDERBOLTS FALL UPON MA‘AM BOUGON
NEXT DAY, Ma‘am Bougon,—thus Courfeyrac designated the old portress-landlady of the Gorbeau tenement,—Ma’am Bougon—her name was in reality Madame Bougon, as we have stated, but this terrible fellow Courfeyrac respected nothing,—Ma‘am Bougon was stupefied with astonishment to see Monsieur Marius go out again with his new coat.
He went again to the Luxembourg Gardens, but did not get beyond his bench midway along the walk. He sat down there as on the day previous, gazing from a distance and seeing distinctly the white hat, the black dress, and especially the bluish light. He did not stir from the bench, and did not go home until the gates of the gardens were shut. He did not see Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter retire. He concluded from that that they left the garden by the gate on the Rue de l‘Ouest. Later, some weeks afterwards, when he thought of it, he could not remember where he had dined that night.
The next day, for the third time, Ma‘am Bougon was thunderstruck. Marius went out with his new suit. “Three days running!” she exclaimed.
She made an attempt to follow him, but Marius walked briskly and with immense strides; it was a hippopotamus undertaking to catch a chamois. In two minutes she lost sight of him, and came back out of breath three quarters choked by her asthma, and furious. “The silly fellow,” she muttered, “to put on his handsome clothes every day and make people run like that!”
Marius had gone to the Luxembourg Gardens.
The young girl was there with Monsieur Leblanc. Marius approached as near as he could, seeming to be reading a book, but he was still very far off, then he returned and sat down on his bench, where he spent four hours watching the artless little sparrows as