Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [310]
Once he made a trial. He asked Cosette:
“Would you like to go to the Luxembourg Gardens?”
A light illumined Cosette’s pale face.
“Yes,” said she.
They went. Three months had passed. Marius went there no longer. Marius was not there.
The next day, Jean Valjean asked Cosette again:
“Would you like to go to the Luxembourg Gardens?”
She answered sadly and quietly:
“No!”
Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and harrowed by this gentleness.
For her part, Cosette was languishing. She suffered from the absence of Marius, as she had rejoiced in his presence, in a peculiar way, without really knowing it. When Jean Valjean ceased to take her on their usual walk, her woman’s instinct murmured confusedly in the depths of her heart, that she must not appear to cling to the Luxembourg Gardens; and that if it were indifferent to her, her father would take her back there. But days, weeks, and months passed away. Jean Valjean had tacitly accepted Cosette’s tacit consent. She regretted it. It was too late. The day she returned to the Luxembourg Gardens, Marius was no longer there. Marius then had disappeared; it was all over; what could she do? Would she ever find him again? She felt a constriction of her heart, which nothing relaxed, and which was increasing every day; she no longer knew whether it was winter or summer, sunshine or rain, whether the birds sang, whether it was the season for dahlias or daisies, whether the Luxembourg Gardens were more charming than the Tuileries, whether the linen which the washerwoman brought home was starched too much, or not enough, whether Toussaint did “her marketing” well or ill, and she became dejected, absorbed, intent upon a single thought, her eye wild and fixed, as when one looks into the night at the deep black place where an apparition has vanished.
Still she did not let Jean Valjean see anything, except her paleness. She kept her face sweet for him.
This paleness was more than sufficient to make Jean Valjean anxious. Sometimes he asked her:
“What is the matter with you?”
She answered:
“Nothing.”
And after a silence, as she felt that he was sad also, she continued: “And you, father, is not something the matter with you?”
“Me? nothing,” said he.
These two beings, who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching a love, and who had lived so long for each other, were now suffering by each other and through each other; without speaking of it, without harsh feeling, and smiling the while.
BOOK FOUR
AID FROM BELOW MAY BE AID FROM ABOVE
1
WOUND WITHOUT, CURE WITHIN
THUS THEIR LIFE gradually darkened.
There was left to them but one distraction, and this had formerly been a pleasure: that was to carry bread to those who were hungry, and clothing to those who were cold. In these visits to the poor, in which Cosette often accompanied Jean Valjean, they found some remnant of their former light-heartedness; and, sometimes, when they had had a good day, when many sorrows had been relieved and many little children revived and made warm, Cosette, in the evening, was a little gay. It was at this period that they visited the Jondrette den.
The day after that visit, Jean Valjean appeared in the cottage in the morning, with his ordinary calmness, but with a large wound on his left arm, very much inflamed and infected, which resembled a burn, and which he explained in some fashion. This wound confined him within doors more than a month with fever. He would see no physician. When Cosette urged it: “Call the veterinarian,” said he.
Cosette dressed it night and morning with so divine a grace and so angelic a pleasure in being useful to him, that Jean Valjean felt all his old happiness return, his fears and his anxieties dissipate, and he looked upon Cosette, saying: “Oh! the good wound! Oh! the kind hurt!”
Cosette, as her father was sick, had deserted the summer-house and regained her taste for the little lodge and the back-yard. She spent