Chapter Chapter 347 · THE EFFECTS OF DREAMS MINGLED WITH HAPPINESS

The lovers saw each other every day. Cosette came with M.

Fauchelevent.—“This is reversing things,” said Mademoiselle

Gillenormand, “to have the bride come to the house to do the courting

like this.” But Marius’ convalescence had caused the habit to become

established, and the armchairs of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,

better adapted to interviews than the straw chairs of the Rue de

l’Homme Armé, had rooted it. Marius and M. Fauchelevent saw each other,

but did not address each other. It seemed as though this had been

agreed upon. Every girl needs a chaperon. Cosette could not have come

without M. Fauchelevent. In Marius’ eyes, M. Fauchelevent was the

condition attached to Cosette. He accepted it. By dint of discussing

political matters, vaguely and without precision, from the point of

view of the general amelioration of the fate of all men, they came to

say a little more than “yes” and “no.” Once, on the subject of

education, which Marius wished to have free and obligatory, multiplied

under all forms lavished on every one, like the air and the sun in a

word, respirable for the entire population, they were in unison, and

they almost conversed. M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even with a

certain loftiness of language—still he lacked something indescribable.

M. Fauchelevent possessed something less and also something more, than

a man of the world.

Marius, inwardly, and in the depths of his thought, surrounded with all

sorts of mute questions this M. Fauchelevent, who was to him simply

benevolent and cold. There were moments when doubts as to his own

recollections occurred to him. There was a void in his memory, a black

spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony.—Many things had been

lost therein. He had come to the point of asking himself whether it

were really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, so serious and so

calm a man, in the barricade.

This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions and the

disappearances of the past had left in his mind. It must not be

supposed that he was delivered from all those obsessions of the memory

which force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to glance sadly

behind us. The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that

have vanished contains neither thought nor love. At times, Marius

clasped his face between his hands, and the vague and tumultuous past

traversed the twilight which reigned in his brain. Again he beheld

Mabeuf fall, he heard Gavroche singing amid the grape-shot, he felt

beneath his lips the cold brow of Éponine; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean

Prouvaire, Combeferre, Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose erect

before him, then dispersed into thin air. Were all those dear,

sorrowful, valiant, charming or tragic beings merely dreams? had they

actually existed? The revolt had enveloped everything in its smoke.

These great fevers create great dreams. He questioned himself; he felt

himself; all these vanished realities made him dizzy. Where were they

all then? was it really true that all were dead? A fall into the

shadows had carried off all except himself. It all seemed to him to

have disappeared as though behind the curtain of a theatre. There are

curtains like this which drop in life. God passes on to the following

act.

And he himself—was he actually the same man? He, the poor man, was

rich; he, the abandoned, had a family; he, the despairing, was to marry

Cosette. It seemed to him that he had traversed a tomb, and that he had

entered into it black and had emerged from it white, and in that tomb

the others had remained. At certain moments, all these beings of the

past, returned and present, formed a circle around him, and

overshadowed him; then he thought of Cosette, and recovered his

serenity; but nothing less than this felicity could have sufficed to

efface that catastrophe.

M. Fauchelevent almost occupied a place among these vanished beings.

Marius hesitated to believe that the Fauchelevent of the barricade was

the same as this Fauchelevent in flesh and blood, sitting so gravely

beside Cosette. The first was, probably, one of those nightmares

occasioned and brought back by his hours of delirium. However, the

natures of both men were rigid, no question from Marius to M.

Fauchelevent was possible. Such an idea had not even occurred to him.

We have already indicated this characteristic detail.

Two men who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of tacit

agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less rare than is

commonly supposed.

Once only, did Marius make the attempt. He introduced into the

conversation the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and, turning to M. Fauchelevent,

he said to him:

“Of course, you are acquainted with that street?”

“What street?”

“The Rue de la Chanvrerie.”

“I have no idea of the name of that street,” replied M. Fauchelevent,

in the most natural manner in the world.

The response which bore upon the name of the street and not upon the

street itself, appeared to Marius to be more conclusive than it really

was.

“Decidedly,” thought he, “I have been dreaming. I have been subject to

a hallucination. It was some one who resembled him. M. Fauchelevent was

not there.”’