Les Miserables by Victor Hugo; Norman Denny

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo; Norman Denny

Author:Victor Hugo; Norman Denny
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: classics
ISBN: 0140444300
Publisher: ePenguin
Published: 1875-01-02T00:00:00+00:00


BOOK EIGHT

THE NOXIOUS POOR

I

Looking for a girl in a hat, Marius encounters a man in a cap

SUMMER AND autumn passed, and winter came. Neither Monsieur Leblanc nor the girl had set foot in the Luxembourg. Marius had but one thought, which was to see that enchanting face again. He had searched endlessly and everywhere, but without success. He had ceased to be the hot-headed dreamer of dreams, the bold challenger of fate, the youthful builder of futures, his mind teeming with castles in the air. He was like a stray dog, plunged in black despair. His life had become meaningless. Work disgusted him, walking tired him, solitude bored him; the vast world of Nature, hitherto so filled for him with light and meaning, with wide horizons and wise counsels, had become an emptiness. Everything, it seemed, had disappeared.

He still meditated, for he could not do otherwise, but he took no pleasure in his thoughts. To every notion that occurred to him, every plan that entered his mind, he had the same answer: what use is it?

He took himself endlessly to task. Why had he followed her, when it was such happiness simply to look at her? And she had looked back at him – was not that tremendous in itself? She had seemed to like him, and what more could he ask? What more could there have been? He had been ridiculous, it was his own doing… And so on. Courfeyrac, to whom he said nothing since it was against his nature to do so, but who guessed a good deal, that being his nature, had at first congratulated him, if with some astonishment, on having fallen in love; but then, seeing his state of misery, he said: ‘So you’re human, like the rest of us. Well, let’s go to the Chaumière.’

On one occasion, encouraged by the September sunshine, he had let himself be borne off to the Bal de Sceaux in company with Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and Grantaire. He had had a wild hope of seeing her there, but of course had not done so. ‘All the same, it’s a good place for finding lost women,’ Grantaire had murmured to the others. Marius had left them to their own pursuits and had walked back, lonely, weary and sad-eyed, outraged by the noise and dust of the carriages of singing revellers that passed him in the night, and seeking to cool his fevered blood by breathing in the sharp scent of the walnut trees lining the road.

He relapsed more and more into solitude, aimless and apathetic, immersed in his private suffering, twisting and turning within the walls of his grief like a wolf in a cage, searching still for what he had lost and made dull-witted by love.

An incident occurred which greatly startled him. In one of the narrow streets off the Boulevard du Luxembourg he passed a man in workman’s clothes wearing a peaked cap beneath which his very white hair was visible. Struck by the beauty of those white locks, Marius turned to look at him.



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