inister to
it a box on the ear. Rather than borrow, he went without food. He had
passed many a day fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet, and that,
if one is not on one's guard, lowered fortunes may lead to baseness of
soul, he kept a jealous watch on his pride. Such and such a formality
or action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely a
deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself against
it. His face wore a sort of severe flush. He was timid even to rudeness.

During all these trials he had felt himself encouraged and even
uplifted, at times, by a secret force that he possessed within himself.
The soul aids the body, and at certain moments, raises it. It is the
only bird which bears up its own cage.

Besides his father's name, another name was graven in Marius' heart,
the name of Thenardier. Marius, with his grave and enthusiastic nature,
surrounded with a sort of aureole the man to whom, in his thoughts,
he owed his father's life,--that intrepid sergeant who had saved the
colonel amid the bullets and the cannon-balls of Waterloo. He never
separated the memory of this man from the memory of his father, and
he associated them in his veneration. It was a sort of worship in two
steps, with the grand altar for the colonel and the lesser one for
Thenardier. What redoubled the tenderness of his gratitude towards
Thenardier, was the idea of the distress into which he knew that
Thenardier had fallen, and which had engulfed the latter. Marius had
learned at Montfermeil of the ruin and bankruptcy of the unfortunate
inn-keeper. Since that time, he had made unheard-of efforts to find
traces of him and to reach him in that dark abyss of misery in which
Thenardier had disappeared. Marius had beaten the whole country; he
had gone to Chelles, to Bondy, to Gourney, to Nogent, to Lagny. He had
persisted for three years, expending in these explorations the little
money which he had laid by. No one had been able to give him any news of
Thenardier: he was supposed to have gone abroad. His creditors had also
sought him, with less love than Marius, but with as much assiduity, and
had not been able to lay their hands on him. Marius blamed himself, and
was almost angry with himself for his lack of success in his researches.
It was the only debt left him by the colonel, and Marius made it a
matter of honor to pay it. "What," he thought, "when my father lay dying
on the field of battle, did Thenardier con