sence of Marius had wrought some
change in him. Nothing in the world could have induced him to take a
step towards "that rogue"; but he suffered. He never inquired about him,
but he thought of him incessantly. He lived in the Marais in a more and
more retired manner; he was still merry and violent as of old, but
his merriment had a convulsive harshness, and his violences always
terminated in a sort of gentle and gloomy dejection. He sometimes said:
"Oh! if he only would return, what a good box on the ear I would give
him!"

As for his aunt, she thought too little to love much; Marius was no
longer for her much more than a vague black form; and she eventually
came to occupy herself with him much less than with the cat or the
paroquet which she probably had. What augmented Father Gillenormand's
secret suffering was, that he locked it all up within his breast, and
did not allow its existence to be divined. His sorrow was like those
recently invented furnaces which consume their own smoke. It sometimes
happened that officious busybodies spoke to him of Marius, and asked
him: "What is your grandson doing?" "What has become of him?" The old
bourgeois replied with a sigh, that he was a sad case, and giving a
fillip to his cuff, if he wished to appear gay: "Monsieur le Baron de
Pontmercy is practising pettifogging in some corner or other."

While the old man regretted, Marius applauded himself. As is the case
with all good-hearted people, misfortune had eradicated his bitterness.
He only thought of M. Gillenormand in an amiable light, but he had set
his mind on not receiving anything more from the man who had been
unkind to his father. This was the mitigated translation of his first
indignation. Moreover, he was happy at having suffered, and at suffering
still. It was for his father's sake. The hardness of his life satisfied
and pleased him. He said to himself with a sort of joy that--it was
certainly the least he could do; that it was an expiation;--that, had
it not been for that, he would have been punished in some other way and
later on for his impious indifference towards his father, and such a
father! that it would not have been just that his father should have all
the suffering, and he none of it; and that, in any case, what were his
toils and his destitution compared with the colonel's heroic life? that,
in short, the only way for him to approach his father and resemble him,
was to be brave in the face of indigence, as