that is required to be stupid: one more turn of the key, and he
might be sublime. His manners were reserved, cold, polished, not very
genial. As his mouth was charming, his lips the reddest, and his teeth
the whitest in the world, his smile corrected the severity of his face,
as a whole. At certain moments, that pure brow and that voluptuous smile
presented a singular contrast. His eyes were small, but his glance was
large.

At the period of his most abject misery, he had observed that young
girls turned round when he passed by, and he fled or hid, with death in
his soul. He thought that they were staring at him because of his old
clothes, and that they were laughing at them; the fact is, that they
stared at him because of his grace, and that they dreamed of him.

This mute misunderstanding between him and the pretty passers-by had
made him shy. He chose none of them for the excellent reason that
he fled from all of them. He lived thus indefinitely,--stupidly, as
Courfeyrac said.

Courfeyrac also said to him: "Do not aspire to be venerable" [they
called each other thou; it is the tendency of youthful friendships to
slip into this mode of address]. "Let me give you a piece of advice,
my dear fellow. Don't read so many books, and look a little more at the
lasses. The jades have some good points about them, O Marius! By dint of
fleeing and blushing, you will become brutalized."

On other occasions, Courfeyrac encountered him and said:--"Good morning,
Monsieur l'Abbe!"

When Courfeyrac had addressed to him some remark of this nature, Marius
avoided women, both young and old, more than ever for a week to come,
and he avoided Courfeyrac to boot.

Nevertheless, there existed in all the immensity of creation, two women
whom Marius did not flee, and to whom he paid no attention whatever. In
truth, he would have been very much amazed if he had been informed
that they were women. One was the bearded old woman who swept out his
chamber, and caused Courfeyrac to say: "Seeing that his servant woman
wears his beard, Marius does not wear his own beard." The other was a
sort of little girl whom he saw very often, and whom he never looked at.

For more than a year, Marius had noticed in one of the walks of the
Luxembourg, the one which skirts the parapet of the Pepiniere, a man
and a very young girl, who were almost always seated side by side on the
same bench, at the most solitary end of the alley, on the Rue de l'Ouest
side. E