An exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by ingenuousness
is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as a dazzling and innocent
creature who walks along, holding in her hand the key to paradise
without being conscious of it. But what she had lost in ingenuous grace,
she gained in pensive and serious charm. Her whole person, permeated
with the joy of youth, of innocence, and of beauty, breathed forth a
splendid melancholy.

It was at this epoch that Marius, after the lapse of six months, saw her
once more at the Luxembourg.

CHAPTER VI--THE BATTLE BEGUN

Cosette in her shadow, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire.
Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, slowly drew together
these two beings, all charged and all languishing with the stormy
electricity of passion, these two souls which were laden with love as
two clouds are laden with lightning, and which were bound to overflow
and mingle in a look like the clouds in a flash of fire.

The glance has been so much abused in love romances that it has finally
fallen into disrepute. One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two
beings fell in love because they looked at each other. That is the way
people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way. The rest is
nothing, but the rest comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these
great shocks which two souls convey to each other by the exchange of
that spark.

At that particular hour when Cosette unconsciously darted that glance
which troubled Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he had also launched
a look which disturbed Cosette.

He caused her the same good and the same evil.

She had been in the habit of seeing him for a long time, and she had
scrutinized him as girls scrutinize and see, while looking elsewhere.
Marius still considered Cosette ugly, when she had already begun to
think Marius handsome. But as he paid no attention to her, the young man
was nothing to her.

Still, she could not refrain from saying to herself that he had
beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, handsome teeth, a charming tone of voice
when she heard him conversing with his comrades, that he held himself
badly when he walked, if you like, but with a grace that was all his
own, that he did not appear to be at all stupid, that his whole person
was noble, gentle, simple, proud, and that, in short, though he seemed
to be poor, yet his air was fine.

On the day when their eyes met at last, and said to each other those
firs