e, she did not know what name to give to what
she now felt. Is any one the less ill because one does not know the name
of one's malady?

She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly. She
did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, useful or
dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited; she loved. She
would have been greatly astonished, had any one said to her: "You do not
sleep? But that is forbidden! You do not eat? Why, that is very bad! You
have oppressions and palpitations of the heart? That must not be! You
blush and turn pale, when a certain being clad in black appears at the
end of a certain green walk? But that is abominable!" She would not have
understood, and she would have replied: "What fault is there of mine in
a matter in which I have no power and of which I know nothing?"

It turned out that the love which presented itself was exactly suited to
the state of her soul. It was a sort of admiration at a distance, a mute
contemplation, the deification of a stranger. It was the apparition of
youth to youth, the dream of nights become a reality yet remaining
a dream, the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at last, but
having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor exigence, nor
defect; in a word, the distant lover who lingered in the ideal, a
chimaera with a form. Any nearer and more palpable meeting would have
alarmed Cosette at this first stage, when she was still half immersed in
the exaggerated mists of the cloister. She had all the fears of children
and all the fears of nuns combined. The spirit of the convent, with
which she had been permeated for the space of five years, was still in
the process of slow evaporation from her person, and made everything
tremble around her. In this situation he was not a lover, he was not
even an admirer, he was a vision. She set herself to adoring Marius as
something charming, luminous, and impossible.

As extreme innocence borders on extreme coquetry, she smiled at him with
all frankness.

Every day, she looked forward to the hour for their walk with
impatience, she found Marius there, she felt herself unspeakably happy,
and thought in all sincerity that she was expressing her whole thought
when she said to Jean Valjean:--

"What a delicious garden that Luxembourg is!"

Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another. They did not
address each other, they did not salute each other, they did not know
e