the sight! You are right!"--At the moment in life
and the heart which she had then attained, she contented herself with
replying, with supreme calmness: "That young man!"

As though she now beheld him for the first time in her life.

"How stupid I am!" thought Jean Valjean. "She had not noticed him. It is
I who have pointed him out to her."

Oh, simplicity of the old! oh, the depth of children!

It is one of the laws of those fresh years of suffering and trouble, of
those vivacious conflicts between a first love and the first obstacles,
that the young girl does not allow herself to be caught in any trap
whatever, and that the young man falls into every one. Jean Valjean
had instituted an undeclared war against Marius, which Marius, with
the sublime stupidity of his passion and his age, did not divine. Jean
Valjean laid a host of ambushes for him; he changed his hour, he changed
his bench, he forgot his handkerchief, he came alone to the Luxembourg;
Marius dashed headlong into all these snares; and to all the
interrogation marks planted by Jean Valjean in his pathway, he
ingenuously answered "yes." But Cosette remained immured in her apparent
unconcern and in her imperturbable tranquillity, so that Jean Valjean
arrived at the following conclusion: "That ninny is madly in love with
Cosette, but Cosette does not even know that he exists."

None the less did he bear in his heart a mournful tremor. The minute
when Cosette would love might strike at any moment. Does not everything
begin with indifference?

Only once did Cosette make a mistake and alarm him. He rose from his
seat to depart, after a stay of three hours, and she said: "What,
already?"

Jean Valjean had not discontinued his trips to the Luxembourg, as he
did not wish to do anything out of the way, and as, above all things,
he feared to arouse Cosette; but during the hours which were so sweet
to the lovers, while Cosette was sending her smile to the intoxicated
Marius, who perceived nothing else now, and who now saw nothing in all
the world but an adored and radiant face, Jean Valjean was fixing on
Marius flashing and terrible eyes. He, who had finally come to believe
himself incapable of a malevolent feeling, experienced moments when
Marius was present, in which he thought he was becoming savage and
ferocious once more, and he felt the old depths of his soul, which
had formerly contained so much wrath, opening once more and rising up
against that young m