; yet no more in danger than a star in the
maw of the clouds.

BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS

CHAPTER I--FULL LIGHT

The reader has probably understood that Eponine, having recognized
through the gate, the inhabitant of that Rue Plumet whither Magnon had
sent her, had begun by keeping the ruffians away from the Rue Plumet,
and had then conducted Marius thither, and that, after many days spent
in ecstasy before that gate, Marius, drawn on by that force which draws
the iron to the magnet and a lover towards the stones of which is built
the house of her whom he loves, had finally entered Cosette's garden as
Romeo entered the garden of Juliet. This had even proved easier for him
than for Romeo; Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, Marius had only
to use a little force on one of the bars of the decrepit gate which
vacillated in its rusty recess, after the fashion of old people's teeth.
Marius was slender and readily passed through.

As there was never any one in the street, and as Marius never entered
the garden except at night, he ran no risk of being seen.

Beginning with that blessed and holy hour when a kiss betrothed these
two souls, Marius was there every evening. If, at that period of
her existence, Cosette had fallen in love with a man in the least
unscrupulous or debauched, she would have been lost; for there are
generous natures which yield themselves, and Cosette was one of them.
One of woman's magnanimities is to yield. Love, at the height where it
is absolute, is complicated with some indescribably celestial blindness
of modesty. But what dangers you run, O noble souls! Often you give the
heart, and we take the body. Your heart remains with you, you gaze upon
it in the gloom with a shudder. Love has no middle course; it either
ruins or it saves. All human destiny lies in this dilemma. This dilemma,
ruin, or safety, is set forth no more inexorably by any fatality than
by love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; also coffin. The same
sentiment says "yes" and "no" in the human heart. Of all the things that
God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light,
alas! and the most darkness.

God willed that Cosette's love should encounter one of the loves which
save.

Throughout the whole of the month of May of that year 1832, there were
there, in every night, in that poor, neglected garden, beneath that
thicket which grew thicker and more fragrant day by day, two b