e, and he would bring good news.
Youth is made thus; it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow useless
and does not accept it. Youth is the smile of the future in the presence
of an unknown quantity, which is itself. It is natural to it to be
happy. It seems as though its respiration were made of hope.

Moreover, Cosette could not remember what Marius had said to her on
the subject of this absence which was to last only one day, and what
explanation of it he had given her. Every one has noticed with what
nimbleness a coin which one has dropped on the ground rolls away and
hides, and with what art it renders itself undiscoverable. There are
thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle away in a corner of
our brain; that is the end of them; they are lost; it is impossible to
lay the memory on them. Cosette was somewhat vexed at the useless little
effort made by her memory. She told herself, that it was very naughty
and very wicked of her, to have forgotten the words uttered by Marius.

She sprang out of bed and accomplished the two ablutions of soul and
body, her prayers and her toilet.

One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader into a nuptial
chamber, not into a virginal chamber. Verse would hardly venture it,
prose must not.

It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is whiteness
in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily, which must not be
gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not gazed upon it. Woman in the
bud is sacred. That innocent bud which opens, that adorable half-nudity
which is afraid of itself, that white foot which takes refuge in a
slipper, that throat which veils itself before a mirror as though
a mirror were an eye, that chemise which makes haste to rise up and
conceal the shoulder for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing
vehicle, those cords tied, those clasps fastened, those laces drawn,
those tremors, those shivers of cold and modesty, that exquisite
affright in every movement, that almost winged uneasiness where there
is no cause for alarm, the successive phases of dressing, as charming as
the clouds of dawn,--it is not fitting that all this should be narrated,
and it is too much to have even called attention to it.

The eye of man must be more religious in the presence of the rising of a
young girl than in the presence of the rising of a star. The possibility
of hurting should inspire an augmentation of respect. The down on the
peach, the blo