the revolution are so great, that they have the prestige of
the ages, like Cato and like Phocion, and each one of them seems to me
an antique memory."

"Moire antique!" exclaimed the old gentleman. "Thanks, Marius. That is
precisely the idea of which I was in search."

And on the following day, a magnificent dress of tea-rose colored moire
antique was added to Cosette's wedding presents.

From these fripperies, the grandfather extracted a bit of wisdom.

"Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go with
it. The useless must be mingled with happiness. Happiness is only the
necessary. Season that enormously with the superfluous for me. A
palace and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the grand
waterworks of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess and try to make her a
duchess. Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers, and add a hundred
thousand francs income. Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you
can see, beneath a marble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also
to the fairy spectacle of marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry
bread. One eats, but one does not dine. I want the superfluous, the
useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose. I
remember to have seen, in the Cathedral of Strasburg, a clock, as tall
as a three-story house which marked the hours, which had the kindness to
indicate the hour, but which had not the air of being made for that; and
which, after having struck midday, or midnight,--midday, the hour of the
sun, or midnight, the hour of love,--or any other hour that you like,
gave you the moon and the stars, the earth and the sea, birds and
fishes, Phoebus and Phoebe, and a host of things which emerged from a
niche, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and
Eponine, and Sabinus, and a throng of little gilded goodmen, who played
on the trumpet to boot. Without reckoning delicious chimes which it
sprinkled through the air, on every occasion, without any one's knowing
why. Is a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to
that? For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg,
and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest."

M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with the wedding, and all
the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell through his
dithyrambs.

"You are ignorant of the art of festivals. You do not know how to
organize a day of enjoyment in th