er
nude stomach.

M. Gillenormand's library became the lawyer's study, which Marius
needed; a study, it will be remembered, being required by the council of
the order.

CHAPTER VII--THE EFFECTS OF DREAMS MINGLED WITH HAPPINESS

The lovers saw each other every day. Cosette came with M.
Fauchelevent.--"This is reversing things," said Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, "to have the bride come to the house to do the courting
like this." But Marius' convalescence had caused the habit to become
established, and the arm-chairs of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,
better adapted to interviews than the straw chairs of the Rue de l'Homme
Arme, had rooted it. Marius and M. Fauchelevent saw each other, but did
not address each other. It seemed as though this had been agreed upon.
Every girl needs a chaperon. Cosette could not have come without
M. Fauchelevent. In Marius' eyes, M. Fauchelevent was the condition
attached to Cosette. He accepted it. By dint of discussing political
matters, vaguely and without precision, from the point of view of the
general amelioration of the fate of all men, they came to say a little
more than "yes" and "no." Once, on the subject of education, which
Marius wished to have free and obligatory, multiplied under all forms
lavished on every one, like the air and the sun in a word, respirable
for the entire population, they were in unison, and they almost
conversed. M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even with a certain
loftiness of language--still he lacked something indescribable. M.
Fauchelevent possessed something less and also something more, than a
man of the world.

Marius, inwardly, and in the depths of his thought, surrounded with
all sorts of mute questions this M. Fauchelevent, who was to him simply
benevolent and cold. There were moments when doubts as to his own
recollections occurred to him. There was a void in his memory, a black
spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony.--Many things had been
lost therein. He had come to the point of asking himself whether it were
really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, so serious and so calm a
man, in the barricade.

This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions and the
disappearances of the past had left in his mind. It must not be supposed
that he was delivered from all those obsessions of the memory which
force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to glance sadly behind
us. The head which does not turn backwards towa