involuntarily dulled his wits? A little, perhaps. Had he entered upon
this love affair, which had ended in his marriage to Cosette, without
taking sufficient precautions to throw light upon the surroundings? He
admitted,--it is thus, by a series of successive admissions of ourselves
in regard to ourselves, that life amends us, little by little,--he
admitted the chimerical and visionary side of his nature, a sort of
internal cloud peculiar to many organizations, and which, in paroxysms
of passion and sorrow, dilates as the temperature of the soul changes,
and invades the entire man, to such a degree as to render him nothing
more than a conscience bathed in a mist. We have more than once
indicated this characteristic element of Marius' individuality.

He recalled that, in the intoxication of his love, in the Rue Plumet,
during those six or seven ecstatic weeks, he had not even spoke to
Cosette of that drama in the Gorbeau hovel, where the victim had taken
up such a singular line of silence during the struggle and the ensuing
flight. How had it happened that he had not mentioned this to Cosette?
Yet it was so near and so terrible! How had it come to pass that he had
not even named the Thenardiers, and, particularly, on the day when he
had encountered Eponine? He now found it almost difficult to explain his
silence of that time. Nevertheless, he could account for it. He recalled
his benumbed state, his intoxication with Cosette, love absorbing
everything, that catching away of each other into the ideal, and perhaps
also, like the imperceptible quantity of reason mingled with this
violent and charming state of the soul, a vague, dull instinct impelling
him to conceal and abolish in his memory that redoubtable adventure,
contact with which he dreaded, in which he did not wish to play any
part, his agency in which he had kept secret, and in which he could be
neither narrator nor witness without being an accuser.

Moreover, these few weeks had been a flash of lightning; there had been
no time for anything except love.

In short, having weighed everything, turned everything over in his mind,
examined everything, whatever might have been the consequences if he had
told Cosette about the Gorbeau ambush, even if he had discovered that
Jean Valjean was a convict, would that have changed him, Marius? Would
that have changed her, Cosette? Would he have drawn back? Would he have
adored her any the less? Would he have refrained from m