Page 1693 - les-miserables

‘Then I like it better too. Truly, it is pretty, Cosette. Call
me Cosette.’
And the smile that she added made of this dialogue
an idyl worthy of a grove situated in heaven. On another
occasion she gazed intently at him and exclaimed:—
‘Monsieur, you are handsome, you are good-looking,
you are witty, you are not at all stupid, you are much more
learned than I am, but I bid you defiance with this word: I
love you!’
And Marius, in the very heavens, thought he heard a
strain sung by a star.
Or she bestowed on him a gentle tap because he coughed,
and she said to him:—
‘Don’t cough, sir; I will not have people cough on my do-
main without my permission. It’s very naughty to cough
and to disturb me. I want you to be well, because, in the first
place, if you were not well, I should be very unhappy. What
should I do then?’
And this was simply divine.
Once Marius said to Cosette:—
‘Just imagine, I thought at one time that your name was
Ursule.’
This made both of them laugh the whole evening.
In the middle of another conversation, he chanced to
exclaim:—
‘Oh! One day, at the Luxembourg, I had a good mind to
finish breaking up a veteran!’ But he stopped short, and went
no further. He would have been obliged to speak to Cosette
of her garter, and that was impossible. This bordered on a

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