Page 1721 - les-miserables

And she had replied: ‘This.’
Then she had seated herself on the bench near the steps,
and while he tremblingly took his place beside her, she had
continued:—
‘My father told me this morning to hold myself in readi-
ness, because he has business, and we may go away from
here.’
Marius shivered from head to foot.
When one is at the end of one’s life, to die means to go
away; when one is at the beginning of it, to go away means
to die.
For the last six weeks, Marius had little by little, slowly,
by degrees, taken possession of Cosette each day. As we have
already explained, in the case of first love, the soul is taken
long before the body; later on, one takes the body long be-
fore the soul; sometimes one does not take the soul at all; the
Faublas and the Prudhommes add: ‘Because there is none”;
but the sarcasm is, fortunately, a blasphemy. So Marius pos-
sessed Cosette, as spirits possess, but he enveloped her with
all his soul, and seized her jealously with incredible con-
viction. He possessed her smile, her breath, her perfume,
the profound radiance of her blue eyes, the sweetness of her
skin when he touched her hand, the charming mark which
she had on her neck, all her thoughts. Therefore, he pos-
sessed all Cosette’s dreams.
He incessantly gazed at, and he sometimes touched
lightly with his breath, the short locks on the nape of her
neck, and he declared to himself that there was not one of
those short hairs which did not belong to him, Marius. He

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