Page 2276 - les-miserables

—there’s a festive programme, there’s a good one, or else
I know nothing of such matters, deuce take it!’
While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listen-
ing to himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they
gazed freely at each other.
Aunt Gillenormand surveyed all this with her imper-
turbable placidity. Within the last five or six months she had
experienced a certain amount of emotions. Marius returned,
Marius brought back bleeding, Marius brought back from
a barricade, Marius dead, then living, Marius reconciled,
Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl, Marius wed-
ding a millionairess. The six hundred thousand francs had
been her last surprise. Then, her indifference of a girl taking
her first communion returned to her. She went regularly to
service, told her beads, read her euchology, mumbled Aves
in one corner of the house, while I love you was being whis-
pered in the other, and she beheld Marius and Cosette in a
vague way, like two shadows. The shadow was herself.
There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the
soul, neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be
designated as the business of living, receives no impressions,
either human, or pleasant or painful, with the exception of
earthquakes and catastrophes. This devotion, as Father Gil-
lenormand said to his daughter, corresponds to a cold in
the head. You smell nothing of life. Neither any bad, nor
any good odor.
Moreover, the six hundred thousand francs had settled
the elderly spinster’s indecision. Her father had acquired the
habit of taking her so little into account, that he had not

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