Page 1566 - les-miserables

the sphere of music. When she had finished, she remained
wrapped in thought.
All at once, it seemed to her that she heard the sound of
footsteps in the garden.
It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be
Toussaint, she was in bed, and it was ten o’clock at night.
She stepped to the shutter of the drawing-room, which
was closed, and laid her ear against it.
It seemed to her that it was the tread of a man, and that
he was walking very softly.
She mounted rapidly to the first floor, to her own cham-
ber, opened a small wicket in her shutter, and peeped into
the garden. The moon was at the full. Everything could be
seen as plainly as by day.
There was no one there.
She opened the window. The garden was absolutely calm,
and all that was visible was that the street was deserted as
usual.
Cosette thought that she had been mistaken. She thought
that she had heard a noise. It was a hallucination produced
by the melancholy and magnificent chorus of Weber, which
lays open before the mind terrified depths, which trembles
before the gaze like a dizzy forest, and in which one hears
the crackling of dead branches beneath the uneasy tread of
the huntsmen of whom one catches a glimpse through the
twilight.
She thought no more about it.
Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature. There
flowed in her veins some of the blood of the bohemian and

1566 Les Miserables