152 0 Les Miserables
as: Ah, how delightful is the drum! or, Pity is not a pandour.
But Cosette had left the convent too early to have occupied
herself much with the ‘drum.’ Therefore, she did not know
what name to give to what she now felt. Is any one the less ill
because one does not know the name of one’s malady?
She loved with all the more passion because she loved ig-
norantly. She did not know whether it was a good thing or a
bad thing, useful or dangerous, eternal or temporary, allow-
able or prohibited; she loved. She would have been greatly
astonished, had any one said to her: ‘You do not sleep? But
that is forbidden! You do not eat? Why, that is very bad! You
have oppressions and palpitations of the heart? That must
not be! You blush and turn pale, when a certain being clad
in black appears at the end of a certain green walk? But that
is abominable!’ She would not have understood, and she
would have replied: ‘What fault is there of mine in a matter
in which I have no power and of which I know nothing?’
It turned out that the love which presented itself was
exactly suited to the state of her soul. It was a sort of admi-
ration at a distance, a mute contemplation, the deification
of a stranger. It was the apparition of youth to youth, the
dream of nights become a reality yet remaining a dream,
the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at last, but
having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor exi-
gence, nor defect; in a word, the distant lover who lingered
in the ideal, a chimaera with a form. Any nearer and more
palpable meeting would have alarmed Cosette at this first
stage, when she was still half immersed in the exaggerated
mists of the cloister. She had all the fears of children and