ur.
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 ignorantly. She did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, useful or dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable 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 admiration 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 exigence, 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.