simple matter.
Youth must amuse itself, and old age must wear out.
I have been young, you will be old.
Come, my boy, you shall pass it on to your grandson.
Here are two hundred pistoles. Amuse yourself, deuce take it!''
Nothing better!
That''s the way the affair should be treated.
You don''t marry, but that does no harm. You understand me?"
Marius, petrified and incapable of uttering a syllable, made a sign with his head that he did not.
The old man burst out laughing, winked his aged eye, gave him a slap on the knee, stared him full in the face with a mysterious and beaming air, and said to him, with the tenderest of shrugs of the shoulder:--
"Booby! make her your mistress."
Marius turned pale.
He had understood nothing of what his grandfather had just said.
This twaddle about the Rue Blomet, Pamela, the barracks, the lancer, had passed before Marius like a dissolving view. Nothing of all that could bear any reference to Cosette, who was a lily.
The good man was wandering in his mind.
But this wandering terminated in words which Marius did understand, and which were a mortal insult to Cosette.
Those words, "make her your mistress," entered the heart of the strict young man like a sword.
He rose, picked up his hat which lay on the floor, and walked to the door with a firm, assured step.