ion of the fate of all men, they came to say a little more than "yes" and "no."
Once, on the subject of education, which Marius wished to have free and obligatory, multiplied under all forms lavished on every one, like the air and the sun in a word, respirable for the entire population, they were in unison, and they almost conversed. M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even with a certain loftiness of language--still he lacked something indescribable.
M. Fauchelevent possessed something less and also something more, than a man of the world.
Marius, inwardly, and in the depths of his thought, surrounded with all sorts of mute questions this M. Fauchelevent, who was to him simply benevolent and cold.
There were moments when doubts as to his own recollections occurred to him.
There was a void in his memory, a black spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony.--Many things had been lost therein.
He had come to the point of asking himself whether it were really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, so serious and so calm a man, in the barricade.
This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions and the disappearances of the past had left in his mind.
It must not be supposed that he was delivered from all those obsessions of the memory which force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to glance sadly behind us.