She looked at Marius, she looked at the crowd, she looked at the sky:
it seemed as though she feared that she should wake up from her dream.
Her amazed and uneasy air added something indescribably enchanting to her beauty. They entered the same carriage to return home, Marius beside Cosette; M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean sat opposite them; Aunt Gillenormand had withdrawn one degree, and was in the second vehicle.
"My children," said the grandfather, "here you are, Monsieur le Baron and Madame la Baronne, with an income of thirty thousand livres."
And Cosette, nestling close to Marius, caressed his ear with an angelic whisper:
"So it is true.
My name is Marius.
I am Madame Thou."
These two creatures were resplendent.
They had reached that irrevocable and irrecoverable moment, at the dazzling intersection of all youth and all joy.
They realized the verses of Jean Prouvaire; they were forty years old taken together.
It was marriage sublimated; these two children were two lilies.
They did not see each other, they did not contemplate each other.
Cosette perceived Marius in the midst of a glory; Marius perceived Cosette on an altar. And on that altar, and in that glory, the two apotheoses mingling, in the background, one knows not how, behind a cloud for Cosette, in a flash for Marius, there was the ideal thing, the real thing, the meeting of the kiss and the dream, the nuptial pillow. All the torments through which they had passed came back to them in intoxication.