Requiescant — Les Misérables

Madame de T's salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the world. It was the only opening through which he could get a glimpse of life. This opening was sombre. More night than day came to him through that skylight. The child who had been all joy and light on entering soon became melancholy, and, what is still more contrary to his age, grave. Surrounded by those singular and imposing personages he gazed about him with serious amazement. Antique visages and Biblical names mingled in his mind with the Old Testament he was learning by heart. When they sat in a circle around a dying fire, sparely lighted by a lamp shaded with green, long gowns of another age, words both majestic and severe, little Marius stared with frightened eyes, in the conviction that he beheld not women, but patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.

With these phantoms priests and gentlemen were sometimes mingled. Tragic tales abounded. Gillenormand reigned there. A bourgeois dominated a feudal salon. Reputations were held in quarantine. They declared that the time which had elapsed since Coblentz had not existed. They jeered at the age, which released them from the necessity of understanding it. All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly amounted to a breath. They all had the air of having lived a long time ago and of obstinately resisting the sepulchre. It was a mummified society. The masters were embalmed; the servants were stuffed with straw. What did they do? They were ultra: so strongly for as to be against. The night had too much light. Former days did not recognize Yesterday. Someone called Bonaparte Scapin. Beginning with 1818 a disturbing shade of doctrinarians sprang up, Royalists who excused themselves for being so. The ultras marked the first epoch. The author traces the features rapidly, without bitterness: souvenirs attach him to this past, for they touch his mother. One may smile at it; one can neither despise nor hate it. It was the France of former days.

Marius pursued some studies. When he emerged from Aunt Gillenormand his grandfather confided him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic innocence. This young soul passed from a prude to a vulgar pedant. He went through college, then entered the law school. He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe. He did not love his grandfather much; the old man's gaiety and cynicism repelled him. His feelings towards his father were gloomy. He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous, proud, religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure to shyness.