It is hard now to picture a students' country party of forty-five years ago. Where the cuckoo was, there is the railway car. Favourite, the only one who can write, has sent word in the name of the four: it is a good hour to emerge from happiness. That is why they rise at five. They take the coach to Saint-Cloud, look at the dry cascade, and exclaim that it must be very beautiful when there is water. They breakfast at the Tête-Noir, throw rings under the quincunx, ascend Diogenes' lantern, gamble for macaroons, pick bouquets, buy reed-pipes, eat apple tarts everywhere, and are perfectly happy. The young girls rustle like warblers escaped from a cage. Favourite has promised rain because slugs are crawling; the shower does not come. A classic poet under the chestnuts sees them pass and thinks of the Graces, then says there is one too many of them.
Favourite, the old one at twenty-three, runs in front under the boughs, jumps ditches, presides like a young female faun. Zéphine and Dahlia cling, take English poses, wear their hair in rolls; melancholy is dawning for women. Listolier and Fameuil, discussing professors, explain Delvincourt and Blondeau to Fantine. Blachevelle seems created to carry Favourite's imitation India shawl on Sundays. Tholomyès follows, dominating. There is dictation in his joviality. His ornament is elephant-leg nankeen trousers with braided copper straps, a rattan worth two hundred francs, and a strange thing called a cigar. Nothing is sacred to him; he smokes. The others say, with veneration, that Tholomyès is astounding. What trousers. What energy.
Fantine is a joy to behold. She carries her sewed-straw hat in her hand rather than on her head. Thick blond hair keeps uncoiling. She wears a mauve barège gown, reddish-brown buskins, and a muslin canezou that conceals and displays at once. The other three wear low-necked dresses without disguise; beside them her reticence looks like an alluring godsend of decency. Brilliant of face, deep blue eyes, a voluptuous dimple visible through muslin: such is Fantine, and under the ribbons one can divine a statue, and in that statue a soul. She is beautiful without being too conscious of it. She is also modesty. An invincible reserve breathes through the intoxication of age, season, and love. This chaste astonishment is the shade that separates Psyche from Venus. Although she would have refused nothing to Tholomyès, her face in repose is supremely virginal. Gravity can succeed to cheerfulness without transition, like the disdain of a goddess. Love is a fault; so be it. Fantine was innocence floating high over fault.
