As for the aunt, she thought too little to love much; to her Marius was only a black and vague profile, and in the end she paid much less attention to him than to the cat or the parrot which it is probable she possessed. What added to Father Gillenormand's secret suffering was that he shut it up within himself, and did not allow it to be divined. His chagrin was like one of those newly-invented furnaces which consume their own smoke. At times it happened that officious friends would speak to him about Marius, and ask, "How is your grandson, and what is he doing?" The old bourgeois would answer, with a sigh if he were sad, or with a flip to his frill if he wished to appear gay, "Monsieur le Baron Pontmercy practises law in some corner." While the old gentleman regretted, Marius applauded himself. As is the case with all good hearts, misfortune had freed him from bitterness; he thought of M. Gillenormand gently, but he was resolved never to accept anything from a man _who had been unjust to his father_. This was the mitigated translation of his first indignation. Moreover, he was glad that he had suffered, and was still suffering, for he did so for his father. The hardness of his life satisfied and pleased him, and he said to himself with a sort of joy that _it was the least he_ could do, and that it was an expiation; that, were it not so, he would have been punished more hereafter for his impious indifference toward his father, and such a father,--that it would not have been just for his father to have all the suffering and he none; and, besides, what were his toil and want when compared with the Colonel's heroic life? Lastly, that his only way of approaching his father, and resembling him, was to be valiant against indigence, as he had been brave against the enemy, and that this was doubtless what the Colonel meant by the words, _He will be worthy of it_,--words which Marius continued to bear, not on his chest, as the Colonel's letter had disappeared, but in his heart. And then, again, on the day when his grandfather turned him out he was only a boy, while now he was a man and felt he was so. Misery--we lay a stress on the fact--had been kind to him; for poverty in youth, when it succeeds, has the magnificent result of turning the whole will to effort and the whole soul to aspiration. Poverty at once lays bare material life and renders it hideous; and hence come indescribable soarings toward the ideal life. The rich young man has a thousand brilliant and coarse amusements,--races, shooting, dogs, tobacco, gambling, good dinners, and so on, which are occupations of the lower part of the mind at the expense of the higher and more delicate part. The poor young man has to work for his bread, and when he has eaten, he has only reverie left him. He goes to the free spectacles which God gives; he looks at the sky, space, the stars, the flowers, the children, the humanity in which he is suffering, and the creation in which he radiates.