break. I have been young and you will be old. All right, my lad, you will requite it to your grandson. Here are two hundred pistoles; go and amuse yourself, confound you!' That is the way in which the matter should be arranged; a man does not marry, but that is no obstacle: do you understand?" Marius, petrified and incapable of uttering a word, shook his head in the negative. The old gentleman burst into a laugh, winked his aged eyelid, tapped him on the knee, looked at him in both eyes with a mysterious and radiant air, and said with the tenderest shrug of the shoulders possible,-- "You goose! make her your mistress!" Marius turned pale; he had understood nothing of what his grandfather had been saying, and this maundering about the Rue Blomet, Pamela, the barracks, the lancer, had passed before Marius like a phantasmagoria. Nothing of all this could affect Cosette, who was a lily, and the old gentleman was wandering. But this divagation had resulted in a sentence which Marius understood, and which was a mortal insult to Cosette, and the words, _Make her your mistress_, passed through the pure young man's heart like a sword-blade. He rose, picked up his hat which was on the ground, and walked to the door with a firm, assured step. Then he turned, gave his grandfather a low bow, drew himself up again, and said,-- "Five years ago you outraged my father; to-day you outrage my wife. I have nothing more to ask of you, sir; farewell!" Father Gillenormand, who was stupefied, opened his mouth, stretched out his arms, strove to rise, and ere he was able to utter a word, the door had closed again, and Marius had disappeared. The old gentleman remained for a few minutes motionless, and as if thunderstruck, unable to speak or breathe, as though a garroter's hand were compressing his throat. At length he tore himself out of his easy-chair, ran to the door as fast as a man can run at ninety-one, opened it, and cried,-- "Help! help!" His daughter appeared, and then his servants; he went on with a lamentable rattle in his throat,-- "Run after him! catch him up! How did I offend him? He is mad and going away! Oh Lord, oh Lord! this time he will not return." He went to the window which looked on the street, opened it with his old trembling hands, bent half his body out of it, while Basque and Nicolette held his skirts, and cried,-- "Marius! Marius! Marius! Marius!" But Marius could not hear him, for at this very moment he was turning the corner of the Rue St. Louis. The nonagenarian raised his hands twice or thrice to his temples with an expression of agony, tottered back, and sank into an easy-chair, pulseless, voiceless, and tearless, shaking his head and moving his lips with a stupid air, and having nothing left in his eyes or heart but a profound and gloomy rigidity which resembled night. BOOK IX. WHERE ARE THEY GOING? CHAPTER I. JEAN VALJEAN.