And on the morrow a splendid tea-colored moire antique dress was added
to Cosette's outfit. The grandfather extracted a wisdom from this
frippery:--
"Love is all very well, but this is required with it. Something
useless is required in happiness; happiness is only what is absolutely
necessary, but season it, say I, with an enormous amount of
superfluity. A palace and her heart; her heart and the Louvre. Give
me my shepherdess, and try that she be a duchess. Bring me Phillis
crowned with corn-flowers, and add to her one thousand francs a year.
Open for me an endless Bucolic under a marble colonnade. I consent
to the Bucolic and also to the fairy scene in marble and gold. Dry
happiness resembles dry bread; you eat it, but you do not dine. I wish
for superfluity, for the useless, for extravagance, for that which is
of no use. I remember to to have seen in Strasburg Cathedral a clock
as tall as a three-storied house, which marked the hour, which had the
kindness to mark the hour, but did not look as if it was made for the
purpose; and which, after striking midday or midnight,--midday, the
hour of the sun, and midnight, the hour of love, or any other hour
you please,--gave you the moon and the stars, earth and sea, birds
and fishes, Phœbus and Phœbe, and a heap of things that came
out of a corner, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles V.,
and Éponine and Sabinus, and a number of little gilt men who played
the trumpet into the bargain, without counting the ravishing chimes
which it scattered in the air on every possible occasion, without your
knowing why. Is a wretched, naked clock, which only marks the hours,
worth that? I am of the opinion of the great clock of Strasburg, and
prefer it to the Black Forest cuckoo clock."
M. Gillenormand talked all sorts of nonsense about the marriage, and
all the ideas of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell into his
dithyrambs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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