The answer, which related to the name of the street, and not to the street itself, seemed to Marius more conclusive than it really was. "Decidedly," he thought, "I must have been dreaming. I had an hallucination. It was some one that resembled him, and M. Fauchelevent was not there." CHAPTER VIII. TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND. The enchantment, great though it was, did not efface other thoughts from Marius's mind. While the marriage arrangements were being made, and the fixed period was waited for, he made some troublesome and scrupulous retrospective researches. He owed gratitude in several quarters; he owed it for his father, and he owed it for himself. There was Thénardier, and there was the stranger who had brought him back to M. Gillenormand's. Marius was anxious to find these two men again, as he did not wish to marry, be happy, and forget them, and feared lest these unpaid debts of honor might cast a shadow over his life, which would henceforth be so luminous. It was impossible for him to leave all these arrears suffering behind him, and he wished, ere he entered joyously into the future, to obtain a receipt from the past. That Thénardier was a villain took nothing from the fact that he had saved Colonel Pontmercy. Thénardier was a bandit for all the world excepting for Marius. And Marius, ignorant of the real scene on the battle-field of Waterloo, did not know this peculiarity, that his father stood to Thénardier in the strange situation of owing him life without owing him gratitude. Not one of the agents whom Marius employed could find Thénardier's trail, and the disappearance seemed complete on that side. Mother Thénardier had died in prison before trial, and Thénardier and his daughter Azelma, the only two left of this lamentable group, had plunged again into the shadow. The gulf of the social unknown had silently closed again upon these beings. No longer could be seen on the surface that quivering, that tremor, and those obscure concentric circles which announce that something has fallen there, and that a grappling-iron may be thrown in.