"Pale eyed Milady with the auburn hair
Sad eyed Milady with the noble heart"
It was not, in the great scheme of things, a lot to go on. Oh and the poet was called Jean. Was possibly called Jean – there was an outside chance, Cosette had told him, that it might have been Jerome.
"Well then", thought Marius with a sort of weary determination, "Well then my Monsieur Chose – baptismal name possibly Jean – author of an unnamed volume of poems published within the past six months possibly to critical acclaim and containing a verse entitled "To Which Ardent and Noble Lady?" Well then, let's be having you! You'd better be good though, you just better had be!"
If asked, Marius would have admitted that he was in no mood for a wild goose chase. However, he would also have admitted that Cosette was by no means the sort of wife who habitually set her husband Herculean tasks in the name of love, something all too common amongst the wives of their circle – the degree of difficulty and pointlessness of the task being somehow seen as reliable indicator of the ardour of the man accomplishing it. A month since, she had come home from a salon entranced – unable to remember the poet's name because he had made her cry so. Marius had heard her dreamily mouthing such lines as she could remember to herself in the drawing room when she imagined herself alone. He had teased her and then they had together determined that he would try to find a volume by the mysterious scribe who had so touched her heart.
Girding his loins, he stepped into the bookshop.
Motes of dust gavotted in the afternoon sunlight and the stock was arranged in the most haphazard manner imaginable. Here and there a desultory effort had been made at sorting the items into some semblance of order on the shelves – for a while they would present, for example, a neatly alphabetised collection of English novels, but these would soon be routed by an abandoned collection of treatises on architecture or some books of 16th century verse which someone had decided they did not wish to purchase after all and dumped. Some of the tomes were laid out on tables, and here too some poor beleaguered soul had clearly attempted to order them into neat stacks. Entropy and fashionable ennui had caused these stacks to disintegrate until they more closely resembled rolling, ever shifting sand dunes of paper. One would have had to be as intrepid as a Bedouin to cross these wastes in search of a desired volume.
There was, Marius mused, something contrived about the place's down at heel, slovenly air. The owner was clearly the sort of tiresome intellectual who considered himself very smart – but completely above being seen to be smart, much less the notion that he might want to sell some books or that other people might enter the shop wanted to by some. The groups of self consciously, pretentiously Bohemian young men gossiping and laughing in the shadows advertised that this was a place where people who thought themselves very clever came to show off that fact, and where the idea that someone might want to walk in off the street with the sole aim or finding a particular tome as quickly as possible, purchase it and then leave with it was inexpressibly vulgar.
Marius, who spoke three languages and was a trained and now occasionally practising lawyer, did not consider himself clever at all and found such places a trial. He always experienced a revival of that paranoia he had been prey to when very poor that people were laughing at him. These haunts of Bohemian sophistry had been just about bearable in his student days when he could come in a pack with Courfeyrac, Jehan and Bossuet so that, together, they could snigger away their discomfit. Now, however . . . .
Still.
He heaved a sigh and, with little hope in his heart, strode off to where he assumed modern poetry might be, past a pair of callow young things, one of whom was shouting loudly, "Well, Blondet says!" He had to physically shove past the fatter of the two blades, who was wearing a ridiculous goose-shit-green topcoat, since he was so engrossed in explaining whatever it was that Blondet had to say about something or other that he had not heard Marius ask him politely, thrice, to step aside. This caused him to drop copious amounts of ash from his cigarillo over his preposterous jacket and he turned and called after Marius in a drawling voice, "Hiy! You Sir – watch what you're about! Yes, you in the unfashionable hat, Sir
In times gone by such an insult would have provoked Courfeyrac to a scathing jacket based witticism and Bahorel to drag the fellow outside "To account for himself like a man". Marius simply glared at him, turned away and then recalled a long forgotten memory of the curmedgeonly old police inspector at rue Pontoise who had been wont to cram his greatcoat pockets full of small arms. "I might take to doing that," Marius thought, "Then next time I am in a situation like this I can shoot the fool – or, on reflection, myself! Now, on with finding the book . . ."
Striding off, Marius found himself making an extended wrong turn around a series of trestles loaded with fat political biographies and dusty volumes on military history where he ended up tripping over a grizzled man in a voluminous greatcoat (he noted that most large bookshops seemed to have a man like this, a veteran of the Grande Armée who could equally well be a veteran of Agincourt or Troy – perpetually searching for something no book could contain). The old soldier glowered at him and grunted, miming the rattling of an imaginary sabre.
Marius strode away and the old soldier returned to disconsolately perusing the books in front of him
Exasperated, he leant on the shelf behind him and looked down at his feet. There, battered, forlorn and abandoned lay a slim tome – "To Which Ardent and Noble Lady And Other Verses" by Jean-Joseph Rougemont.
"Oh Gently Mother Mary," Marius breathed, stooping to retrieve the book and dashing headlong to the counter in one clumsy hurried movement, "Thank you! Than you! Thank you!"