At that time Marius was a handsome young man of middle height with thick dark hair. When young women turned to look at him in the street, he thought they were laughing at his old clothes, and fled or hid. In fact they turned because they were drawn to him. And so he kept away from every one of them.
For more than a year, on a quiet path in the Luxembourg Gardens, Marius had noticed a man and a young girl sitting side by side on the same bench. The man looked about sixty, with a sad, serious face. His hair was white, but he had the solid build of a retired soldier. He always wore a blue coat that looked new and a broad-brimmed hat, and he never let his eyes rest on anyone’s for long. The girl was thirteen or fourteen, thin enough to be almost plain, in a black merino dress like a convent boarder’s. They looked like father and daughter.
Marius walked that path nearly every day and saw the two of them nearly every day. But after looking at them for two or three days, he paid them no more attention. Because of the girl’s black dress and the man’s white hair, the students called the girl Mademoiselle Lanoire and the man Monsieur Leblanc. Courfeyrac had given them the nicknames. Marius too called the old man Monsieur Leblanc. The old man was Jean Valjean, and the girl was Cosette.