She saw the reflection in the pool before she saw him: tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in a plain black suit he'd got from his grandmother. Clearly he was also manicured for the occasion, clean-shaven, his dark hair smoothed down, and his dark eyes were alert, his skin tanned. All that wavered, shimmered in the reflecting pool before she raised her eyes, almost afraid to look, to put the image with the name, the man with the memory, the past with the present. "Starling"
"You are so beautiful"
"You are so- so substantial," she faltered, for lack of anything else to say.
He walked down the length of the reflecting pool, coming toward her while her heartbeat pounded all the way out to her fingertips. As she watched him move, she could she how the boy's body had filled out with manhood and strengthened with labor. For this sight she had returned to Paris. For this man. For this moment.
But to her grave disappointment, when he reached for her hand he called her mademoiselle."Don't-" she interrupted him. "Please, surely after everything that's happened to us, we're beyond such formalities."
"What has happened to us, mademoiselle? When we last saw each other, we were children."
"I was a beast. I behaved like a little beast and you had every right to hate me."
"I never hated you. Even your cruelties meant you noticed me. How could I have hated you?"
"Please say my name. I've waited so long to hear you say-"
"Fantine."
...The silence between them was the more poignant for the noise everywhere else. The respectful distance remained as ever save that he was not as humble and she was not as lordly. No doubt they looked very odd together, she the opulent lady and he a plain looking man, a laborer uncomfortable in Sunday clothes. She wished she had not worn the apricot silk, but something simpler, less likly to point up their differences. She gazed out over the park, over the plain of the last ten years of her life, exile and loneliness tempered only by work and by the dream that the Starling loved her, that their love could be simple and sterling despite the time and the distance between them. The belief in this love that had buoyed her in those long, grim London years, but perhaps it was just that, a mere dream, easily dissolved on waking, of no more substance than lies sweetened and condenced, If that was so, Fantine felt she could not live another moment without knowing the truth. "When you quit writing i thought perhaps you'd got married or fallen in love."
"No it wasn't that."
But you have a women," Fantine shrugged, "all men have women."
..."I have had women," he said at last. He looked to the center of the fountain, where stone horses plunged out of the water, hooves high, wild and fearful. "But I have only ever loved one women. I have only ever loved the one women I can never have."
"Why not, if you love her?"
Le Sansonnet reached out and took her hand, turned it over slowly in his own, then deliberately, he undid the buttons along her inner arm to her wrist. Fantine's mouth went dry as she watched him, and everything else dimmed save for the sound of splashing in the fountain and her own quickening breath as his strong fingers twisted the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons. His palms were hard and calloused, seamed and dry, the nails trimmed, but labor was ground in all around them, and on the backs of his tanned hands, veins and sinews stood out. But for all that, his touch was so light, so assured, so without haste that Fantine's eyes closed and she bit her lip, certain that whatever else happened between men and women, it could not be as intimate as this, as moving, as stirring. He took the glove off, threaded his big fingers through hers, and drew her hand up to his lips, kissed it, his mouth lingering against her flesh.
"Look at my hands, Fantine," he said finally, without releasing her. "Look at yours. It's no more possible now as when we were children. It's no different."
"I have worked, Gabriel. I have worked as you work." She clutched his hands, both of them in hers, stepping as close as the steel hoop permitted. "My hands are stong, Starling, feel them! They're soft, but they're strong. These are not the hands of a second empire flea hopping from dog to dog. My hands have done work. These are not the hands of a women afraid of work. I am my father's daughter, my mother's daughter, not my brother's sister."
"I came this day because I could not bear to let it pass, but I know, you know as well as I, Fantine- oh Fantine, I read once in letter your father wrote and he told your mother truly that love is its own country, but not its own world. The world invades that country, Fantine. It invaded out country long ago and there's too much at stake." He pulled her close up against him and she closed her eyes to be kissed, but only words fell from his lips. "I can't see you again. You mustn't go to the Cafe Rigolo again. It's too dangerous. I can't tell you- there's too much I can't tell you."
"You can tell me that you love me." She broke away from him and stepped back defiantly. "Because if you do love me, then it doesn't matter. Not any of it- what you can say and what you cannot say, where and if there's a place for us, what your hands are like and what mine are like. If you love me, we have time, and all that will come with time. If you don't love me, then all we have is memory." She regared him without coquetry or whimsy. "It can be enough, memory, and I don't begrudge it, but I have to know."
...Gabriel smiled at her, the old crooked smile, and told her he had loved her forever, always, from the time he was a boy, and in the years that had parted them, no day had pass without her name on his lips, without her face before him, without his heart breaking because she could not be in his arms as she was now. This moment.
-Laura Kalpakin, Cosette