There is Beauty all Around: Marius

I really liked reading about Marius, and his friends, and his grandfather. All the personalities and struggles were so insightful to me. Take for example Hugo's description of Marius as a poor college student. Privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is good breast for great souls. It is with great poverty as with everything else, it gradually becomes endurable. Marius had never given up for a single day. He had undergone everything, in the shape of privation; he had done everything, except get into debt. For him a debt was the beginning of slavery. In all his trials he felt encouraged and sometimes even upborne by a secret force. The soul helps the body, and at certain moments uplifts it.

Here are a few favorite descriptions of the young men from the Friends of the A B C. I wish that my boys would find such deep friends when they reach this age.
Combeferre loved the word citizen, but he preferred the word man. He believed in all dreams: railroads, the suppression of suffering in surgical operations, the fixing of the image in the camera obscura, the electric telegraph, the steering of balloons. Combeferre represented the philosophy of the revolution.

Enjolras represented the logic of the revolution. Enjolras was now a man, but he seemed a child still. His twenty-two years of age appeared seventeen; he was serious, he did not seem to know that there was on the earth a being called woman.

Jean Prouvaire was addicted to love; he cultivated a pot of flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved people, mourned over women, wept over childhood, confounded the future and God in the same faith and blamed the revolution for having cut off a royal head, that of Andre Chenier. He was well read, all day he pondered over social questions: wages, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought, liberty of love, education, punishment; and at night he gazed upon the stars, those enormous beings.

And I do want to share a few passages about M. Gillenormand, Marius' grandfather who raises him, but keeps the boy's father away and for it, is rejected when Marius comes of age.
Old men need affection as they do sunshine. It is warmth.

And the old man resumed in an angry and stern voice: "Come now, what do you want of me?"
"Monsieur," said Marius, "I know that my presence is displeasing to you, but I come only to ask one thing of you, and then I will go away immediately."
"You are a fool!" said the old man. "Who's telling you to go away?"
This was the translation of those loving words which he had deep in his heart: Come, ask my pardon now! Throw yourself on my neck! M. Gillenormand felt Marius was going to leave him in a few moments, that his unkind reception repelled him, that his harshness
was driving him away; he said to himself, and his anguish increased; and as his anguish immediately turned to anger, his harshness augmented. He would have had Marius comprehend, and Marius did not comprehend; which rendered the goodman furious.

He continued: "What! you have left me! me, your grandfather, you have left my house to go nobody knows where; you have a afflicted your aunt, you have been leading the life of a bachelor, amusing yourself; you have not given me a sign of life, and now at the end of four years, you come to my house, and have nothing to say but that!"
This violent method of pushing the grandson to tenderness produced only silence on the part of Marius.

Marius had lived too little as yet to know that nothing is more imminent than the impossible, and that what we must always foresee is the unforeseen. He was a spectator of his own drama, as a play which one does not comprehend.

Victor Hugo is equally talented in his writing of adventure as he is in romance.
At night, when they were there, this garden seemed a living and sacred place. All the flowers opened about them, and proffered them their incense; they too opened their souls and poured them forth to the flowers: the lusty and vigorous vegetation trembled full of sap and intoxication about these two innocent creatures, and they spoke words of love at which the trees thrilled.