Les Misérables quotes

… we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese.

True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.

M. Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility of the bar.

“Who is this good man who is staring at me?”

“Sire,” said M. Myriel, “you are looking at a good man, and I at a great man. Each of us can profit by it.”

That very evening, the Emperor asked the Cardinal the name of the Curé, and some time afterwards M. Myriel was utterly astonished to learn that he had been appointed Bishop of Digne.

“Hold, Monsieur the director of the hospital, I will tell you something. There is evidently a mistake here. There are thirty-six of you, in five or six small rooms. There are three of us here, and we have room for sixty.

There is some mistake, I tell you; you have my house, and I have yours. Give me back my house; you are at home here.

”

Far from it.

As there is always more wretchedness below than there is brotherhood above, all was given away, so to speak, before it was received.

It was like water on dry soil; no matter how much money he received, he never had any. Then he stripped himself.

and they never called him anything except Monseigneur Bienvenu. We will follow their example, and will also call him thus when we have occasion to name him. Moreover, this appellation pleased him.

“I like that name,” said he. “Bienvenu makes up for the Monseigneur.”

We do not claim that the portrait herewith presented is probable; we confine ourselves to stating that it resembles the original.

At another time, on receiving a notification of the decease of a gentleman of the countryside, wherein not only the dignities of the dead man, but also the feudal and noble qualifications of all his relatives, spread over an entire page:

“What a stout back Death has!” he exclaimed. “What a strange burden of titles is cheerfully imposed on him, and how much wit must men have, in order thus to press the tomb into the service of vanity!”

He was gifted, on occasion, with a gentle raillery, which almost always concealed a serious meaning. In the course of one Lent, a youthful vicar came to Digne, and preached in the cathedral. He was tolerably eloquent. The subject of his sermon was charity.

There were six of them to share it. One day the Bishop caught sight of him in the act of bestowing this charity, and said to his sister, with a smile,

“There is M. Géborand purchasing paradise for a sou.”

When it was a question of charity, he was not to be rebuffed even by a refusal, and on such occasions he gave utterance to remarks which induced reflection. Once he was begging for the poor in a drawing-room of the town;

This variety of man has actually existed. When the Bishop came to him, he touched his arm, “You must give me something, M. le Marquis.” The Marquis turned round and answered dryly,

“I have poor people of my own, Monseigneur.” “Give them to me,” replied the Bishop.

One day he preached the following sermon in the cathedral:—

And this arises from a thing which is called the tax on doors and windows. Just put poor families, old women and little children, in those buildings, and behold the fevers and maladies which result!

Alas! God gives air to men; the law sells it to them.

I do not blame the law, but I bless God. In the department of the Isère, in the Var, in the two departments of the Alpes, the Hautes, and the Basses, the peasants have not even wheelbarrows;

“Man has upon him his flesh, which is at once his burden and his temptation. He drags it with him and yields to it. He must watch it, check it, repress it, and obey it only at the last extremity.

There may be some fault even in this obedience; but the fault thus committed is venial; it is a fall, but a fall on the knees which may terminate in prayer.

“To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err, fall, sin if you will, but be upright.

“

To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err, fall, sin if you will, but be upright.

“The least possible sin is the law of man. No sin at all is the dream of the angel. All which is terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.”

“

The least possible sin is the law of man. No sin at all is the dream of the angel.

All which is terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.”

He was indulgent towards women and poor people, on whom the burden of human society rest. He said, “

The faults of women, of children, of the feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands, the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise.

”

He said, moreover, “Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed.

The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow.

”

He went on,

“And where will the advocate of the crown be tried?”

A tragic event occurred at Digne. A man was condemned to death for murder. He was a wretched fellow, not exactly educated, not exactly ignorant, who had been a mountebank at fairs, and a writer for the public.

It was a perfect festival wherever he appeared. One would have said that his presence had something warming and luminous about it.

The children and the old people came out to the doorsteps for the Bishop as for the sun.

He bestowed his blessing, and they blessed him. They pointed out his house to anyone who was in need of anything.

Here and there he halted, accosted the little boys and girls, and smiled upon the mothers.

He visited the poor so long as he had any money; when he no longer had any, he visited the rich.

As he made his cassocks last a long while, and did not wish to have it noticed, he never went out in the town without his wadded purple cloak. This inconvenienced him somewhat in summer.

His wealthy penitents and the sainted women of Digne had more than once assessed themselves to raise the money for a new altar for Monseigneur’s oratory; on each occasion he had taken the money and had given it to the poor.

“The most beautiful of altars,” he said, “is the soul of an unhappy creature consoled and thanking God.”

In his oratory there were two straw prie-Dieu, and there was an armchair, also in straw, in his bedroom.

Again he wrote:

“Do not inquire the name of him who asks a shelter of you. The very man who is embarrassed by his name is the one who needs shelter.”

It chanced that a worthy curé, I know not whether it was the curé of Couloubroux or the curé of Pompierry, took it into his head to ask him one day, probably at the instigation of Madame Magloire, whether Monsieur was sure that he was …

The Bishop touched his shoulder, with gentle gravity, and said to him, “Nisi Dominus custodierit domum, in vanum vigilant qui custodiunt eam.”

Unless the Lord guard the house, in vain do they watch who guard it.

Then he spoke of something else.

“Do not go, Monseigneur. In the name of Heaven! You are risking your life!”

“Monsieur le maire,” said the Bishop, “is that really all? I am not in the world to guard my own life, but to guard souls.”

They had to allow him to do as he pleased. He set out, accompanied only by a child who offered to serve as a guide. His obstinacy was bruited about the countryside, and caused great consternation.

That evening, before he went to bed, he said again: “Let us never fear robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves.

Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves.

What matters it what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens our soul.”

They need not have cut off his head, if you please; clemency must be exercised, agreed; but a good banishment for life. An example, in short, etc. Besides, he was an atheist, like all the rest of those people.

Gossip of the geese about the vulture.

Was G⸺ a vulture after all? Yes; if he were to be judged by the element of ferocity in this solitude of his.

It is well that there should be witnesses at that moment. One has one’s caprices; I should have liked to last until the dawn, but I know that I shall hardly live three hours. It will be night then. What does it matter, after all?

Dying is a simple affair. One has no need of the light for that. So be it. I shall die by starlight.

”

“

I shall die while he sleeps. The two slumbers may be good neighbors.

”

Alas! The work was incomplete, I admit: we demolished the ancient regime in deeds; we were not able to suppress it entirely in ideas. To destroy abuses is not sufficient; customs must be modified.

The mill is there no longer; the wind is still there.

”

“

Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of progress.

In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent of Christ. Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the unknown social quantities;

“Ah, there you go; ’93! I was expecting that word. A cloud had been forming for the space of fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen hundred years it burst.

You are putting the thunderbolt on its trial.

”

“

The judge speaks in the name of justice; the priest speaks in the name of pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice.

A thunderbolt should commit no error.” And he added, regarding the member of the Convention steadily the while, “Louis XVII?”

His scourge, full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried, ‘Sinite parvulos,’ he made no distinction between the little children. It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod.

Innocence, Monsieur, is its own crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags as in fleurs de lys.

”

I agree to that. But in that case, as I have told you, we must go back further than ’93, and our tears must begin before Louis XVII.

I will weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep with me over the children of the people.

”

“

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions.

When they are over, this fact is recognized—that the human race has been treated harshly, but that it has progressed.”

He very soon returned to Digne. He was interrogated as to this speedy return, and he replied: “

I embarrassed them. The outside air penetrated to them through me. I produced on them the effect of an open door.

”

The priest must keep close to the poor. Now, can one come in contact incessantly night and day with all this distress, all these misfortunes, and this poverty, without having about one’s own person a little of that misery, like the dust of labor?

Is it possible to imagine a man near a brazier who is not warm?

Can one imagine a workman who is working near a furnace, and who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened nails, nor a drop of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face?

One morning he was in his garden, and thought himself alone, but his sister was walking behind him, unseen by him: suddenly he paused and gazed at something on the ground; it was a large, black, hairy, frightful spider. His sister heard him say:—

“Poor beast! It is not its fault!”

Why not mention these almost divinely childish sayings of kindness? Puerile they may be; but these sublime puerilities were peculiar to Saint Francis d’Assisi and of Marcus Aurelius. One day he sprained his ankle in his effort to avoid stepping on an ant.

of the future eternity, that strange mystery; of the eternity past, a mystery still more strange; of all the infinities, which pierced their way into all his senses, beneath his eyes; and, without seeking to comprehend the incomprehensible, he gazed upon it.

He did not study God; he was dazzled by him.

He considered those magnificent conjunctions of atoms, which communicate aspects to matter, reveal forces by verifying them, create individualities in unity, proportions in extent, the innumerable in the infinite, and, through light, produce beauty. These conjunctions are formed and dissolved incessantly; hence life and death.

Was not this narrow enclosure, with the heavens for a ceiling, sufficient to enable him to adore God in his most divine works, in turn? Does not this comprehend all, in fact? and what is there left to desire beyond it?

A little garden in which to walk, and immensity in which to dream.

At one’s feet that which can be cultivated and plucked; over head that which one can study and meditate upon: some flowers on earth, and all the stars in the sky.

he projected no ray of future upon the dark groundswell of events; he did not see to condense in flame the light of things; he had nothing of the prophet and nothing of the magician about him.

This humble soul loved, and that was all.

That he carried prayer to the pitch of a superhuman aspiration is probable: but one can no more pray too much than one can love too much;

he was occupied only in finding for himself, and in inspiring others with the best way to compassionate and relieve. That which exists was for this good and rare priest a permanent subject of sadness which sought consolation.

There are men who toil at extracting gold; he toiled at the extraction of pity.

Universal misery was his mine. The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness. “Love each other;” he declared this to be complete, desired nothing further, and that was the whole of his doctrine.

He saw nothing of all this.

People who are crushed do not look behind them. They know but too well the evil fate which follows them.

Thus he proceeded for some time, walking on without ceasing, traversing at random streets of which he knew nothing, forgetful of his fatigue, as is often the case when a man is sad. All at once he felt the pangs of hunger sharply.

… more in the street, alone, without refuge, without shelter, without a roof over his head, chased even from that bed of straw and from that miserable kennel, he dropped rather than seated himself on a stone, and it appears that a passerby heard him exclaim,

“I am not even a dog!”

He soon rose again and resumed his march. He went out of the town, hoping to find some tree or haystack in the fields which would afford him shelter.

“On this bench?” she went on.

“I have had a mattress of wood for nineteen years,” said the man; “today I have a mattress of stone.”

“You have been a soldier?”

but her whole visage, her whole person, breathed forth an ineffable goodness, as we stated in the beginning. She had always been predestined to gentleness; but faith, charity, hope, those three virtues which mildly warm the soul, had gradually elevated that gentleness to sanctity.

Nature had made her a lamb, religion had made her an angel.

Poor sainted virgin! Sweet memory which has vanished!

Each time that he uttered the word sir, in his voice which was so gently grave and polished, the man’s face lighted up.

Monsieur to a convict is like a glass of water to one of the shipwrecked of the Medusa. Ignominy thirsts for consideration.

“This lamp gives a very bad light,” said the Bishop.

The Bishop, who was sitting close to him, gently touched his hand. “You could not help telling me who you were. This is not my house; it is the house of Jesus Christ.

This door does not demand of him who enters whether he has a name, but whether he has a grief. You suffer, you are hungry and thirsty; you are welcome.

And do not thank me; do not say that I receive you in my house. No one is at home here, except the man who needs a refuge.

This door does not demand of him who enters whether he has a name, but whether he has a grief. You suffer, you are hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And do not thank me; do not say that I receive you in my house.

No one is at home here, except the man who needs a refuge.

I say to you, who are passing by, that you are much more at home here than I am myself. Everything here is yours. What need have I to know your name? Besides, before you told me you had one which I knew.”

“Really? You knew what I was called?”

“Yes,” replied the Bishop, “you are called my brother.”

“Stop, Monsieur le Curé,” exclaimed the man. “I was very hungry when I entered here; but you are so good, that I no longer know what has happened to me.”

“Have you really reflected well? How do you know that I have not been an assassin?”

“That is the concern of the good God.”

Then gravely, and moving his lips like one who is praying or talking to himself, he raised two fingers of his right hand and bestowed his benediction on the man, who did not bow, and without turning his head or looking behind him, he returned …

All that had constituted his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601. What became of his sister? What became of the seven children? Who troubled himself about that?

What becomes of the handful of leaves from the young tree which is sawed off at the root?

It is always the same story.

Three years for this fresh attempt. Sixteen years. Finally, I think it was during his thirteenth year, he made a last attempt, and only succeeded in getting retaken at the end of four hours of absence. Three years for those four hours. Nineteen years.

In October, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for having broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.

Room for a brief parenthesis.

Claude Gaux had stolen a loaf; Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact that four thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate cause.

Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering; he emerged impassive. He had entered in despair; he emerged gloomy.

What had taken place in that soul?

Whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration.

These questions put and answered, he judged society and condemned it.

He condemned it to his hatred.

And besides, human society had done him nothing but harm; he had never seen anything of it save that angry face which it calls Justice, and which it shows to those whom it strikes.

Men had only touched him to bruise him. Every contact with them had been a blow.

Never, since his infancy, since the days of his mother, of his sister, had he ever encountered a friendly word and a kindly glance. From suffering to suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a war;

He was of the number who had a mind. He went to school at the age of forty, and learned to read, to write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify his intelligence was to fortify his hate.

In certain cases, education and enlightenment can serve to eke out evil.

This is a sad thing to say; after having judged society, which had caused his unhappiness, he judged Providence, which had made society, and he condemned it also.

Thus during nineteen years of torture and slavery, this soul mounted and at the same time fell.

Light entered it on one side, and darkness on the other.

Jean Valjean had not, as we have seen, an evil nature. He was still good when he arrived at the galleys. He there condemned society, and felt that he was becoming wicked; he there condemned Providence, and was conscious that he was becoming impious.

In this situation Jean Valjean meditated; and what could be the nature of his meditation?

If the grain of millet beneath the millstone had thoughts, it would, doubtless, think that same thing which Jean Valjean thought.

All these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagories full of realities, had eventually created for him a sort of interior state which is almost indescribable.

From year to year this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatal sureness.

When the heart is dry, the eye is dry.

On his departure from the galleys it had been nineteen years since he had shed a tear.

There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human distresses; but what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float, and he, he rattles in the death agony.

He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.

Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength is exhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men, has vanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf; he sinks, he stiffens himself, he twists himself;

Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of souls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip! Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death!

The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness.

The soul, going downstream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall resuscitate it?

Society, the State, by diminishing his hoard, had robbed him wholesale. Now it was the individual who was robbing him at retail.

Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not from the sentence.

That is what happened to him at Grasse. We have seen in what manner he was received at Digne.

As the cathedral clock struck two in the morning, Jean Valjean awoke.

What woke him was that his bed was too good.

It was nearly twenty years since he had slept in a bed, and, although he had not undressed, the sensation was too novel not to disturb his slumbers.

When many varied sensations have agitated the day, when various matters preoccupy the mind, one falls asleep once, but not a second time.

Sleep comes more easily than it returns.

This is what happened to Jean Valjean. He could not get to sleep again, and he fell to thinking.

He suddenly came to a halt. He was near the bed. He had arrived there sooner than he had thought for.

Nature sometimes mingles her effects and her spectacles with our actions with sombre and intelligent appropriateness, as though she desired to make us reflect.

For the last half-hour a large cloud had covered the heavens. At the moment when Jean Valjean paused in front of the bed, this cloud parted, as though on purpose, and a ray of light, traversing the long window, suddenly illuminated the Bishop’s pale face.

His whole face was illumined with a vague expression of satisfaction, of hope, and of felicity. It was more than a smile, and almost a radiance. He bore upon his brow the indescribable reflection of a light which was invisible.

The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.

A reflection of that heaven rested on the Bishop.

Jean Valjean was in the shadow, and stood motionless, with his iron candlestick in his hand, frightened by this luminous old man. Never had he beheld anything like this. This confidence terrified him.

The moral world has no grander spectacle than this: a troubled and uneasy conscience, which has arrived on the brink of an evil action, contemplating the slumber of the just.

That slumber in that isolation, and with a neighbor like himself, had about it something sublime, of which he was vaguely but imperiously conscious.

The Bishop continued to sleep in profound peace beneath that terrifying gaze.

The gleam of the moon rendered confusedly visible the crucifix over the chimneypiece, which seemed to be extending its arms to both of them, with a benediction for one and pardon for the other.

Suddenly Jean Valjean replaced his cap on his brow; then stepped rapidly past the bed, without glancing at the Bishop, straight to the cupboard, which he saw near the head; he raised his iron candlestick as though to force the lock; the key was there;

“

And, in the first place, was that silver ours?

”

“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good.

It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.

”

Then his heart burst, and he began to cry.

It was the first time that he had wept in nineteen years.

When Jean Valjean left the Bishop’s house, he was, as we have seen, quite thrown out of everything that had been his thought hitherto. He could not yield to the evidence of what was going on within him.

The future life, the possible life which offered itself to him henceforth, all pure and radiant, filled him with tremors and anxiety. He no longer knew where he really was.

Like an owl, who should suddenly see the sun rise, the convict had been dazzled and blinded, as it were, by virtue.

That which was certain, that which he did not doubt, was that he was no longer the same man, that everything about him was changed, that it was no longer in his power to make it as though the Bishop had not spoken to him …

He examined his life, and it seemed horrible to him; his soul, and it seemed frightful to him. In the meantime a gentle light rested over this life and this soul.

It seemed to him that he beheld Satan by the light of Paradise.

How many hours did he weep thus? What did he do after he had wept? Whither did he go! No one ever knew.

There had already been more than one episode in their romance, though hardly begun; and the lover who had borne the name of Adolph in the first chapter had turned out to be Alphonse in the second, and Gustave in the third.

Poverty and coquetry are two fatal counsellors; one scolds and the other flatters, and the beautiful daughters of the people have both of them whispering in their ear, each on its own side.

These badly guarded souls listen. Hence the falls which they accomplish, and the stones which are thrown at them. They are overwhelmed with splendor of all that is immaculate and inaccessible. Alas! what if the Jungfrau were hungry?

These badly guarded souls listen. Hence the falls which they accomplish, and the stones which are thrown at them. They are overwhelmed with splendor of all that is immaculate and inaccessible.

Alas! what if the Jungfrau were hungry?

Favorite having been in England, was admired by Dahlia and Zéphine. She had had an establishment of her own very early in life.

At fifteen she came to Paris “to seek her fortune.” Fantine was beautiful, and remained pure as long as she could. She was a lovely blonde, with fine teeth.

She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on her head, and her pearls were in her mouth.

She worked for her living; then, still for the sake of her living—for the heart, also, has its hunger—she loved.

She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased the first random passerby, who had encountered her, when a very small child, running bare-legged in the street.

She received the name as she received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained.

She was called little Fantine. No one knew more than that. This human creature had entered life in just this way. At the age of ten, Fantine quitted the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood.

Fantine had long evaded Tholomyès in the mazes of the hill of the Pantheon, where so many adventurers twine and untwine, but in such a way as constantly to encounter him again.

There is a way of avoiding which resembles seeking.

In short, the eclogue took place.

he carried a stout rattan worth two hundred francs in his hand, and, as he treated himself to everything, a strange thing called a cigar in his mouth.

Nothing was sacred to him; he smoked.

“That Tholomyès is astounding!” said the others, with veneration. “What trousers! What energy!”

Love is a fault; so be it.

Fantine was innocence floating high over fault.

It is remarkable that the stature of this population should have diminished in the last fifty years; and the populace of the suburbs is still more puny than at the time of the Revolution. It is not dangerous. In short, it is an amiable rabble.”

Prefects of the police do not deem it possible that a cat can transform itself into a lion; that does happen, however, and in that lies the miracle wrought by the populace of Paris.

Moreover, the cat so despised by Count Anglès possessed the esteem of the republics of old. In their eyes it was liberty incarnate;

Give him a pike, he will produce the 10th of August; give him a gun, you will have Austerlitz. He is Napoleon’s stay and Danton’s resource.

Is it a question of country, he enlists; is it a question of liberty, he tears up the pavements.

Beware! His hair filled with wrath, is epic; his blouse drapes itself like the folds of a chlamys. Take care! He will make of the first Rue Grenétat which comes to hand Caudine Forks.

Chat at table, the chat of love; it is as impossible to reproduce one as the other; the chat of love is a cloud; the chat at table is smoke.

Fameuil and Dahlia were humming. Tholomyès was drinking. Zéphine was laughing, Fantine smiling, Listolier blowing a wooden trumpet which he had purchased at Saint-Cloud.

This pun which has fallen from the skies must not be received with too much stupor. Everything which falls in that way is not necessarily worthy of enthusiasm and respect.

The pun is the dung of the mind which soars.

The jest falls, no matter where; and the mind after producing a piece of stupidity plunges into the azure depths. A whitish speck flattened against the rock does not prevent the condor from soaring aloft. Far be it from me to insult the pun!

In all things the word finis must be written in good season; self-control must be exercised when the matter becomes urgent; the bolt must be drawn on appetite; one must set one’s own fantasy to the violin, and carry one’s self to the post.

The sage is the man who knows how, at a given moment, to effect his own arrest.

Have some confidence in me, for I have succeeded to some extent in my study of the law, according to the verdict of my examinations, for I know the difference between the question put and the question pending, for I have sustained a thesis in …

“Woman,” resumed Tholomyès; “distrust her. Woe to him who yields himself to the unstable heart of woman! Woman is perfidious and disingenuous.

She detests the serpent from professional jealousy. The serpent is the shop over the way.

”

it errs gayly, our gentle love. It has been said, error is human; I say, error is love. Ladies, I idolize you all. O Zéphine, O Joséphine, face more than irregular, you would be charming were you not all askew.

You have the air of a pretty face upon which someone has sat down by mistake.

As for Favorite, O nymphs and muses! One day when Blachevelle was crossing the gutter in the Rue Guérin-Boisseau, he espied a beautiful girl with white stockings well drawn up, which displayed her legs. This prologue pleased him, and Blachevelle fell in love.

The pampas of America would please me if I had not the arcades of the Odéon. My soul flits away into the virgin forests and to the savannas. All is beautiful. The flies buzz in the sun.

The sun has sneezed out the humming bird.

Embrace me, Fantine!”

My soul flits away into the virgin forests and to the savannas. All is beautiful. The flies buzz in the sun. The sun has sneezed out the humming bird. Embrace me, Fantine!”

He made a mistake and embraced Favorite.

She slept with that slumber of absolute confidence peculiar to her age.

The arms of mothers are made of tenderness; in them children sleep profoundly.

As for the mother, her appearance was sad and poverty-stricken. She was dressed like a working-woman who is inclined to turn into a peasant again. She was young. Was she handsome? Perhaps; but in that attire it was not apparent.

She gazed at them in much emotion.

The presence of angels is an announcement of Paradise.

She thought that, above this inn, she beheld the mysterious here of Providence. These two little creatures were evidently happy.

“You have two pretty children, Madame.”

The most ferocious creatures are disarmed by caresses bestowed on their young.

The mother raised her head and thanked her, and bade the wayfarer sit down on the bench at the door, she herself being seated on the threshold. The two women began to chat.

The child opened her eyes, great blue eyes like her mother’s, and looked at—what? Nothing; with that serious and sometimes severe air of little children, which is a mystery of their luminous innocence in the presence of our twilight of virtue.

One would say that they feel themselves to be angels, and that they know us to be men.

Then the child began to laugh; and although the mother held fast to her, she slipped to the ground with the unconquerable energy of a little being which wished to run.

The mother passed the night at the inn, gave up her money and left her child, fastened her carpetbag once more, now reduced in volume by the removal of the outfit, and light henceforth and set out on the following morning, intending to return soon.

People arrange such departures tranquilly; but they are despairs!

A neighbor of the Thénardiers met this mother as she was setting out, and came back with the remark:—

The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but the cat rejoices even over a lean mouse.

Let us say a word or two of them now. We will complete the sketch later on.

There was in the woman a substratum of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard. Both were susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progress which is accomplished in the direction of evil.

There exist crab-like souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness, retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness.

This man and woman possessed such souls.

Later on, when her hair, arranged in a romantically drooping fashion, began to grow gray, when the Megaera began to be developed from the Pamela, the female Thénardier was nothing but a coarse, vicious woman, who had dabbled in stupid romances.

Now, one cannot read nonsense with impunity.

The result was that her eldest daughter was named Éponine; as for the younger, the poor little thing came near being called Gulnare;

What does she expect us to do with her seven francs?” and he wrote to demand twelve francs. The mother, whom they had persuaded into the belief that her child was happy, “and was coming on well,” submitted, and forwarded the twelve francs.

Certain natures cannot love on the one hand without hating on the other.

Mother Thénardier loved her two daughters passionately, which caused her to hate the stranger.

Certain natures cannot love on the one hand without hating on the other. Mother Thénardier loved her two daughters passionately, which caused her to hate the stranger.

It is sad to think that the love of a mother can possess villainous aspects.

Little as was the space occupied by Cosette, it seemed to her as though it were taken from her own, and that that little child diminished the air which her daughters breathed.

Madame Thénardier was vicious with Cosette. Éponine and Azelma were vicious.

Children at that age are only copies of their mother. The size is smaller; that is all.

A year passed; then another.

Five years old! the reader will say; that is not probable. Alas! It is true.

Social suffering begins at all ages.

Have we not recently seen the trial of a man named Dumollard, an orphan turned bandit, who, from the age of five, as the official documents state, being alone in the world, “worked for his living and stole?”

Cosette, so pretty and rosy on her arrival in that house, was now thin and pale. She had an indescribably uneasy look. “The sly creature,” said the Thénardiers.

Injustice had made her peevish, and misery had made her ugly.

Nothing remained to her except her beautiful eyes, which inspired pain, because, large as they were, it seemed as though one beheld in them a still larger amount of sadness.

… taken a fancy to bestow this name on this trembling, frightened, and shivering little creature, no bigger than a bird, who was awake every morning before anyone else in the house or the village, and was always in the street or the fields before daybreak.

Only the little lark never sang.

Thus three results ensued from one idea.

In less than three years the inventor of this process had become rich, which is good, and had made everyone about him rich, which is better.

He was a stranger in the Department. Of his origin, nothing was known; of the beginning of his career, very little. It was rumored that he had come to town with very little money, a few hundred francs at the most.

He was a man about fifty years of age, who had a preoccupied air, and who was good. That was all that could be said about him.

Thanks to the rapid progress of the industry which he had so admirably reconstructed, Montreuil-sur-Mer had become a rather important centre of trade. Spain, which consumes a good deal of black jet, made enormous purchases there each year.

he constructed two, one for girls, the other for boys. He allotted a salary from his own funds to the two instructors, a salary twice as large as their meagre official salary, and one day he said to someone who expressed surprise, “

The two prime functionaries of the state are the nurse and the schoolmaster.

” He created at his own expense an infant school, a thing then almost unknown in France, and a fund for aiding old and infirm workmen.

But when he beheld the wealthy manufacturer Madeleine going to low mass at seven o’clock, he perceived in him a possible candidate, and resolved to outdo him; he took a Jesuit confessor, and went to high mass and to vespers.

Ambition was at that time, in the direct acceptation of the word, a race to the steeple.

The poor profited by this terror as well as the good God, for the honorable deputy also founded two beds in the hospital, which made twelve.

He always took his meals alone, with an open book before him, which he read. He had a well-selected little library.

He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.

In proportion as leisure came to him with fortune, he seemed to take advantage of it to cultivate his mind.

He was affable and sad. The people said: “

There is a rich man who has not a haughty air. There is a happy man who has not a contented air.

”

And there are a thousand little cares. Nothings, which are enormous in that void. The most ineffable accents of the feminine voice employed to lull you, and supplying the vanished universe to you. One is caressed with the soul.

One sees nothing, but one feels that one is adored.

It is a paradise of shadows.

Nothings, which are enormous in that void. The most ineffable accents of the feminine voice employed to lull you, and supplying the vanished universe to you. One is caressed with the soul. One sees nothing, but one feels that one is adored.

It is a paradise of shadows.

It was from this paradise that Monseigneur Welcome had passed to the other.

Sometimes even several of them at a time.

Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and our vices, straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls.

God shows them to us in order to induce us to reflect. Only since animals are mere shadows, God has not made them capable of education in the full sense of the word; what is the use?

The peasants of Asturias are convinced that in every litter of wolves there is one dog, which is killed by the mother because, otherwise, as he grew up, he would devour the other little ones.

Give to this dog-son of a wolf a human face, and the result will be Javert.

Javert had been born in prison, of a fortune-teller, whose husband was in the galleys. As he grew up, he thought that he was outside the pale of society, and he despaired of ever reentering it.

When Javert laughed—and his laugh was rare and terrible—his thin lips parted and revealed to view not only his teeth, but his gums, and around his nose there formed a flattened and savage fold, as on the muzzle of a wild beast.

Javert, serious, was a watchdog; when he laughed, he was a tiger.

As for the rest, he had very little skull and a great deal of jaw; his hair concealed his forehead and fell over his eyebrows; between his eyes there was a permanent, central frown, like an imprint of wrath; his gaze was obscure;

As we have said, he had no vices.

When he was pleased with himself, he permitted himself a pinch of snuff. Therein lay his connection with humanity.

The reader will have no difficulty in understanding that Javert was the terror of that whole class which the annual statistics of the Ministry of Justice designates under the rubric, Vagrants. The name of Javert routed them by its mere utterance;

She wrote often, and this was noticed. It began to be said in an undertone, in the women’s workroom, that Fantine “wrote letters” and that “she had ways about her.”

There is no one for spying on people’s actions like those who are not concerned in them.

Why does that gentleman never come except at nightfall? Why does Mr. So-and-So never hang his key on its nail on Tuesday? Why does he always take the narrow streets? Why does Madame always descend from her hackney-coach before reaching her house?

It was remarked that in the workroom she often turned aside, in the midst of the rest, to wipe away a tear. These were the moments when she was thinking of her child; perhaps, also, of the man whom she had loved.

Breaking the gloomy bonds of the past is a mournful task.

It was observed that she wrote twice a month at least, and that she paid the carriage on the letter. They managed to obtain the address: Monsieur, Monsieur Thénardier, innkeeper at Montfermeil.

However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her when she returned at night, taught her the art of living in misery.

Back of living on little, there is the living on nothing. These are the two chambers; the first is dark, the second is black.

Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the winter; how to give up a bird which eats a half a farthing’s worth of millet every two days; how to make a coverlet of one’s petticoat, and a petticoat of one’s coverlet;

It seems as though an unfortunate woman were utterly bare beneath the sarcasm and the curiosity of all in small towns.

In Paris, at least, no one knows you, and this obscurity is a garment.

Oh! how she would have liked to betake herself to Paris! Impossible!

Madame Victurnien sometimes saw her passing, from her window, noticed the distress of “that creature” who, “thanks to her,” had been “put back in her proper place,” and congratulated herself.

The happiness of the evil-minded is black.

Excess of toil wore out Fantine, and the little dry cough which troubled her increased. She sometimes said to her neighbor, Marguerite, “Just feel how hot my hands are!”

Short days, less work. Winter: no warmth, no light, no noonday, the evening joining on to the morning, fogs, twilight; the window is gray; it is impossible to see clearly at it. The sky is but a vent-hole. The whole day is a cavern.

The sun has the air of a beggar.

A frightful season! Winter changes the water of heaven and the heart of man into a stone. Her creditors harrassed her.

the window is gray; it is impossible to see clearly at it. The sky is but a vent-hole. The whole day is a cavern. The sun has the air of a beggar. A frightful season!

Winter changes the water of heaven and the heart of man into a stone.

Her creditors harrassed her.

Fantine thought: “

My child is no longer cold. I have clothed her with my hair.

” She put on little round caps which concealed her shorn head, and in which she was still pretty.

Then she looked at Fantine, who turned toward her her head bereft of its hair.

Fantine had grown ten years older since the preceding night.

“Jesus!” said Marguerite, “what is the matter with you, Fantine?”

At the same time she smiled. The candle illuminated her countenance.

It was a bloody smile.

A reddish saliva soiled the corners of her lips, and she had a black hole in her mouth.

What is this history of Fantine? It is society purchasing a slave.

From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain. A soul for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts.

From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain.

A soul for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts.

The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does not, as yet, permeate it; it is said that slavery has disappeared from European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists;

At the point in this melancholy drama which we have now reached, nothing is left to Fantine of that which she had formerly been.

She has become marble in becoming mire.

Whoever touches her feels cold. She passes; she endures you; she ignores you; she is the severe and dishonored figure. Life and the social order have said their last word for her. All has happened to her that will happen to her.

She is resigned, with that resignation which resembles indifference, as death resembles sleep. She no longer avoids anything. Let all the clouds fall upon her, and all the ocean sweep over her! What matters it to her?

She is a sponge that is soaked.

At least, she believes it to be so; but it is an error to imagine that fate can be exhausted, and that one has reached the bottom of anything whatever.

Alas! What are all these fates, driven on pell-mell? Whither are they going? Why are they thus?

He who knows that sees the whole of the shadow.

He is alone. His name is God.

… a detachment, Javert opened the door, entered with Fantine, and shut the door behind him, to the great disappointment of the curious, who raised themselves on tiptoe, and craned their necks in front of the thick glass of the station-house, in their effort to see.

Curiosity is a sort of gluttony. To see is to devour.

On entering, Fantine fell down in a corner, motionless and mute, crouching down like a terrified dog.

She spoke thus, rent in twain, shaken with sobs, blinded with tears, her neck bare, wringing her hands, and coughing with a dry, short cough, stammering softly with a voice of agony.

Great sorrow is a divine and terrible ray, which transfigures the unhappy.

At that moment Fantine had become beautiful once more. From time to time she paused, and tenderly kissed the police agent’s coat. She would have softened a heart of granite; but a heart of wood cannot be softened.

Great sorrow is a divine and terrible ray, which transfigures the unhappy. At that moment Fantine had become beautiful once more. From time to time she paused, and tenderly kissed the police agent’s coat.

She would have softened a heart of granite; but a heart of wood cannot be softened.

“Come!” said Javert, “I have heard you out. Have you entirely finished? You will get six months. Now march! The Eternal Father in person could do nothing more.”

In the meantime a serious incident occurred.

Carve as we will the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny constantly reappears in it.

That is the sort of kindness which disorganizes society.

Good God! it is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just.

Come! if you had been what I thought you, I should not have been kind to you, not I! You would have seen! Mr. Mayor, I must treat myself as I would treat any other man.

Sister Perpétue was an ordinary villager, a sister of charity in a coarse style, who had entered the service of God as one enters any other service.

She was a nun as other women are cooks.

This type is not so very rare. The monastic orders gladly accept this heavy peasant earthenware, which is easily fashioned into a Capuchin or an Ursuline. These rustics are utilized for the rough work of devotion.

The eye of the spirit can nowhere find more dazzling brilliance and more shadow than in man; it can fix itself on no other thing which is more formidable, more complicated, more mysterious, and more infinite.

There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven: there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the inmost recesses of the soul.

To make the poem of the human conscience, were it only with reference to a single man, were it only in connection with the basest of men, would be to blend all epics into one superior and definitive epic.

To make the poem of the human conscience, were it only with reference to a single man, were it only in connection with the basest of men, would be to blend all epics into one superior and definitive epic.

Conscience is the chaos of chimaeras, of lusts, and of temptations; the furnace of dreams; the lair of ideas of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophisms; it is the battlefield of the passions.

Penetrate, at certain hours, past the livid face of a human being who is engaged in reflection, and look behind, gaze into that soul, gaze into that obscurity. There, beneath that external silence, battles of giants, like those recorded in Homer, are in progress;

he rose from his chair, and began to pace the room: “Come,” said he, “let us think no more about it; my resolve is taken!” but he felt no joy.

One can no more prevent thought from recurring to an idea than one can the sea from returning to the shore: the sailor calls it the tide; the guilty man calls it remorse; God upheaves the soul as he does the ocean.

After the expiration of a few moments, do what he would, he resumed the gloomy dialogue in which it was he who spoke and he who listened, saying that which he would have preferred to ignore, and listened to that which he would have preferred …

So he must go to Arras, deliver the false Jean Valjean, and denounce the real one. Alas! that was the greatest of sacrifices, the most poignant of victories, the last step to take; but it must be done.

Sad fate! he would enter into sanctity only in the eyes of God when he returned to infamy in the eyes of men.

“Well,” said he, “let us decide upon this; let us do our duty; let us save this man.” He uttered these words aloud, without perceiving that he was speaking aloud.

He rose and resumed his march; this time, he seemed to be content.

Diamonds are found only in the dark places of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought.

It seemed to him, that, after having descended into these depths, after having long groped among the darkest of these shadows, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he now held it in his hand, and he …

“How stupid I am! There can be no one!”

There was someone; but the person who was there was of those whom the human eye cannot see.

He placed the candlesticks on the chimneypiece.

And do what he would, he always fell back upon the heartrending dilemma which lay at the foundation of his reverie:

“Should he remain in paradise and become a demon? Should he return to hell and become an angel?”

What was to be done? Great God! what was to be done?

At daybreak he was in the open country; the town of Montreuil-sur-Mer lay far behind him. He watched the horizon grow white; he stared at all the chilly figures of a winter’s dawn as they passed before his eyes, but without seeing them.

The morning has its spectres as well as the evening.

He did not see them; but without his being aware of it, and by means of a sort of penetration which was almost physical, these black silhouettes of trees and of hills added some gloomy and sinister quality to the violent state of his soul.

The trot of the horse, the bells on the harness, the wheels on the road, produced a gentle, monotonous noise.

These things are charming when one is joyous, and lugubrious when one is sad.

It was broad daylight when he arrived at Hesdin. He halted in front of the inn, to allow the horse a breathing spell, and to have him given some oats.

this is a sort of contemplation which sometimes suffices to the soul, and almost relieves it from thought. What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time?

To travel is to be born and to die at every instant;

perhaps, in the vaguest region of his mind, he did make comparisons between the shifting horizon and our human existence: all the things of life are perpetually fleeing before us; the dark and bright intervals are intermingled; after a dazzling moment, an eclipse;

This creature of five and twenty had a wrinkled brow, flabby cheeks, pinched nostrils, teeth from which the gums had receded, a leaden complexion, a bony neck, prominent shoulder-blades, frail limbs, a clayey skin, and her golden hair was growing out sprinkled with gray.

Alas! how illness improvises old-age!

At midday the physician returned, gave some directions, inquired whether the mayor had made his appearance at the infirmary, and shook his head.

He reentered the council-chamber. The first thing he caught sight of was the knob of the door. This knob, which was round and of polished brass, shone like a terrible star for him.

He gazed at it as a lamb might gaze into the eye of a tiger.

He could not take his eyes from it. From time to time he advanced a step and approached the door.

the galleys make the convict what he is; reflect upon that, if you please. Before going to the galleys, I was a poor peasant, with very little intelligence, a sort of idiot; the galleys wrought a change in me.

I was stupid; I became vicious: I was a block of wood; I became a firebrand.

Later on, indulgence and kindness saved me, as severity had ruined me. But, pardon me, you cannot understand what I am saying.

Before going to the galleys, I was a poor peasant, with very little intelligence, a sort of idiot; the galleys wrought a change in me. I was stupid; I became vicious: I was a block of wood; I became a firebrand.

Later on, indulgence and kindness saved me, as severity had ruined me.

But, pardon me, you cannot understand what I am saying. You will find at my house, among the ashes in the fireplace, the forty-sou piece which I stole, seven years ago, from Little Gervais. I have nothing farther to add; take me. Good God!

the district-attorney forgot he was there for the purpose of prosecuting, the President that he was there to preside, the counsel for the defence that he was there to defend. It was a striking circumstance that no question was put, that no authority intervened.

The peculiarity of sublime spectacles is, that they capture all souls and turn witnesses into spectators.

No one, probably, could have explained what he felt; no one, probably, said to himself that he was witnessing the splendid outburst of a grand light: all felt themselves inwardly dazzled.

To see her thus, one would never have dreamed that she was an invalid whose life was almost despaired of.

She resembled rather something on the point of soaring away than something on the point of dying.

The branch trembles when a hand approaches it to pluck a flower, and seems to both withdraw and to offer itself at one and the same time.

Oh! how good you were to go and get her for me! Only tell me how she is. Did she stand the journey well? Alas! she will not recognize me. She must have forgotten me by this time, poor darling!

Children have no memories. They are like birds.

A child sees one thing today and another thing tomorrow, and thinks of nothing any longer. And did she have white linen? Did those Thénardiers keep her clean? How have they fed her? Oh!

Anyone who was thoroughly acquainted with him, and who had examined him attentively at the moment, would have shuddered. The buckle of his leather stock was under his left ear instead of at the nape of his neck. This betrayed unwonted agitation.

Javert was a complete character, who never had a wrinkle in his duty or in his uniform; methodical with malefactors, rigid with the buttons of his coat.

That he should have set the buckle of his stock awry, it was indispensable that there should have taken place in him one of those emotions which may be designated as internal earthquakes.

The instant that Madeleine’s glance encountered Javert’s glance, Javert, without stirring, without moving from his post, without approaching him, became terrible.

No human sentiment can be as terrible as joy.

It was the visage of a demon who has just found his damned soul.

The instant that Madeleine’s glance encountered Javert’s glance, Javert, without stirring, without moving from his post, without approaching him, became terrible. No human sentiment can be as terrible as joy.

It was the visage of a demon who has just found his damned soul.

The satisfaction of at last getting hold of Jean Valjean caused all that was in his soul to appear in his countenance. The depths having been stirred up, mounted to the surface.

happy and indignant, he held his heel upon crime, vice, rebellion, perdition, hell; he was radiant, he exterminated, he smiled, and there was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous Saint Michael.

Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him.

Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror;

The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously venerable radiance. Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who triumphs.

Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as this face, wherein was displayed all that may be designated as the evil of the good.

So Fantine was buried in the free corner of the cemetery which belongs to anybody and everybody, and where the poor are lost.

Fortunately, God knows where to find the soul again.

Fantine was laid in the shade, among the first bones that came to hand; she was subjected to the promiscuousness of ashes. She was thrown into the public grave. Her grave resembled her bed.

Fortunately, God knows where to find the soul again. Fantine was laid in the shade, among the first bones that came to hand; she was subjected to the promiscuousness of ashes. She was thrown into the public grave.

Her grave resembled her bed.

The first thing which struck him in this paddock was a door of the sixteenth century, which here simulates an arcade, everything else having fallen prostrate around it.

A monumental aspect often has its birth in ruin.

In a wall near the arcade opens another arched door, of the time of Henry IV, permitting a glimpse of the trees of an orchard;

This corner of earth, could he but have seized it, would, perhaps, have given him the world likewise.

Chickens are scattering its dust abroad with their beaks. A growl is audible; it is a huge dog, who shows his teeth and replaces the English.

The English behaved admirably there. Cooke’s four companies of guards there held out for seven hours against the fury of an army.

The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror is visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there; it lives and it dies there; it was only yesterday.

The walls are in the death agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud; the holes are wounds; the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee.

This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is today. Buildings which have since been pulled down then formed redans and angles.

They were thirsty; this Guillaume brought them water. It was from this well that he drew it. Many drank there their last draught.

This well where drank so many of the dead was destined to die itself.

After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and it was turned into a sepulchre.

After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies.

Death has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow glory.

The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast into it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says they were not.

Hence arises a truer measure in the definitive judgments of nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander, Rome enchained lessens Caesar, Jerusalem murdered lessens Titus, tyranny follows the tyrant.

It is a misfortune for a man to leave behind him the night which bears his form.

The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute, not a day. In order to depict a battle, there is required one of those powerful painters who have chaos in their brushes. Rembrandt is better than Vandermeulen; Vandermeulen, exact at noon, lies at three o’clock.

Geometry is deceptive; the hurricane alone is trustworthy.

That is what confers on Folard the right to contradict Polybius.

His impenetrability had been smiling ever since the morning. On the 18th of June, that profound soul masked by marble beamed blindly. The man who had been gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest favorites of destiny make mistakes.

Our joys are composed of shadow. The supreme smile is God’s alone.

Ridet Caesar, Pompeius flebit, said the legionaries of the Fulminatrix Legion. Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it is certain that Caesar laughed.

… having asked the news of Napoleon from L’Inconstant, the Emperor, who still wore in his hat the white and amaranthine cockade sown with bees, which he had adopted at the isle of Elba, laughingly seized the speaking-trumpet, and answered for himself, “The Emperor is well.”

A man who laughs like that is on familiar terms with events.

Napoleon indulged in many fits of this laughter during the breakfast at Waterloo. After breakfast he meditated for a quarter of an hour;

Napoleon turning round abruptly, despatched an express at full speed to Paris to announce that the battle was won.

Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder darts.

He had just found his clap of thunder.

Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been decided on.

Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the Universe.

The squares, wasted by this mad cavalry, closed up their ranks without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter of grapeshot, they created explosions in their assailants’ midst. The form of this combat was monstrous.

These squares were no longer battalions, they were craters; those cuirassiers were no longer cavalry, they were a tempest.

Each square was a volcano attacked by a cloud; lava contended with lightning.

The painful surprise of Napoleon is well known. Grouchy hoped for, Blücher arriving. Death instead of life.

Fate has these turns; the throne of the world was expected; it was Saint Helena that was seen.

If the little shepherd who served as guide to Bülow, Blücher’s lieutenant, had advised him to debouch from the forest above Frischemont, instead of below Plancenoit, the form of the nineteenth century might, perhaps, have been different. Napoleon would have won the battle of Waterloo.

Had the action been begun two hours earlier, it would have been over at four o’clock, and Blücher would have fallen on the battle won by Napoleon.

Such are these immense risks proportioned to an infinite which we cannot comprehend.

The Emperor had been the first, as early as midday, to descry with his field-glass, on the extreme horizon, something which had attracted his attention. He had said, “I see yonder a cloud, which seems to me to be troops.”

Conscious that they were about to die, they shouted, “Vive l’Empereur!”

History records nothing more touching than that agony bursting forth in acclamations.

The sky had been overcast all day long.

The army yielded suddenly on all sides at once—Hougomont, La Haie-Sainte, Papelotte, Plancenoit. The cry “Treachery!” was followed by a cry of “Save yourselves who can!”

An army which is disbanding is like a thaw.

All yields, splits, cracks, floats, rolls, falls, jostles, hastens, is precipitated. The disintegration is unprecedented. Ney borrows a horse, leaps upon it, and without hat, cravat, or sword, places himself across the Brussels road, stopping both English and French.

Those who had conquered Europe have fallen prone on the earth, with nothing left to say nor to do, feeling the present shadow of a terrible presence. Hoc erat in fatis. That day the perspective of the human race underwent a change.

Waterloo is the hinge of the nineteenth century.

The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Someone, a person to whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes can be explained.

The winner of the battle of Waterloo was not Napoleon, who was put to flight; nor Wellington, giving way at four o’clock, in despair at five; nor Blücher, who took no part in the engagement.

The winner of Waterloo was Cambronne.

To thunder forth such a reply at the lightning-flash that kills you is to conquer!

Their specific gravity in the human species results from something more than a combat. Their honor, thank God! their dignity, their intelligence, their genius, are not numbers which those gamblers, heroes and conquerors, can put in the lottery of battles.

Often a battle is lost and progress is conquered. There is less glory and more liberty.

The drum holds its peace; reason takes the word. It is a game in which he who loses wins. Let us, therefore, speak of Waterloo coldly from both sides.

Their honor, thank God! their dignity, their intelligence, their genius, are not numbers which those gamblers, heroes and conquerors, can put in the lottery of battles. Often a battle is lost and progress is conquered. There is less glory and more liberty.

The drum holds its peace; reason takes the word.

It is a game in which he who loses wins. Let us, therefore, speak of Waterloo coldly from both sides. Let us render to chance that which is due to chance, and to God that which is due to God. What is Waterloo? A victory?

reason takes the word. It is a game in which he who loses wins. Let us, therefore, speak of Waterloo coldly from both sides. Let us render to chance that which is due to chance, and to God that which is due to God.

What is Waterloo? A victory? No. The winning number in the lottery.

The quine won by Europe, paid by France.

The quine won by Europe, paid by France.

It was not worthwhile to place a lion there.

Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God, who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more extraordinary comparison.

the stream, the plain, the forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey, the despot going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle; faith in a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but perturbing it.

Wellington was the Barême of war; Napoleon was its Michelangelo; and on this occasion, genius was vanquished by calculation.

On both sides someone was awaited. It was the exact calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington expected Blücher; he came.

Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites.

Never did God, who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more extraordinary comparison.

On one side, precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage of the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of battalions, carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand, nothing voluntarily …

Napoleon was its Michelangelo; and on this occasion, genius was vanquished by calculation. On both sides someone was awaited. It was the exact calculator who succeeded. Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington expected Blücher; he came.

Wellington is classic war taking its revenge.

Bonaparte, at his dawning, had encountered him in Italy, and beaten him superbly. The old owl had fled before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not only struck as by lightning, but disgraced. Who was that Corsican of six and twenty?

In fact, to get Wurmser, it sufficed to blanch the hair of Wellington.

Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of the second.

That which must be admired in the battle of Waterloo, is England; the English firmness, the English resolution, the English blood; the superb thing about England there, no offence to her, was herself. It was not her captain; it was her army.

Wellington was tenacious; in that lay his merit, and we are not seeking to lessen it: but the least of his foot-soldiers and of his cavalry would have been as solid as he.

The iron soldier is worth as much as the Iron Duke.

As for us, all our glorification goes to the English soldier, to the English army, to the English people. If trophy there be, it is to England that the trophy is due.

after Waterloo, in Louis XVIII granting and conforming to the charter. Bonaparte places a postilion on the throne of Naples, and a sergeant on the throne of Sweden, employing inequality to demonstrate equality; Louis XVIII at Saint-Ouen countersigns the declaration of the rights of man.

If you wish to gain an idea of what revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of the nature of progress, call it Tomorrow.

Tomorrow fulfils its work irresistibly, and it is already fulfilling it today. It always reaches its goal strangely. It employs Wellington to make of Foy, who was only a soldier, an orator. Foy falls at Hougomont and rises again in the tribune.

Tomorrow fulfils its work irresistibly, and it is already fulfilling it today. It always reaches its goal strangely. It employs Wellington to make of Foy, who was only a soldier, an orator. Foy falls at Hougomont and rises again in the tribune.

Thus does progress proceed. There is no such thing as a bad tool for that workman.

It does not become disconcerted, but adjusts to its divine work the man who has bestridden the Alps, and the good old tottering invalid of Father Élysée. It makes use of the gouty man as well as of the conqueror;

The final extinction of that vast people which had been in eruption for twenty-six years—such was the dream. The solidarity of the Brunswicks, the Nassaus, the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs with the Bourbons.

Waterloo bears divine right on its crupper.

It is true, that the Empire having been despotic, the kingdom by the natural reaction of things, was forced to be liberal, and that a constitutional order was the unwilling result of Waterloo, to the great regret of the conquerors.

Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon. Under this reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the strange name of ideology!

It is a grave imprudence in a great man to turn the future into derision.

The populace, however, that food for cannon which is so fond of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance. Where is he? What is he doing? “Napoleon is dead,” said a passerby to a veteran of Marengo and Waterloo. “He dead!” cried the soldier;

War has frightful beauties which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideous features. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the bodies of the dead after the victory.

The dawn which follows a battle always rises on naked corpses.

Who does this? Who thus soils the triumph? What hideous, furtive hand is that which is slipped into the pocket of victory? What pickpockets are they who ply their trade in the rear of glory?

Some philosophers—Voltaire among the number—affirm that it is precisely those persons who have made the glory. It is the same men, they say; there is no relief corps; those who are erect pillage those who are prone on the earth.

The hero of the day is the vampire of the night.

One has assuredly the right, after all, to strip a corpse a bit when one is the author of that corpse. For our own part, we do not think so;

The darkness was serene. Not a cloud in the zenith.

What matters it if the earth be red! the moon remains white; these are the indifferences of the sky.

In the fields, branches of trees broken by grapeshot, but not fallen, upheld by their bark, swayed gently in the breeze of night. A breath, almost a respiration, moved the shrubbery. Quivers which resembled the departure of souls ran through the grass.

… attitude, with his back turned to the heap of dead, scanning the horizon on his knees, with the whole upper portion of his body supported on his two forefingers, which rested on the earth, and his head peering above the edge of the hollow road.

The jackal’s four paws suit some actions.

Then coming to a decision, he rose to his feet.

He wheeled round; it was the open hand, which had closed, and had seized the skirt of his coat.

An honest man would have been terrified; this man burst into a laugh.

“Come,” said he, “it’s only a dead body. I prefer a spook to a gendarme.”

But the hand weakened and released him.

Effort is quickly exhausted in the grave.

“Well now,” said the prowler, “is that dead fellow alive? Let’s see.”

They made an effort, and got the old road-mender to drinking. Boulatruelle drank an enormous amount, but said very little.

He combined with admirable art, and in masterly proportions, the thirst of a gormandizer with the discretion of a judge.

Nevertheless, by dint of returning to the charge and of comparing and putting together the few obscure words which he did allow to escape him, this is what Thénardier and the schoolmaster imagined that they had made out:—

At six francs the shot, that comes to nine hundred thousand francs a day, three hundred millions a year, which vanish in smoke.

This is a mere detail. All this time the poor were dying of hunger.

The year 1823 was what the Restoration called “the epoch of the Spanish war.”

France, having reestablished el rey netto in Spain, might well have reestablished the absolute king at home. They fell into the alarming error of taking the obedience of the soldier for the consent of the nation. Such confidence is the ruin of thrones.

It is not permitted to fall asleep, either in the shadow of a machineel tree, nor in the shadow of an army.

Let us return to the ship Orion.

The presence of a vessel of war in a port has something about it which attracts and engages a crowd.

It is because it is great, and the crowd loves what is great.

A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent combinations of the genius of man with the powers of nature.

The ocean seeks to lead it astray in the alarming sameness of its billows, but the vessel has its soul, its compass, which counsels it and always shows it the north. In the blackest nights, its lanterns supply the place of the stars.

Thus, against the wind, it has its cordage and its canvas; against the water, wood; against the rocks, its iron, brass, and lead; against the shadows, its light; against immensity, a needle.

If one wishes to form an idea of all those gigantic proportions which, taken as a whole, constitute the ship of the line, one has only to enter one of the six-story covered construction stocks, in the ports of Brest or Toulon.

The simple pile of chains on a ship of a hundred guns is four feet high, twenty feet in breadth, and eight feet in depth. And how much wood is required to make this ship? Three thousand cubic metres.

It is a floating forest.

And moreover, let this be borne in mind, it is only a question here of the military vessel of forty years ago, of the simple sailing-vessel; steam, then in its infancy, has since added new miracles to that prodigy which is called a war vessel.

he did not shout, for fear of exhausting his strength. All were awaiting the minute when he should release his hold on the rope, and, from instant to instant, heads were turned aside that his fall might not be seen.

There are moments when a bit of rope, a pole, the branch of a tree, is life itself, and it is a terrible thing to see a living being detach himself from it and fall like a ripe fruit.

All at once a man was seen climbing into the rigging with the agility of a tiger-cat; this man was dressed in red; he was a convict; he wore a green cap; he was a life convict.

… point, he fastened the rope which he had brought to it, and allowed the other end to hang down, then he began to descend the rope, hand over hand, and then—and the anguish was indescribable—instead of one man suspended over the gulf, there were two.

One would have said it was a spider coming to seize a fly, only here the spider brought life, not death.

Ten thousand glances were fastened on this group; not a cry, not a word; the same tremor contracted every brow; all mouths held their breath as though they feared to add the slightest puff to the wind which was swaying the two unfortunate men.

This Thénardier female was like the product of a wench engrafted on a fishwife.

When one heard her speak, one said, “That is a gendarme;” when one saw her drink, one said, “That is a carter;” when one saw her handle Cosette, one said, “That is the hangman.”

One of her teeth projected when her face was in repose.

she belonged, as we have said, to the race of those colossal wild women, who contort themselves at fairs with paving-stones hanging from their hair. She did everything about the house—made the beds, did the washing, the cooking, and everything else.

Cosette was her only servant; a mouse in the service of an elephant.

Everything trembled at the sound of her voice—window panes, furniture, and people. Her big face, dotted with red blotches, presented the appearance of a skimmer. She had a beard. She was an ideal market-porter dressed in woman’s clothes. She swore splendidly;

His cunning began here; he smiled habitually, by way of precaution, and was almost polite to everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing.

He had the glance of a polecat and the bearing of a man of letters.

He greatly resembled the portraits of the Abbé Delille. His coquetry consisted in drinking with the carters. No one had ever succeeded in rendering him drunk. He smoked a big pipe. He wore a blouse, and under his blouse an old black coat.

Every newcomer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame Thénardier, “There is the master of the house.” A mistake. She was not even the mistress. The husband was both master and mistress.

She worked; he created.

He directed everything by a sort of invisible and constant magnetic action. A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a sign; the mastodon obeyed. Thénardier was a sort of special and sovereign being in Madame Thénardier’s eyes, though she did not thoroughly realize it.

This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except her children, and who did not fear anyone except her husband.

She was a mother because she was mammiferous.

But her maternity stopped short with her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys. The man had but one thought—how to enrich himself.

He did not succeed in this. A theatre worthy of this great talent was lacking.

Thénardier was ruining himself at Montfermeil, if ruin is possible to zero; in Switzerland or in the Pyrenees this penniless scamp would have become a millionaire; but an innkeeper must browse where fate has hitched him.

It will be understood that the word “innkeeper” is here employed in a restricted sense, and does not extend to an entire class.

Cosette ran upstairs and down, washed, swept, rubbed, dusted, ran, fluttered about, panted, moved heavy articles, and weak as she was, did the coarse work. There was no mercy for her; a fierce mistress and venomous master.

The Thénardier hostelry was like a spider’s web, in which Cosette had been caught, and where she lay trembling.

The ideal of oppression was realized by this sinister household. It was something like the fly serving the spiders.

The poor child passively held her peace.

What takes place within these souls when they have but just quitted God, find themselves thus, at the very dawn of life, very small and in the midst of men all naked!

She no longer thought, she no longer saw.

The immensity of night was facing this tiny creature. On the one hand, all shadow; on the other, an atom.

It was only seven or eight minutes’ walk from the edge of the woods to the spring. Cosette knew the way, through having gone over it many times in daylight. Strange to say, she did not get lost. A remnant of instinct guided her vaguely.

The planet was, in fact, very near the horizon and was traversing a dense layer of mist which imparted to it a horrible ruddy hue. The mist, gloomily empurpled, magnified the star.

One would have called it a luminous wound.

A cold wind was blowing from the plain. The forest was dark, not a leaf was moving; there were none of the vague, fresh gleams of summertide. Great boughs uplifted themselves in frightful wise. Slender and misshapen bushes whistled in the clearings.

The darkness was bewildering. Man requires light. Whoever buries himself in the opposite of day feels his heart contract.

When the eye sees black, the heart sees trouble.

In an eclipse in the night, in the sooty opacity, there is anxiety even for the stoutest of hearts. No one walks alone in the forest at night without trembling. Shadows and trees—two formidable densities. A chimerical reality appears in the indistinct depths.

One is conscious of something hideous, as though one’s soul were becoming amalgamated with the darkness. This penetration of the shadows is indescribably sinister in the case of a child.

Forests are apocalypses, and the beating of the wings of a tiny soul produces a sound of agony beneath their monstrous vault.

Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious that she was seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer terror alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more terrible even than terror; she shivered.

The iron handle completed the benumbing and freezing of her wet and tiny hands; she was forced to halt from time to time, and each time that she did so, the cold water which splashed from the pail fell on her bare legs.

This took place in the depths of a forest, at night, in winter, far from all human sight; she was a child of eight: no one but God saw that sad thing at the moment.

And her mother, no doubt, alas!

And her mother, no doubt, alas!

For there are things that make the dead open their eyes in their graves.

She panted with a sort of painful rattle; sobs contracted her throat, but she dared not weep, so afraid was she of the Thénardier, even at a distance: it was her custom to imagine the Thénardier always present.

it was a man who had come up behind her, and whose approach she had not heard. This man, without uttering a word, had seized the handle of the bucket which she was carrying.

There are instincts for all the encounters of life.

The child was not afraid.

“I don’t think so.

Other people have mothers. I have none.

”

“And it will not cut?”

“Yes, sir,” said the child; “it cuts salad and the heads of flies.”

They reached the village. Cosette guided the stranger through the streets. They passed the bakeshop, but Cosette did not think of the bread which she had been ordered to fetch. The man had ceased to ply her with questions, and now preserved a gloomy silence.

The man, who had barely moistened his lips in the wine which he had poured out for himself, observed the child with peculiar attention.

Cosette was ugly. If she had been happy, she might have been pretty.

We have already given a sketch of that sombre little figure. Cosette was thin and pale; she was nearly eight years old, but she seemed to be hardly six. Her large eyes, sunken in a sort of shadow, were almost put out with weeping.

Éponine and Azelma did not look at Cosette. She was the same as a dog to them.

These three little girls did not yet reckon up four and twenty years between them, but they already represented the whole society of man; envy on the one side, disdain on the other.

The doll of the Thénardier sisters was very much faded, very old, and much broken; but it seemed nonetheless admirable to Cosette, who had never had a doll in her life, a real doll, to make use of the expression which all children will understand.

While dreaming and chattering, making tiny outfits, and baby clothes, while sewing little gowns, and corsages and bodices, the child grows into a young girl, the young girl into a big girl, the big girl into a woman.

The first child is the continuation of the last doll.

A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children.

The first child is the continuation of the last doll.

A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as impossible, as a woman without children.

So Cosette had made herself a doll out of the sword.

“That machine costs at least thirty francs. No nonsense. Down on your belly before that man!”

Gross natures have this in common with naive natures, that they possess no transition state.

“Well, Cosette,” said the Thénardier, in a voice that strove to be sweet, and which was composed of the bitter honey of malicious women, “aren’t you going to take your doll?”

It was Cosette’s sabot. Cosette, with that touching trust of childhood, which can always be deceived yet never discouraged, had placed her shoe on the hearthstone also.

Hope in a child who has never known anything but despair is a sweet and touching thing.

There was nothing in this wooden shoe.

“Twenty-three francs!” cried the woman, with an enthusiasm which was mingled with some hesitation.

Like all great artists, Thénardier was dissatisfied.

It was the accent of Castlereagh auditing France’s bill at the Congress of Vienna.

Everything had changed for her since she had met that good man in the forest.

Cosette, less happy than the most insignificant swallow of heaven, had never known what it was to take refuge under a mother’s shadow and under a wing.

For the last five years, that is to say, as far back as her memory ran, the poor child had shivered and trembled. She had always been exposed completely naked to the sharp wind of adversity; now it seemed to her she was clothed.

At the same time certain circumstances being given, certain shocks arriving to bring his under-nature to the surface, he had all the requisites for a blackguard. He was a shopkeeper in whom there was some taint of the monster.

Satan must have occasionally crouched down in some corner of the hovel in which Thénardier dwelt, and have fallen a-dreaming in the presence of this hideous masterpiece.

“Bah!” he thought; “they will have time to make their escape.”

“You may keep this paper as your receipt.”

Thénardier retreated in tolerably good order.

“This signature is fairly well imitated,” he growled between his teeth; “however, let it go!”

A portion of this building has recently been demolished. From what still remains of it one can form a judgment as to what it was in former days. As a whole, it was not over a hundred years old.

A hundred years is youth in a church and age in a house.

It seems as though man’s lodging partook of his ephemeral character, and God’s house of his eternity.

Not an unevenness of the ground, not a caprice in the architecture, not a fold. The ensemble was glacial, regular, hideous. Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief.

Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored.

If such a hell existed, that bit of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital might have formed the entrance to it.

everywhere parallel rows of trees, buildings erected on a line, flat constructions, long, cold rows, and the melancholy sadness of right angles. Not an unevenness of the ground, not a caprice in the architecture, not a fold. The ensemble was glacial, regular, hideous.

Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief.

Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored. If such a hell existed, that bit of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital might have formed the entrance to it.

“Ah! so it is true!” said the child. “Good morning, Monsieur.”

Children accept joy and happiness instantly and familiarly, being themselves by nature joy and happiness.

Cosette caught sight of Catherine at the foot of her bed, and took possession of her, and, as she played, she put a hundred questions to Jean Valjean. Where was she? Was Paris very large? Was Madame Thénardier very far away?

Where was she? Was Paris very large? Was Madame Thénardier very far away? Was she to go back? etc., etc. All at once she exclaimed, “How pretty it is here!”

It was a frightful hole, but she felt free.

“Must I sweep?” she resumed at last.

He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what it meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing.

Poor old man, with a perfectly new heart!

Only, as he was five and fifty, and Cosette eight years of age, all that might have been love in the whole course of his life flowed together into a sort of ineffable light.

It was the second white apparition which he had encountered.

The Bishop had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette caused the dawn of love to rise.

The early days passed in this dazzled state.

These are the effects of the dawn, of childhood, of joy. The novelty of the earth and of life counts for something here. Nothing is so charming as the coloring reflection of happiness on a garret.

We all have in our past a delightful garret.

Nature, a difference of fifty years, had set a profound gulf between Jean Valjean and Cosette; destiny filled in this gulf. Destiny suddenly united and wedded with its irresistible power these two uprooted existences, differing in age, alike in sorrow.

destiny filled in this gulf. Destiny suddenly united and wedded with its irresistible power these two uprooted existences, differing in age, alike in sorrow. One, in fact, completed the other.

Cosette’s instinct sought a father, as Jean Valjean’s instinct sought a child. To meet was to find each other.

At the mysterious moment when their hands touched, they were welded together. When these two souls perceived each other, they recognized each other as necessary to each other, and embraced each other closely.

And in truth, the mysterious impression produced on Cosette in the depths of the forest of Chelles by the hand of Jean Valjean grasping hers in the dark was not an illusion, but a reality.

The entrance of that man into the destiny of that child had been the advent of God.

Moreover, Jean Valjean had chosen his refuge well. There he seemed perfectly secure.

At times she became serious and stared at her little black gown. Cosette was no longer in rags; she was in mourning.

She had emerged from misery, and she was entering into life.

Jean Valjean had undertaken to teach her to read. Sometimes, as he made the child spell, he remembered that it was with the idea of doing evil that he had learned to read in prison. This idea had ended in teaching a child to read.

He felt in it a premeditation from on high, the will of someone who was not man, and he became absorbed in reverie.

Good thoughts have their abysses as well as evil ones.

To teach Cosette to read, and to let her play, this constituted nearly the whole of Jean Valjean’s existence. And then he talked of her mother, and he made her pray.

He paid, vexed that his passage should have aroused remark.

Every flight should be an imperceptible slipping away.

A heavy cart was crossing the Seine at the same time as himself, and on its way, like him, to the right bank. This was of use to him. He could traverse the bridge in the shadow of the cart.

In order to reach them, it was necessary to risk himself in a tolerably large unsheltered and illuminated space. He did not hesitate. Those who were on his track had evidently lost the scent, and Jean Valjean believed himself to be out of danger.

Hunted, yes; followed, no.

A little street, the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, opened out between two timber-yards enclosed in walls. This street was dark and narrow and seemed made expressly for him. Before entering it he cast a glance behind him.

There was but one thing which was possible.

Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he carried, as one might say, two beggar’s pouches: in one he kept his saintly thoughts; in the other the redoubtable talents of a convict.

He rummaged in the one or the other, according to circumstances.

A rope would have been required; Jean Valjean had none. Where was he to get a rope at midnight, in the Rue Polonceau? Certainly, if Jean Valjean had had a kingdom, he would have given it for a rope at that moment.

All extreme situations have their lightning flashes which sometimes dazzle, sometimes illuminate us.

Jean Valjean’s despairing glance fell on the street lantern-post of the blind alley Genrot.

He had a rope.

These gloomy inventors of expedients work rapidly when they are fighting against fatality.

We have already explained that the lanterns had not been lighted that night. The lantern in the Cul-de-Sac Genrot was thus naturally extinct, like the rest; and one could pass directly under it without even noticing that it was no longer in its place.

These voices had this strange characteristic, that they did not prevent the building from seeming to be deserted.

It was a supernatural chant in an uninhabited house.

While these voices were singing, Jean Valjean thought of nothing. He no longer beheld the night; he beheld a blue sky. It seemed to him that he felt those wings which we all have within us, unfolding.

The song died away. It may have lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could not have told.

Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.

All fell silent again. There was no longer anything in the street; there was nothing in the garden. That which had menaced, that which had reassured him—all had vanished.

Jean Valjean often said afterwards, that, although many funereal spectres had crossed his path in life, he had never beheld anything more bloodcurdling and terrible than that enigmatical form accomplishing some inexplicable mystery in that gloomy place, and beheld thus at night.

It was alarming to suppose that that thing was perhaps dead; and still more alarming to think that it was perhaps alive.

He had the courage to plaster his face to the glass, and to watch whether the thing would move. In spite of his remaining thus what seemed to him a very long time, the outstretched form made no movement.

When Jean Valjean, on the evening of the very day when Javert had arrested him beside Fantine’s deathbed, had escaped from the town jail of Montreuil-sur-Mer, the police had supposed that he had betaken himself to Paris.

Paris is a maelstrom where everything is lost, and everything disappears in this belly of the world, as in the belly of the sea.

No forest hides a man as does that crowd. Fugitives of every sort know this. They go to Paris as to an abyss; there are gulfs which save.

Paris is a maelstrom where everything is lost, and everything disappears in this belly of the world, as in the belly of the sea.

No forest hides a man as does that crowd.

Fugitives of every sort know this. They go to Paris as to an abyss; there are gulfs which save. The police know it also, and it is in Paris that they seek what they have lost elsewhere. They sought the ex-mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer.

… advisable to stir up the prosecutor of the Crown, and that his complaints with regard to the abduction of Cosette would have as their first result to fix upon himself, and upon many dark affairs which he had on hand, the glittering eye of justice.

The last thing that owls desire is to have a candle brought to them.

And in the first place, how explain the fifteen hundred francs which he had received? He turned squarely round, put a gag on his wife’s mouth, and feigned astonishment when the stolen child was mentioned to him. He understood nothing about it;

As soon as he had positively recognized Jean Valjean, the formidable convict, he perceived that there were only three of them, and he asked for reinforcements at the police station of the Rue de Pontoise.

One puts on gloves before grasping a thorn cudgel.

This delay and the halt at the Carrefour Rollin to consult with his agents came near causing him to lose the trail. He speedily divined, however, that Jean Valjean would want to put the river between his pursuers and himself.

Javert advanced slowly, sounding, searching on his way all the nooks of the street like so many pockets of thieves.

When he reached the centre of the web he found the fly no longer there.

His exasperation can be imagined.

Javert committed all these blunders, and nonetheless was one of the cleverest and most correct spies that ever existed. He was, in the full force of the term, what is called in venery a “knowing dog.” But what is there that is perfect?

Great strategists have their eclipses.

The greatest follies are often composed, like the largest ropes, of a multitude of strands.

Great strategists have their eclipses.

The greatest follies are often composed, like the largest ropes, of a multitude of strands.

Take the cable thread by thread, take all the petty determining motives separately, and you can break them one after the other, and you say, “That is all there is of it!” Braid them, twist them together; the result is enormous:

Nevertheless, it was a sombre place of which one had had a glimpse.

The threshold smiled; the house prayed and wept.

If one succeeded in passing the porter, which was not easy—which was even nearly impossible for everyone, for there was an Open Sesame!

It was there that that profound remark was made anent a rather greedy parakeet which belonged to a lady boarder:—

“How well bred! it eats the top of the slice of bread and butter just like a person!”

It was on one of the flagstones of this cloister that there was once picked up a confession which had been written out in advance, in order that she might not forget it, by a sinner of seven years:—

It was there that a little abandoned child, a foundling whom the convent was bringing up out of charity, uttered this sweet and heartbreaking saying. She heard the others talking of their mothers, and she murmured in her corner:—

“As for me, my mother was not there when I was born!”

There was a stout portress who could always be seen hurrying through the corridors with her bunch of keys, and whose name was Sister Agatha. The “big big girls”—those over ten years of age—called her Agathocles.

This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite.

Such being the case, and a convent having happened to be on our road, it has been our duty to enter it. Why?

and they go about shouting, “Look! take this, honest people.” This logic was known to the ancients. The soothsayers practise it. They rubbed a black heifer over with chalk, and said, “She is white, Bos cretatus.”

As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.

Superstitions, bigotries, affected devotion, prejudices, those forms, all forms as they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their smoke, and they must be clasped close, body to body, and war must be made on them, and that without truce;

for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms. It is difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl it to the earth.

A convent in France, in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century, is a college of owls facing the light.

A cloister, caught in the very act of asceticism, in the very heart of the city of ’89 and of 1830 and of 1848, Rome blossoming out in Paris, is an anachronism.

So, given the nineteenth century, we are opposed, as a general proposition, and among all peoples, in Asia as well as in Europe, in India as well as in Turkey, to ascetic claustration.

Whoever says cloister, says marsh.

Their putrescence is evident, their stagnation is unhealthy, their fermentation infects people with fever, and etiolates them; their multiplication becomes a plague of Egypt.

… philosophical point of view, outside the requirements of militant policy, on condition that the monastery shall be absolutely a voluntary matter and shall contain only consenting parties, I shall always consider a cloistered community with a certain attentive, and, in some respects, a deferential gravity.

Wherever there is a community, there is a commune; where there is a commune, there is right.

The monastery is the product of the formula: Equality, Fraternity. Oh! how grand is liberty! And what a splendid transfiguration! Liberty suffices to transform the monastery into a republic.

Let us take nothing from the human mind; to suppress is bad. We must reform and transform. Certain faculties in man are directed towards the Unknown; thought, reverie, prayer.

The Unknown is an ocean. What is conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown.

Thought, reverie, prayer—these are great and mysterious radiations. Let us respect them. Whither go these majestic irradiations of the soul? Into the shadow; that is to say, to the light.

The grandeur of democracy is to disown nothing and to deny nothing of humanity. Close to the right of the man, beside it, at the least, there exists the right of the soul.

To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law.

Let us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars.

There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist.

Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

Man lives by affirmation even more than by bread.

There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

Man lives by affirmation even more than by bread.

Even to see and to show does not suffice. Philosophy should be an energy; it should have for effort and effect to ameliorate the condition of man. Socrates should enter into Adam and produce Marcus Aurelius;

In the cloister, one suffers in order to enjoy. One draws a bill of exchange on death. One discounts in terrestrial gloom celestial light.

In the cloister, hell is accepted in advance as a post obit on paradise.

The taking of the veil or the frock is a suicide paid for with eternity.

In the cloister, one suffers in order to enjoy. One draws a bill of exchange on death. One discounts in terrestrial gloom celestial light. In the cloister, hell is accepted in advance as a post obit on paradise.

The taking of the veil or the frock is a suicide paid for with eternity.

It does not seem to us, that on such a subject mockery is permissible. All about it is serious, the good as well as the bad.

We blame the church when she is saturated with intrigues, we despise the spiritual which is harsh toward the temporal; but we everywhere honor the thoughtful man.

We salute the man who kneels.

A faith; this is a necessity for man. Woe to him who believes nothing.

We salute the man who kneels.

A faith; this is a necessity for man. Woe to him who believes nothing.

One is not unoccupied because one is absorbed. There is visible labor and invisible labor.

One is not unoccupied because one is absorbed. There is visible labor and invisible labor.

To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act.

Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work.

To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act.

Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work.

Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.

Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work.

Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.

In our opinion, cenobites are not lazy men, and recluses are not idlers.

“There is probably no work more divine than that performed by these souls.” And we add: “There is probably no work which is more useful.”

There certainly must be some who pray constantly for those who never pray at all.

In our opinion the whole question lies in the amount of thought that is mingled with prayer.

If it is a mother, the mothers lay her out; if she is a sister, the sisters lay her out. After which, I nail her up. That forms a part of my gardener’s duty.

A gardener is a bit of a gravedigger.

She is placed in a lower hall of the church which communicates with the street, and into which no man may enter save the doctor of the dead. I don’t count the undertaker’s men and myself as men.

The strides of a lame man are like the ogling glances of a one-eyed man; they do not reach their goal very promptly.

Moreover, Fauchelevent was in a dilemma. He took nearly a quarter of an hour to return to his cottage in the garden. Cosette had waked up. Jean Valjean had placed her near the fire.

What seemed unprecedented to Fauchelevent was, we repeat, a simple matter to Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had been in worse straits than this.

Any man who has been a prisoner understands how to contract himself to fit the diameter of the escape.

The prisoner is subject to flight as the sick man is subject to a crisis which saves or kills him. An escape is a cure. What does not a man undergo for the sake of a cure?

Any man who has been a prisoner understands how to contract himself to fit the diameter of the escape. The prisoner is subject to flight as the sick man is subject to a crisis which saves or kills him.

An escape is a cure.

What does not a man undergo for the sake of a cure?

“Good! And what if you should happen to cough or to sneeze?”

“A man who is making his escape does not cough or sneeze.”

“Father Fauchelevent, we must come to a decision: I must either be caught here, or accept this escape through the hearse.”

Fauchelevent had expected anything but this, that a gravedigger could die. It is true, nevertheless, that gravediggers do die themselves.

By dint of excavating graves for other people, one hollows out one’s own.

Fauchelevent stood there with his mouth wide open. He had hardly the strength to stammer:—

And he added, with the satisfaction of a serious man who is turning a phrase well:—

“Their hunger is the enemy of my thirst.”

The hearse skirted a clump of cypress-trees, quitted the grand alley, turned into a narrow one, entered the waste land, and plunged into a thicket. This indicated the immediate proximity of the place of sepulture.

I have my scrivener’s stall in the market of the Rue de Sèvres. You know? the Umbrella Market. All the cooks of the Red Cross apply to me. I scribble their declarations of love to the raw soldiers.

In the morning I write love letters; in the evening I dig graves. Such is life, rustic.

”

Every combination thought out by Jean Valjean had been progressing, and progressing favorably, since the preceding day. He, like Fauchelevent, counted on Father Mestienne. He had no doubt as to the end. Never was there a more critical situation, never more complete composure.

The four planks of the coffin breathe out a kind of terrible peace.

It seemed as though something of the repose of the dead entered into Jean Valjean’s tranquillity.

Jean Valjean’s eyes were open and gazing at him.

To see a corpse is alarming, to behold a resurrection is almost as much so.

Fauchelevent became like stone, pale, haggard, overwhelmed by all these excesses of emotion, not knowing whether he had to do with a living man or a dead one, and staring at Jean Valjean, who was gazing at him.

Jean Valjean had merely fainted. The fresh air had revived him.

Joy is the ebb of terror.

Fauchelevent found almost as much difficulty in recovering himself as Jean Valjean had.

She was deeply conscious that it was necessary to “be good.” Who has not experienced the sovereign power of those two words, pronounced with a certain accent in the ear of a terrified little being: “Say nothing!”

Fear is mute. Moreover, no one guards a secret like a child.

But when, at the expiration of these lugubrious twenty-four hours, she beheld Jean Valjean again, she gave vent to such a cry of joy, that any thoughtful person who had chanced to hear that cry, would have guessed that it issued from an abyss.

The prioress passed Jean Valjean in review.

There is nothing which examines like a downcast eye.

“Yes, reverend Mother,” replied Fauchelevent.

It was quite natural that Cosette should think herself Jean Valjean’s daughter. Moreover, as she knew nothing, she could say nothing, and then, she would not have said anything in any case.

As we have just observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness.

Cosette had suffered so much, that she feared everything, even to speak or to breathe. A single word had so often brought down an avalanche upon her. She had hardly begun to regain her confidence since she had been with Jean Valjean.

At the appointed hour she flew to the hut. When she entered the lowly cabin, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean blossomed out and felt his happiness increase with the happiness which he afforded Cosette.

The joy which we inspire has this charming property, that, far from growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us more radiant than ever.

At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her running and playing in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh from that of the rest.

Cosette’s face had even undergone a change, to a certain extent. The gloom had disappeared from it.

A smile is the same as sunshine; it banishes winter from the human countenance.

Recreation over, when Cosette went into the house again, Jean Valjean gazed at the windows of her classroom, and at night he rose to look at the windows of her dormitory.

Again he beheld gratings, bolts, iron bars—to guard whom? Angels.

These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he now beheld once more around lambs.

This was a place of expiation, and not of punishment; and yet, it was still more austere, more gloomy, and more pitiless than the other.

Paris has a child, and the forest has a bird; the bird is called the sparrow; the child is called the gamin.

Couple these two ideas which contain, the one all the furnace, the other all the dawn; strike these two sparks together, Paris, childhood; there leaps out from them a little being. Homuncio, Plautus would say.

he runs, lies in wait, rummages about, wastes time, blackens pipes, swears like a convict, haunts the wine-shop, knows thieves, calls gay women “thou,” talks slang, sings obscene songs, and has no evil in his heart.

This is because he has in his heart a pearl, innocence; and pearls are not to be dissolved in mud.

So long as man is in his childhood, God wills that he shall be innocent.

It suffices for him to be there, with his radiance of happiness, with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with his hand-clapping, which resembles a clapping of wings, to confer on that narrow, dark, fetid, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable keel, the name of Paradise.

Bestow on an individual the useless and deprive him of the necessary, and you have the gamin.

The gamin is not devoid of literary intuition. His tendency, and we say it with the proper amount of regret, would not constitute classic taste. He is not very academic by nature.

… Profundis to the Jack-pudding, finds without seeking, knows what he is ignorant of, is a Spartan to the point of thieving, is mad to wisdom, is lyrical to filth, would crouch down on Olympus, wallows in the dunghill and emerges from it covered with stars.

The gamin of Paris is Rabelais in this youth.

He is not content with his trousers unless they have a watch-pocket.

… is a magnificent thing to put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of the ocean.

To breathe Paris preserves the soul.

What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart which one experiences every time that one meets one of these children around whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads of a broken family.

This child of the puddle is also the child of the ideal. Measure that spread of wings which reaches from Molière to Barra.

To sum up the whole, and in one word, the gamin is a being who amuses himself, because he is unhappy.

and then, those who govern under the superintendence of the French idea will have to make this choice; the children of France or the gamins of Paris; flames in the light or will-o’-the-wisps in the gloom.

The gamin expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world.

For Paris is a total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. The whole of this prodigious city is a foreshortening of dead manners and living manners.

Paris reigns. Geniuses flash forth there, the red tails prosper there. Adonaï passes on his chariot with its twelve wheels of thunder and lightning; Silenus makes his entry there on his ass. For Silenus read Ramponneau.

Paris is the synonym of Cosmos, Paris is Athens, Sybaris, Jerusalem, Pantin.

All civilizations are there in an abridged form, all barbarisms also. Paris would greatly regret it if it had not a guillotine.

this does not prevent vagabondism, and that enormous genius which is called Paris, while transfiguring the world by its light, sketches in charcoal Bouginier’s nose on the wall of the temple of Theseus and writes “Credeville the thief” on the Pyramids.

Paris is always showing its teeth; when it is not scolding it is laughing.

Such is Paris. The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe. A heap of mud and stone, if you will, but, above all, a moral being. It is more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it is daring.

Such is Paris. The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe. A heap of mud and stone, if you will, but, above all, a moral being. It is more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it is daring.

To dare; that is the price of progress.

All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of daring.

Audacity! is a Fiat lux. It is necessary, for the sake of the forward march of the human race, that there should be proud lessons of courage permanently on the heights. Daring deeds dazzle history and are one of man’s great sources of light.

The dawn dares when it rises.

To attempt, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to one’s self, to grasp fate bodily, to astound catastrophe by the small amount of fear that it occasions us, now to affront unjust power, again to insult drunken victory, to hold one’s position, …

Some people or other had clothed him in rags out of charity. Still, he had a father and a mother. But his father did not think of him, and his mother did not love him.

He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.

This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The pavements were less hard to him than his mother’s heart.

This child never felt so well as when he was in the street.

The pavements were less hard to him than his mother’s heart.

His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.

This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The pavements were less hard to him than his mother’s heart.

His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.

He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering, lad, with a vivacious but sickly air.

He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch, scraped the gutters, stole a little, but, like cats and sparrows, gayly laughed when he was called a rogue, and got angry when called a thief.

He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because he was free.

When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social order meet them and crush them, but so long as they are children, they escape because of their smallness. The tiniest hole saves them.

When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social order meet them and crush them, but so long as they are children, they escape because of their smallness.

The tiniest hole saves them.

Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened, every two or three months, that he said, “Come, I’ll go and see mamma!”

When he entered, he was asked: “Whence come you?” He replied: “From the street.” When he went away, they asked him: “Whither are you going?” He replied: “Into the streets.” His mother said to him: “What did you come here for?”

This child lived, in this absence of affection, like the pale plants which spring up in cellars.

It did not cause him suffering, and he blamed no one. He did not know exactly how a father and mother should be.

Probably because his father’s name was Jondrette.

It seems to be the instinct of certain wretched families to break the thread.

The chamber which the Jondrettes inhabited in the Gorbeau hovel was the last at the end of the corridor. The cell next to it was occupied by a very poor young man who was called M. Marius.

Gillenormand on account of his wife, a pretty and coquettish barberess. M. Gillenormand admired his own discernment in all things, and declared that he was extremely sagacious; here is one of his sayings:

“I have, in truth, some penetration; I am able to say when a flea bites me, from what woman it came.”

The words which he uttered the most frequently were: “the sensible man,” and “nature.”

He had all thirty-two of his teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He was of an amorous disposition, but declared that, for the last ten years, he had wholly and decidedly renounced women.

He could no longer please, he said; he did not add: “I am too old,” but: “I am too poor.”

He said: “If I were not ruined—Héée!” All he had left, in fact, was an income of about fifteen thousand francs. His dream was to come into an inheritance and to have a hundred thousand livres income for mistresses.

“Nature,” he said, “in order that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it even specimens of its amusing barbarism. Europe possesses specimens of Asia and Africa on a small scale.

The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizard is a pocket crocodile.

The dancers at the opera are pink female savages. They do not eat men, they crunch them; or, magicians that they are, they transform them into oysters and swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only the bones, they leave only the shell. Such are our morals.

The dancers at the opera are pink female savages. They do not eat men, they crunch them; or, magicians that they are, they transform them into oysters and swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only the bones, they leave only the shell. Such are our morals.

We do not devour, we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we claw.

”

One day, having been cheated by a business man in a matter of inheritance, in a gross and apparent manner, he uttered this solemn exclamation: “That was indecently done! I am really ashamed of this pilfering.

Everything has degenerated in this century, even the rascals.

Morbleu! this is not the way to rob a man of my standing. I am robbed as though in a forest, but badly robbed. Silvae sint consule dignae!” He had had two wives, as we have already mentioned;

Thus the two sisters strayed, each in her own dream, at the epoch when they were young girls.

Both had wings, the one like an angel, the other like a goose.

No ambition is ever fully realized, here below at least. No paradise becomes terrestrial in our day. The younger wedded the man of her dreams, but she died. The elder did not marry at all.

In the matter of cant, Mademoiselle Gillenormand could have given points to a miss. Her modesty was carried to the other extreme of blackness.

She cherished a frightful memory of her life; one day, a man had beheld her garter.

Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her guimpe was never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended sufficiently high. She multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking.

Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her guimpe was never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended sufficiently high. She multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking.

The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in proportion as the fortress is the less menaced.

Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique mysteries of innocence, she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand nephew, named Théodule, to embrace her without displeasure.

She had never been malicious, which is relative kindness; and then, years wear away the angles, and the softening which comes with time had come to her. She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not herself know the secret.

There breathed from her whole person the stupor of a life that was finished, and which had never had a beginning.

She kept house for her father. M. Gillenormand had his daughter near him, as we have seen that Monseigneur Bienvenu had his sister with him.

Ah! ça ira ça ira ça ira! Les Bonapartistes à la lanterne!

Songs are like the guillotine; they chop away indifferently, today this head, tomorrow that. It is only a variation.

In the Fualdès affair, which belongs to this epoch, 1816, they took part for Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdès was “a Buonapartist.” They designated the liberals as “friends and brothers;” this constituted the most deadly insult.

He had, in spite of his levity, and without its interfering in any way with his dignity, a certain manner about him which was imposing, dignified, honest, and lofty, in a bourgeois fashion; and his great age added to it.

One is not a century with impunity. The years finally produce around a head a venerable dishevelment.

In addition to this, he said things which had the genuine sparkle of the old rock.

He was covered with blood. While tearing down the banner he had received a sword-cut across his face. The Emperor, greatly pleased, shouted to him: “You are a colonel, you are a baron, you are an officer of the Legion of Honor!”

Pontmercy replied: “Sire, I thank you for my widow.”

An hour later, he fell in the ravine of Ohain. Now, who was this Georges Pontmercy? He was this same “brigand of the Loire.”

In the same way, there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners who refused to salute Flaminius, and who had a little of Hannibal’s spirit.

One day he encountered the district-attorney in one of the streets of Vernon, stepped up to him, and said: “Mr. Crown Attorney, am I permitted to wear my scar?”

He had nothing save his meagre half-pay as chief of squadron. He had hired the smallest house which he could find at Vernon. He lived there alone, we have just seen how.

Moreover, he had renounced everything, and neither stirred up mischief nor conspired. He shared his thoughts between the innocent things which he was then doing and the great things which he had done.

He passed his time in expecting a pink or in recalling Austerlitz.

M. Gillenormand kept up no relations with his son-in-law. The colonel was “a bandit” to him. M. Gillenormand never mentioned the colonel, except when he occasionally made mocking allusions to “his Baronship.”

Nearly the whole dictionary consisted of “Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be in good odor”—that was the point. There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions of these venerable groups, and their ideas smelled of it.

It was a mummified society. The masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with straw.

A worthy old marquise, an emigrée and ruined, who had but a solitary maid, continued to say: “My people.”

By the dim light of the candle, a large tear could be distinguished on the pale and prostrate colonel’s cheek, where it had trickled from his dead eye.

The eye was extinguished, but the tear was not yet dry. That tear was his son’s delay.

Marius gazed upon that man whom he beheld for the first time, on that venerable and manly face, on those open eyes which saw not, on those white locks, those robust limbs, on which, here and there, brown lines, marking sword-thrusts, and a sort of …

Marius remained only forty-eight hours at Vernon. After the interment he returned to Paris, and applied himself again to his law studies, with no more thought of his father than if the latter had never lived.

In two days the colonel was buried, and in three forgotten.

Marius wore crape on his hat. That was all.

After the interment he returned to Paris, and applied himself again to his law studies, with no more thought of his father than if the latter had never lived. In two days the colonel was buried, and in three forgotten.

Marius wore crape on his hat. That was all.

He visited Paris very rarely, and so rarely that Marius had never seen him. The cousins knew each other only by name. We think we have said that Théodule was the favorite of Aunt Gillenormand, who preferred him because she did not see him.

Not seeing people permits one to attribute to them all possible perfections.

One morning, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder returned to her apartment as much disturbed as her placidity was capable of allowing. Marius had just asked his grandfather’s permission to take a little trip, adding that he meant to set out that very evening. “Go!”

The work was clumsy, the worker cross. She had been seated at this for several hours when the door opened. Mademoiselle Gillenormand raised her nose. Lieutenant Théodule stood before her, making the regulation salute. She uttered a cry of delight.

One may be old, one may be a prude, one may be pious, one may be an aunt, but it is always agreeable to see a lancer enter one’s chamber.

“You here, Théodule!” she exclaimed.

Marius, on the evening following this dialogue, mounted the diligence without suspecting that he was watched. As for the watcher, the first thing he did was to fall asleep. His slumber was complete and conscientious.

Argus snored all night long.

At daybreak, the conductor of the diligence shouted: “Vernon! relay of Vernon! Travellers for Vernon!” And Lieutenant Théodule woke.

He had strewn his bouquet there. At the extremity of the grave, on a little swelling which marked the head, there stood a cross of black wood with this name in white letters: Colonel Baron Pontmercy. Marius’ sobs were audible.

The “lass” was a grave.

“Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis XVIII!”

Louis XVIII had been dead for four years; but it was all the same to him.

The old man, who had been crimson, turned whiter than his hair. He wheeled round towards a bust of M. le Duc de Berry, which stood on the chimneypiece, and made a profound bow, with a sort of peculiar majesty.

In that direction, they sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right. They grew enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of infinite realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space.

There is nothing like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams for engendering the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow.

These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A beginning of mystery menaced “the established order of things,” which was suspicious and underhand. A sign which was revolutionary to the highest degree.

from the immediate point of view, a soldier of the democracy; above the contemporary movement, the priest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his lids a little red, his lower lip was thick and easily became disdainful, his brow was lofty.

A great deal of brow in a face is like a great deal of horizon in a view.

Like certain young men at the beginning of this century and the end of the last, who became illustrious at an early age, he was endowed with excessive youth, and was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to hours of pallor.

but it suited him better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than for conflagration.

A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but why not await the dawn?

A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a still better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke, progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this tender and serious spirit.

Bahorel, a man of caprice, was scattered over numerous cafés; the others had habits, he had none. He sauntered.

To stray is human. To saunter is Parisian.

In reality, he had a penetrating mind and was more of a thinker than appeared to view.

Everything failed him and everybody deceived him; what he was building tumbled down on top of him. If he were splitting wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a mistress, he speedily discovered that he had a friend also.

Some misfortune happened to him every moment, hence his joviality.

He said: “I live under falling tiles.” He was not easily astonished, because, for him, an accident was what he had foreseen, he took his bad luck serenely, and smiled at the teasing of fate, like a person who is listening to pleasantries.

what he was building tumbled down on top of him. If he were splitting wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a mistress, he speedily discovered that he had a friend also. Some misfortune happened to him every moment, hence his joviality.

He said: “I live under falling tiles.”

He was not easily astonished, because, for him, an accident was what he had foreseen, he took his bad luck serenely, and smiled at the teasing of fate, like a person who is listening to pleasantries.

He was poor, but his fund of good humor was inexhaustible.

He soon reached his last sou, never his last burst of laughter.

When adversity entered his doors, he saluted this old acquaintance cordially, he tapped all catastrophes on the stomach; he was familiar with fatality to the point of calling it by its nickname: “Good day, Guignon,” he said to it.

This was his axiom: “There is but one certainty, my full glass.” He sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles. “They are greatly in advance to be dead,” he exclaimed.

He said of the crucifix: “There is a gibbet which has been a success.”

A rover, a gambler, a libertine, often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly: “J’aimons les filles, et j’aimons le bon vin.” Air: Vive Henri IV.

In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable. A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. That which we lack attracts us.

No one loves the light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad always has his eyes fixed on heaven.

Why? In order to watch the bird in its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras.

Laigle de Meaux was pondering without melancholy, over a little misadventure which had befallen him two days previously at the law-school, and which had modified his personal plans for the future, plans which were rather indistinct in any case.

Reverie does not prevent a cab from passing by, nor the dreamer from taking note of that cab.

Laigle de Meaux, whose eyes were straying about in a sort of diffuse lounging, perceived, athwart his somnambulism, a two-wheeled vehicle proceeding through the place, at a foot pace and apparently in indecision. For whom was this cabriolet? Why was it driving at a walk?

“Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws. You produce on me no effect with your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes’ bric-a-brac. I excuse you from the task of soothing me. Moreover, I am sad. What do you wish me to say to you?

Man is evil, man is deformed; the butterfly is a success, man is a failure.

God made a mistake with that animal. A crowd offers a choice of ugliness. The first comer is a wretch, Femme—woman—rhymes with infâme—infamous.

On forming our little Holy Alliance we assigned ourselves each our frontier, which we never cross. What is situated on the side of winter belongs to Vaud, on the side of the wind to Gex. Hence the peace.”

“Peace is happiness digesting.”

“And you, Joly, where do you stand in your entanglement with Mamselle—you know whom I mean?”

All held their peace, and Enjolras bowed his head.

Silence always produces somewhat the effect of acquiescence, of the enemy being driven to the wall.

Marius continued with increased enthusiasm, and almost without pausing for breath:—

At that moment, he felt Enjolras’ hand on his shoulder.

“Citizen,” said Enjolras to him, “my mother is the Republic.”

For thirty sous, Marius got it turned by some porter or other, and it was a new coat. But this coat was green. Then Marius ceased to go out until after nightfall. This made his coat black.

As he wished always to appear in mourning, he clothed himself with the night.

In spite of all this, he got admitted to practice as a lawyer.

As for wine, he drank water. When he paid at the desk where Madam Rousseau, at that period still plump and rosy majestically presided, he gave a sou to the waiter, and Madam Rousseau gave him a smile. Then he went away.

For sixteen sous he had a smile and a dinner.

This Restaurant Rousseau, where so few bottles and so many water carafes were emptied, was a calming potion rather than a restaurant. It no longer exists. The proprietor had a fine nickname: he was called “Rousseau the Aquatic.”

Marius had not failed for a single day. He had endured everything in the way of destitution; he had done everything except contract debts. He did himself the justice to say that he had never owed anyone a sou.

A debt was, to him, the beginning of slavery.

He even said to himself, that a creditor is worse than a master; for the master possesses only your person, a creditor possesses your dignity and can administer to it a box on the ear. Rather than borrow, he went without food.

During all these trials he had felt himself encouraged and even uplifted, at times, by a secret force that he possessed within himself.

The soul aids the body, and at certain moments, raises it. It is the only bird which bears up its own cage.

Besides his father’s name, another name was graven in Marius’ heart, the name of Thénardier.

It was three years since he had left his grandfather. Both parties had remained on the same terms, without attempting to approach each other, and without seeking to see each other. Besides, what was the use of seeing each other?

Marius was the brass vase, while Father Gillenormand was the iron pot.

We admit that Marius was mistaken as to his grandfather’s heart. He had imagined that M.

“If the thing were to do over again, would I do it?” His pride instantly answered “yes,” but his aged head, which he shook in silence, replied sadly “no.” He had his hours of depression. He missed Marius.

Old men need affection as they need the sun. It is warmth.

Strong as his nature was, the absence of Marius had wrought some change in him. Nothing in the world could have induced him to take a step towards “that rogue;” but he suffered. He never inquired about him, but he thought of him incessantly.

Marius was in error.

There are fathers who do not love their children; there exists no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.

At bottom, as we have said, M. Gillenormand idolized Marius. He idolized him after his own fashion, with an accompaniment of snappishness and boxes on the ear; but, this child once gone, he felt a black void in his heart;

The wealthy young man has a hundred coarse and brilliant distractions, horse races, hunting, dogs, tobacco, gaming, good repasts, and all the rest of it; occupations for the baser side of the soul, at the expense of the loftier and more delicate sides.

The poor young man wins his bread with difficulty; he eats; when he has eaten, he has nothing more but meditation.

He goes to the spectacles which God furnishes gratis; he gazes at the sky, space, the stars, flowers, children, the humanity among which he is suffering, the creation amid which he beams.

M. Mabeuf had taken a fancy to Marius, because Marius, being young and gentle, warmed his age without startling his timidity.

Youth combined with gentleness produces on old people the effect of the sun without wind.

When Marius was saturated with military glory, with gunpowder, with marches and countermarches, and with all those prodigious battles in which his father had given and received such tremendous blows of the sword, he went to see M. Mabeuf, and M.

Mabeuf remained rather puerilely, but profoundly serene. His habits of mind had the regular swing of a pendulum. Once mounted on an illusion, he went for a very long time, even after the illusion had disappeared.

A clock does not stop short at the precise moment when the key is lost.

M. Mabeuf had his innocent pleasures. These pleasures were inexpensive and unexpected; the merest chance furnished them. One day, Mother Plutarque was reading a romance in one corner of the room. She was reading aloud, finding that she understood better thus.

In these aspirations, much more than in deliberate, rational coordinated ideas, is the real character of a man to be found.

Our chimaeras are the things which the most resemble us.

Each one of us dreams of the unknown and the impossible in accordance with his nature.

This child had not only grown, she had become idealized.

As three days in April suffice to cover certain trees with flowers, six months had sufficed to clothe her with beauty. Her April had arrived.

One sometimes sees people, who, poor and mean, seem to wake up, pass suddenly from indigence to luxury, indulge in expenditures of all sorts, and become dazzling, prodigal, magnificent, all of a sudden. That is the result of having pocketed an income;

She dropped her eyes, and he pursued his way.

What he had just seen was no longer the ingenuous and simple eye of a child; it was a mysterious gulf which had half opened, then abruptly closed again.

There comes a day when the young girl glances in this manner. Woe to him who chances to be there!

What he had just seen was no longer the ingenuous and simple eye of a child; it was a mysterious gulf which had half opened, then abruptly closed again.

There comes a day when the young girl glances in this manner. Woe to him who chances to be there!

That first gaze of a soul which does not, as yet, know itself, is like the dawn in the sky. It is the awakening of something radiant and strange.

It is a sort of undecided tenderness which reveals itself by chance, and which waits. It is a snare which the innocent maiden sets unknown to herself, and in which she captures hearts without either wishing or knowing it.

It is a virgin looking like a woman.

It is rare that a profound reverie does not spring from that glance, where it falls.

On the way thither, he encountered Courfeyrac, and pretended not to see him. Courfeyrac, on his return home, said to his friends:—

“I have just met Marius’ new hat and new coat, with Marius inside them. He was going to pass an examination, no doubt. He looked utterly stupid.”

On arriving at the Luxembourg, Marius made the tour of the fountain basin, and stared at the swans; then he remained for a long time in contemplation before a statue whose head was perfectly black with mould, and one of whose hips was missing.

This march savored of an attack, and certainly of a desire for conquest.

So I say that he marched on the bench, as I should say: “Hannibal marched on Rome.”

However, all his movements were purely mechanical, and he had interrupted none of the habitual preoccupations of his mind and labors.

Beautiful with a beauty which was wholly feminine and angelic, with a complete beauty which would have made Petrarch sing and Dante kneel. It seemed to him that he was floating free in the azure heavens.

At the same time, he was horribly vexed because there was dust on his boots.

He thought he felt sure that she had looked at his boots too.

A glance had wrought all this.

When the mine is charged, when the conflagration is ready, nothing is more simple. A glance is a spark.

It was all over with him. Marius loved a woman. His fate was entering the unknown.

“I feel that her whole soul lies within it!” he exclaimed.

This handkerchief belonged to the old gentleman, who had simply let it fall from his pocket.

In the days which followed the finding of this treasure, he only displayed himself at the Luxembourg in the act of kissing the handkerchief and laying it on his heart.

The reader has just seen how Marius discovered, or thought that he discovered, that She was named Ursule.

Appetite grows with loving.

To know that her name was Ursule was a great deal; it was very little. In three or four weeks, Marius had devoured this bliss. He wanted another. He wanted to know where she lived.

His dinner took care of itself.

Fever nourishes the sick man, and love the lover.

He spent a week in this manner. M. Leblanc no longer appeared at the Luxembourg.

Society hardly even suspects this digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels. There are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works, as there are extractions.

What emerges from these deep excavations? The future.

The deeper one goes, the more mysterious are the toilers. The work is good, up to a degree which the social philosophies are able to recognize; beyond that degree it is doubtful and mixed; lower down, it becomes terrible.

… interrupts the tension of all these energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in these obscurities, and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms the top and the bottom and the inside and the outside.

Society hardly even suspects this digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels.

There are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works, as there are extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The future.

With it, evil commences.

Reflect and tremble in the presence of anyone who has no glance at all.

The social order has its black miners.

they are ignorant both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought for anything but the satisfaction of their individual desires. They are almost unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible obliteration.

They have two mothers, both stepmothers, ignorance and misery.

They have a guide, necessity; and for all forms of satisfaction, appetite. They are brutally voracious, that is to say, ferocious, not after the fashion of the tyrant, but after the fashion of the tiger. From suffering these spectres pass to crime;

All the others, those above it, have but one object—to suppress it. It is to this point that philosophy and progress tend, with all their organs simultaneously, by their amelioration of the real, as well as by their contemplation of the absolute.

Destroy the cavern Ignorance and you destroy the lair Crime.

Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just written. The only social peril is darkness.

Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just written.

The only social peril is darkness.

Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, here below, at least, in predestination. The same shadow in front, the same flesh in the present, the same ashes afterwards. But ignorance, mingled with the human paste, blackens it.

Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just written. The only social peril is darkness.

Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay.

There is no difference, here below, at least, in predestination. The same shadow in front, the same flesh in the present, the same ashes afterwards. But ignorance, mingled with the human paste, blackens it.

One thought one beheld the Farnese Hercules clad in duck trousers and a cotton velvet waistcoat.

Gueulemer, built after this sculptural fashion, might have subdued monsters; he had found it more expeditious to be one.

A low brow, large temples, less than forty years of age, but with crow’s-feet, harsh, short hair, cheeks like a brush, a beard like that of a wild boar; the reader can see the man before him.

three teeth, two francs, fifty. Take advantage of this opportunity.” This “Take advantage of this opportunity” meant: Have as many teeth extracted as possible. He had been married and had had children. He did not know what had become of his wife and children.

He had lost them as one loses his handkerchief.

Babet read the papers, a striking exception in the world to which he belonged.

Later on he had abandoned everything, in order to “undertake Paris.” This was his expression.

Who was Claquesous? He was night.

He waited until the sky was daubed with black, before he showed himself. At nightfall he emerged from the hole whither he returned before daylight. Where was this hole? No one knew.

The rim of his hat was curled up on the left side, in order to make room for a tuft of hair, after the style of 1829. He lived by robbery with violence. His coat was of the best cut, but threadbare.

Montparnasse was a fashion-plate in misery and given to the commission of murders.

The cause of all this youth’s crimes was the desire to be well-dressed. The first grisette who had said to him: “You are handsome!” had cast the stain of darkness into his heart, and had made a Cain of this Abel.

What is necessary to cause these spectres to vanish?

Light. Light in floods. Not a single bat can resist the dawn. Light up society from below.

He had just crossed his threshold, where Ma’am Bougon was sweeping at the moment, as she uttered this memorable monologue:—

“What is there that is cheap now? Everything is dear. There is nothing in the world that is cheap except trouble; you can get that for nothing, the trouble of the world!”

Marius slowly ascended the boulevard towards the barrier, in order to reach the Rue Saint-Jacques. He was walking along with drooping head.

In her early childhood she must even have been pretty. The grace of her age was still struggling against the hideous, premature decrepitude of debauchery and poverty.

The remains of beauty were dying away in that face of sixteen, like the pale sunlight which is extinguished under hideous clouds at dawn on a winter’s day.

That face was not wholly unknown to Marius. He thought he remembered having seen it somewhere.

Sad creatures, without name, or sex, or age, to whom neither good nor evil were any longer possible, and who, on emerging from childhood, have already nothing in this world, neither liberty, nor virtue, nor responsibility.

Souls which blossomed out yesterday, and are faded today, like those flowers let fall in the streets, which are soiled with every sort of mire, while waiting for some wheel to crush them.

Nevertheless, while Marius bent a pained and astonished gaze on her, the young girl was wandering back and forth in the garret with the audacity of a spectre. She kicked about, without troubling herself as to her nakedness.

One felt that under other conditions of education and destiny, the gay and over-free mien of this young girl might have turned out sweet and charming.

Never, even among animals, does the creature born to be a dove change into an osprey. That is only to be seen among men.

Marius reflected, and allowed her to have her way.

Marius had lived for five years in poverty, in destitution, even in distress, but he now perceived that he had not known real misery. True misery he had but just had a view of. It was its spectre which had just passed before his eyes.

In fact, he who has only beheld the misery of man has seen nothing; the misery of woman is what he must see; he who has seen only the misery of woman has seen nothing; he must see the misery of the child.

When a man has reached his last extremity, he has reached his last resources at the same time. Woe to the defenceless beings who surround him! Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, good will, all fail him simultaneously.

Then all horrors become possible.

Despair is surrounded with fragile partitions which all open on either vice or crime.

Health, youth, honor, all the shy delicacies of the young body, the heart, virginity, modesty, that epidermis of the soul, are manipulated in sinister wise by that fumbling which seeks resources, which encounters opprobrium, and which accommodates itself to it.

The plaster which should have filled this cavity was missing, and by mounting on the commode, a view could be had through this aperture into the Jondrettes’ attic.

Commiseration has, and should have, its curiosity.

This aperture formed a sort of peephole. It is permissible to gaze at misfortune like a traitor in order to succor it.

Cities, like forests, have their caverns in which all the most wicked and formidable creatures which they contain conceal themselves.

Only, in cities, that which thus conceals itself is ferocious, unclean, and petty, that is to say, ugly; in forests, that which conceals itself is ferocious, savage, and grand, that is to say, beautiful.

Only, in cities, that which thus conceals itself is ferocious, unclean, and petty, that is to say, ugly; in forests, that which conceals itself is ferocious, savage, and grand, that is to say, beautiful.

Taking one lair with another, the beast’s is preferable to the man’s. Caverns are better than hovels.

What Marius now beheld was a hovel.

He had a pipe in his mouth and was smoking.

There was no bread in the hovel, but there was still tobacco.

He was writing probably some more letters like those which Marius had read.

He paused, smote the table with his fist, and added, as he ground his teeth:—

“Oh! I could eat the whole world!”

A big woman, who might be forty years of age, or a hundred, was crouching near the fireplace on her bare heels.

Moreover, no trace of work was revealed in that dwelling; no handicraft, no spinning-wheel, not a tool. In one corner lay some ironmongery of dubious aspect.

It was the dull listlessness which follows despair and precedes the death agony.

Marius gazed for a while at this gloomy interior, more terrifying than the interior of a tomb, for the human soul could be felt fluttering there, and life was palpitating there.

“Calm yourself, my little friend,” she said. “Don’t hurt yourself, my dear. You are too good to write to all those people, husband.”

Bodies press close to each other in misery, as in cold, but hearts draw apart.

This woman must have loved this man, to all appearance, judging from the amount of love within her; but probably, in the daily and reciprocal reproaches of the horrible distress which weighed on the whole group, this had become extinct.

“What? So much the better?” retorted his wife.

“Peace!” replied the father, “I suppress the liberty of the press.”

Then tearing the woman’s chemise which he was wearing, he made a strip of cloth with which he hastily swathed the little girl’s bleeding wrist.

I do not jest, that I don’t! I read them lessons on honor, on morality, on virtue! Ask them! They have got to walk straight. They are none of your unhappy wretches who begin by having no family, and end by espousing the public.

One is Mamselle Nobody, and one becomes Madame Everybody.

Deuce take it! None of that in the Fabantou family! I mean to bring them up virtuously, and they shall be honest, and nice, and believe in God, by the sacred name!

This added a touch of genuine wrath to Marius’ ecstasy. He devoured her with his eyes. He could not believe that it really was that divine creature whom he saw in the midst of those vile creatures in that monstrous lair.

It seemed to him that he beheld a hummingbird in the midst of toads.

When she took her departure, he had but one thought, to follow her, to cling to her trace, not to quit her until he learned where she lived, not to lose her again, at least, after having so miraculously rediscovered her.

An idea flashed across Marius’ mind.

What branch does one disdain when one feels that one is falling?

He drew near to the Jondrette girl.

“There, you speak like a brave man, and like an honest man.

Courage does not fear crime, and honesty does not fear authority.

”

A few moments later, about three o’clock, Courfeyrac chanced to be passing along the Rue Mouffetard in company with Bossuet. The snow had redoubled in violence, and filled the air. Bossuet was just saying to Courfeyrac:—

“One would say, to see all these snowflakes fall, that there was a plague of white butterflies in heaven.”

All at once, Bossuet caught sight of Marius coming up the street towards the barrier with a peculiar air.

She stepped to the window and looked out with the half-foolish way she had.

“How ugly Paris is when it has put on a white chemise!”

said she.

This old man, who was so firm and so brave in the presence of such a danger, seemed to possess one of those natures which are as courageous as they are kind, both easily and simply.

The father of a woman whom we love is never a stranger to us.

Marius felt proud of that unknown man.

“Ah!” roared Thénardier hoarsely, “a pretty lie! You stick to that pleasantry, do you! You’re floundering, my old buck! Ah! You don’t remember! You don’t see who I am?”

“Excuse me, sir,” said M. Leblanc with a politeness of accent, which at that moment seemed peculiarly strange and powerful, “I see that you are a villain!”

Who has not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish! At this word “villain,” the female Thénardier sprang from the bed, Thénardier grasped his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands.

“Excuse me, sir,” said M. Leblanc with a politeness of accent, which at that moment seemed peculiarly strange and powerful, “I see that you are a villain!”

Who has not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish!

At this word “villain,” the female Thénardier sprang from the bed, Thénardier grasped his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands. “Don’t you stir!” he shouted to his wife; and, turning to M. Leblanc:—

… truffles, you eat asparagus at forty francs the bunch in the month of January, and green peas, you gorge yourselves, and when you want to know whether it is cold, you look in the papers to see what the engineer Chevalier’s thermometer says about it.

We, it is we who are thermometers.

We don’t need to go out and look on the quay at the corner of the Tour de l’Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of cold;

“I warn you that I shall not admit that you don’t know how to write.”

A grand inquisitor might have envied that smile.

Thénardier pushed the table close to M. Leblanc, and took an inkstand, a pen, and a sheet of paper from the drawer which he left half open, and in which gleamed the long blade of the knife.

“Are you mad! Are you crazy! What a pack of boobies! You want to waste time, do you? Draw lots, do you? By a wet finger, by a short straw! With written names! Thrown into a hat!—”

“Would you like my hat?” cried a voice on the threshold.

All wheeled round. It was Javert.

“Don’t come near me,” she cried, “or I’ll crush you.”

“What a grenadier!” ejaculated Javert; “you’ve got a beard like a man, mother, but I have claws like a woman.”

And he continued to advance.

Her body was lost in the darkness, and only her head was visible. One would have pronounced her a mask of Decrepitude carved out by a light from the night.

“Madame,” said he, “does not possess that style of beauty which pleases me.”

He then pursued his road, and resumed his song:—

so that this word, “statesmen,” has ended by becoming somewhat of a slang word. It must be borne in mind, in fact, that wherever there is nothing but skill, there is necessarily pettiness.

To say “the skilful” amounts to saying “the mediocre.”

In the same way, to say “statesmen” is sometimes equivalent to saying “traitors.” If, then, we are to believe the skilful, revolutions like the Revolution of July are severed arteries; a prompt ligature is indispensable. The right, too grandly proclaimed, is shaken.

The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the people.

The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair is not a caste.

But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march of the human race. This has often been the fault of the bourgeoisie.

“His pardon is granted; it only remains for me to obtain it.” Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis IX and as kindly as Henri IV

Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls, the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.

Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps, by others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the present day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor before history;

The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside of France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France, as we have said.

God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text written in a mysterious tongue.

Men immediately make translations of it; translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps, and of nonsense. Very few minds comprehend the divine language.

there are already twenty translations on the public place. From each remaining springs a party, and from each misinterpretation a faction; and each party thinks that it alone has the true text, and each faction thinks that it possesses the light.

Power itself is often a faction.

There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current; they are the old parties.

it is the king. Revolution is precisely the contrary of revolt. Every revolution, being a normal outcome, contains within itself its legitimacy, which false revolutionists sometimes dishonor, but which remains even when soiled, which survives even when stained with blood.

Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity.

A revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is because it must be that it is.

Nonetheless did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution of 1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning.

Errors make excellent projectiles.

They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic; they attacked this revolution in its royalty. They shouted to it: “Revolution, why this king?” Factions are blind men who aim correctly.

Errors make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic; they attacked this revolution in its royalty. They shouted to it: “Revolution, why this king?”

Factions are blind men who aim correctly.

This cry was uttered equally by the republicans. But coming from them, this cry was logical. What was blindness in the legitimists was clearness of vision in the democrats. 1830 had bankrupted the people. The enraged democracy reproached it with this.

They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions.

Slaying wealth is not the same thing as dividing it.

The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The two problems must be combined and made but one.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine had also other causes to tremble; for it received the counter-shock of commercial crises, of failures, strikes, slack seasons, all inherent to great political disturbances.

In times of revolution misery is both cause and effect.

The blow which it deals rebounds upon it. This population full of proud virtue, capable to the highest degree of latent heat, always ready to fly to arms, prompt to explode, irritated, deep, undermined, seemed to be only awaiting the fall of a spark.

Progress; and that holy, sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in terrible wise, driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in fist, a roar in their mouths.

They were savages, yes; but the savages of civilization.

They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only with fear and trembling, to force the human race to paradise. They seemed barbarians, and they were saviours. They demanded light with the mask of night.

They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only with fear and trembling, to force the human race to paradise.

They seemed barbarians, and they were saviours. They demanded light with the mask of night.

Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying, but ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men, smiling, embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings, in white plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their elbows on a velvet …

God takes care of that.

God’s whole policy consists in rendering slopes less steep.

But too much dreaming sinks and drowns. Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to fall entirely from thought into reverie! He thinks that he can re-ascend with equal ease, and he tells himself that, after all, it is the same thing. Error!

Thought is the toil of the intelligence, reverie its voluptuousness. To replace thought with reverie is to confound a poison with a food.

Marius had begun in that way, as the reader will remember. Passion had supervened and had finished the work of precipitating him into chimaeras without object or bottom. One no longer emerges from one’s self except for the purpose of going off to dream.

Fatal declivity down which the most honest and the firmest as well as the most feeble and most vicious are drawn, and which ends in one of two holds, suicide or crime.

By dint of going outdoors to think, the day comes when one goes out to throw one’s self in the water.

Excess of reverie breeds men like Escousse and Lebras.

He who has not viewed the things of this world and the heart of man under this double light has seen nothing and knows nothing of the true.

The soul which loves and suffers is in a state of sublimity.

However, day followed day, and nothing new presented itself. It merely seemed to him, that the sombre space which still remained to be traversed by him was growing shorter with every instant. He thought that he already distinctly perceived the brink of the bottomless abyss.

This miscarriage had its consequences, however, which were perfectly distinct from Brujon’s programme. The reader will see what they were.

Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying quite another.

She had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia through having gone mad from the contagion of Hamlet’s madness, but because she had slept in the loft of some stable.

And in spite of it all, she was beautiful. What a star art thou, O youth!

In the meantime, she had halted in front of Marius with a trace of joy in her livid countenance, and something which resembled a smile.

“You are following me too closely, Monsieur Marius. Let me go on ahead, and follow me so, without seeming to do it. A nice young man like you must not be seen with a woman like me.”

No tongue can express all that lay in that word, woman, thus pronounced by that child.

She proceeded a dozen paces and then halted once more; Marius joined her. She addressed him sideways, and without turning towards him:—

When Toussaint came, he had said to her: “It is the young lady who is the mistress of this house.”—“And you, monsieur?” Toussaint replied in amazement.—

“I am a much better thing than the master, I am the father.”

Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent, and she regulated their expenditure, which was very modest. Every day, Jean Valjean put his arm through Cosette’s and took her for a walk.

and, as we have just said, he willingly did his duty as a national guard; the sum of his ambition lay in resembling any other man who paid his taxes.

This man had for his ideal, within, the angel, without, the bourgeois.

Let us note one detail, however; when Jean Valjean went out with Cosette, he dressed as the reader has already seen, and had the air of a retired officer.

… which sheds herself always thoroughly where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as in the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden with as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.

Nothing is small, in fact; anyone who is subject to the profound and penetrating influence of nature knows this.

Although no absolute satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the cause or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomable ecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity. Everything toils at everything.

Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates.

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins.

Which of the two possesses the larger field of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars.

all have need of each other. The light does not bear away terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers.

All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of the infinite.

Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins.

Nothing supplies the place of this instinct.

All the nuns in the world are not worth as much as one mother in the formation of a young girl’s soul.

Cosette had had no mother. She had only had many mothers, in the plural.

Nothing supplies the place of this instinct. All the nuns in the world are not worth as much as one mother in the formation of a young girl’s soul.

Cosette had had no mother. She had only had many mothers, in the plural.

As for Jean Valjean, he was, indeed, all tenderness, all solicitude; but he was only an old man and he knew nothing at all.

Now, in this work of education, in this grave matter of preparing a woman for life, what science is required to combat that vast ignorance which is called innocence!

Nothing prepares a young girl for passions like the convent.

The convent turns the thoughts in the direction of the unknown. The heart, thus thrown back upon itself, works downward within itself, since it cannot overflow, and grows deep, since it cannot expand.

When he was seated, she leaned her cheek against his white hair, and dropped a silent tear, saying to herself:

“Perhaps this man is my mother.”

Cosette, although this is a strange statement to make, in the profound ignorance of a girl brought up in a convent—maternity being also absolutely unintelligible to virginity—had ended by fancying that she had had as little mother as possible.

In fact, he had, for some time past, been contemplating with terror that beauty which seemed to grow more radiant every day on Cosette’s sweet face.

The dawn that was smiling for all was gloomy for him.

Cosette had been beautiful for a tolerably long time before she became aware of it herself. But, from the very first day, that unexpected light which was rising slowly and enveloping the whole of the young girl’s person, wounded Jean Valjean’s sombre eye.

Now she preferred the garden, and did not dislike to promenade back and forth in front of the railed fence. Jean Valjean, who was shy, never set foot in the garden. He kept to his back yard, like a dog.

Cosette, in gaining the knowledge that she was beautiful, lost the grace of ignoring it.

An exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by ingenuousness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as a dazzling and innocent creature who walks along, holding in her hand the key to paradise without being conscious of it.

The glance has been so much abused in love romances that it has finally fallen into disrepute. One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two beings fell in love because they looked at each other.

That is the way people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way.

The rest is nothing, but the rest comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls convey to each other by the exchange of that spark.

Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious, though in an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon.

Women play with their beauty as children do with a knife. They wound themselves.

The reader will recall Marius’ hesitations, his palpitations, his terrors. He remained on his bench and did not approach. This vexed Cosette. One day, she said to Jean Valjean: “Father, let us stroll about a little in that direction.”

This vexed Cosette. One day, she said to Jean Valjean: “Father, let us stroll about a little in that direction.” Seeing that Marius did not come to her, she went to him. In such cases, all women resemble Muhammad.

And then, strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl it is boldness.

This is surprising, and yet nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming, each the other’s qualities.

The first thing that Cosette felt was a confused and profound melancholy. It seemed to her that her soul had become black since the day before. She no longer recognized it.

The whiteness of soul in young girls, which is composed of coldness and gayety, resembles snow. It melts in love, which is its sun.

Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word uttered in its terrestrial sense. On the books of profane music which entered the convent, amour was replaced by tambour or pandour.

“Ah, how delightful is the drum!” or, “Pity is not a pandour.” But Cosette had left the convent too early to have occupied herself much with the “drum.” Therefore, she did not know what name to give to what she now felt.

Is anyone the less ill because one does not know the name of one’s malady?

She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly. She did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, useful or dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited; she loved.

“How stupid I am!” thought Jean Valjean. “She had not noticed him. It is I who have pointed him out to her.”

Oh, simplicity of the old! oh, the depth of children!

It is one of the laws of those fresh years of suffering and trouble, of those vivacious conflicts between a first love and the first obstacles, that the young girl does not allow herself to be caught in any trap whatever, and that the young …

Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two.

Youth, even in its sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.

At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile. It is the property of grief to cause the childish side of man to reappear. He had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was escaping from him.

At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile.

It is the property of grief to cause the childish side of man to reappear.

He had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was escaping from him. He would have liked to resist, to retain her, to arouse her enthusiasm by some external and brilliant matter.

a third where they were begging; one could be seen in which they were gnashing their teeth; another load menaced the spectators, another blasphemed God; the last was as silent as the tomb.

Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles of hell on the march.

The march of the damned to their tortures, performed in sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot of the Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet cart.

He was not looking at a spectacle, he was seeing a vision. He tried to rise, to flee, to make his escape; he could not move his feet.

Sometimes, the things that you see seize upon you and hold you fast.

He remained nailed to the spot, petrified, stupid, asking himself, athwart confused and inexpressible anguish, what this sepulchral persecution signified, and whence had come that pandemonium which was pursuing him.

Cosette was still too young to escape the penetrating influence of that April joy which bore so strong a resemblance to herself. Insensibly, and without her suspecting the fact, the blackness departed from her spirit.

In spring, sad souls grow light, as light falls into cellars at midday.

Cosette was no longer sad. However, though this was so, she did not account for it to herself.

Beside the apple-tree stood a sort of fruit-house, which was not securely fastened, and where one might contrive to get an apple.

One apple is a supper; one apple is life. That which was Adam’s ruin might prove Gavroche’s salvation.

The garden abutted on a solitary, unpaved lane, bordered with brushwood while awaiting the arrival of houses; the garden was separated from it by a hedge.

Whose fault was it? No one’s.

Marius possessed one of those temperaments which bury themselves in sorrow and there abide; Cosette was one of those persons who plunge into sorrow and emerge from it again.

Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period, the fatal phase of feminine reverie abandoned to itself, in which the isolated heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the vine which cling, as chance directs, to the capital of a marble column or …

She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror. Was this another hallucination? What! Two days in succession! One hallucination might pass, but two hallucinations? The disquieting point about it was, that the shadow had assuredly not been a phantom.

Phantoms do not wear round hats.

On the following day Jean Valjean returned. Cosette told him what she thought she had heard and seen. She wanted to be reassured and to see her father shrug his shoulders and say to her: “You are a little goose.”

But this lasted only for a moment.

That which is terror by night is curiosity by day.

“Bah!” said she, “come, let us see what it is.”

The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, that is love.

Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.

How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!

The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of dreams.

God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being transparent.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.

God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being transparent.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.

Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitude of mysterious means to correspond.

And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.

Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.

The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.

True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely little.

If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love.

Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we possess paradise, we desire heaven.

If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive plant; if you are a man, be love.

Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we possess paradise, we desire heaven.

Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.

“Does she still come to the Luxembourg?” “No, sir.” “This is the church where she attends mass, is it not?” “She no longer comes here.” “Does she still live in this house?” “She has moved away.” “Where has she gone to dwell?”

What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one’s soul!

Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a child of him!

There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. There is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.

Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a finger⁠—that would suffice for my eternity!

Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live in it.

Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture. There is ecstasy in agony.

Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing.

Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.

I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love.

His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.

What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure;

… the clouds and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.

If there did not exist someone who loved, the sun would become extinct.

Beneath a veil of incomparable sweetness, he had something about him that suggested death and night. His face was illuminated by the light of the dying day, and by the thought of a soul that is taking flight.

He seemed to be not yet a ghost, and he was no longer a man.

He had flung away his hat in the thicket, a few paces distant.

He fell upon the bench, and she beside him. They had no words more. The stars were beginning to gleam.

How did it come to pass that their lips met? How comes it to pass that the birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that May expands, that the dawn grows white behind the black trees on the shivering crest of the hills?

A kiss, and that was all.

At intervals, Cosette stammered a word.

Her soul fluttered on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.

Little by little they began to talk to each other. Effusion followed silence, which is fullness. The night was serene and splendid overhead.

the Thénardiers had two. The same sex, the same age. A good arrangement for the one, a good investment for the other. The little Thénardiers became little Magnons. Magnon quitted the Quai des Célestins and went to live in the Rue Clocheperce.

In Paris, the identity which binds an individual to himself is broken between one street and another.

The registry office being in no way warned, raised no objections, and the substitution was effected in the most simple manner in the world.

The child stared at him in astonishment, and received the shawl in silence.

When a certain stage of distress has been reached in his misery, the poor man no longer groans over evil, no longer returns thanks for good.

That done: “Brrr!” said Gavroche, who was shivering more than Saint Martin, for the latter retained one-half of his cloak.

At this brr! the downpour of rain, redoubled in its spite, became furious.

The wicked skies punish good deeds.

“Ah, come now!” exclaimed Gavroche, “what’s the meaning of this? It’s re-raining! Good Heavens, if it goes on like this, I shall stop my subscription.”

“Excuse us, sir, we have a papa and a mamma, but we don’t know where they are.”

“Sometimes that’s better than knowing where they are,” said Gavroche, who was a thinker.

“We have been wandering about these two hours,” continued the elder, “we have hunted for things at the corners of the streets, but we have found nothing.”

Gavroche was at home, in fact.

Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless! Charity of great things! Goodness of giants!

This huge monument, which had embodied an idea of the Emperor’s, had become the box of a street urchin. The brat had been accepted and sheltered by the colossus.

The Emperor had had the dream of a genius; in that Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing its tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying waters, he wished to incarnate the people.

God had done a grander thing with it, he had lodged a child there.

The hole through which Gavroche had entered was a breach which was hardly visible from the outside, being concealed, as we have stated, beneath the elephant’s belly, and so narrow that it was only cats and homeless children who could pass through it.

he exclaimed. “Are you scoffing at me? Are you turning up your noses? Do you want the Tuileries? Are you brutes? Come, say! I warn you that I don’t belong to the regiment of simpletons. Ah, come now, are you brats from the Pope’s establishment?”

A little roughness is good in cases of fear. It is reassuring.

The two children drew close to Gavroche.

At the same time Gavroche grasped the little fellow’s hand across his brother. The child pressed the hand close to him, and felt reassured.

Courage and strength have these mysterious ways of communicating themselves.

Silence reigned round them once more, the sound of their voices had frightened off the rats; at the expiration of a few minutes, they came raging back, but in vain, the three little fellows were fast asleep and heard nothing more.

Gavroche shrugged his shoulders, and replied:—

“A young ’un like me’s a man, and men like you are babes.”

“The brat’s tongue’s well hung!” exclaimed Babet.

For, it must be stated to those who are ignorant of the case, that argot is both a literary phenomenon and a social result.

What is slang, properly speaking? It is the language of wretchedness.

We may be stopped; the fact may be put to us in general terms, which is one way of attenuating it;

True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

Slang is nothing but a dressing-room where the tongue having some bad action to perform, disguises itself. There it clothes itself in word-masks, in metaphor-rags. In this guise it becomes horrible.

Let us have compassion on the chastised. Alas! Who are we ourselves? Who am I who now address you? Who are you who are listening to me? And are you very sure that we have done nothing before we were born?

The earth is not devoid of resemblance to a jail.

Who knows whether man is not a recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment.

Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase: the fortunate and the unfortunate.

In this world, evidently the vestibule of another, there are no fortunate.

The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous—that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading, means to light the fire;

Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase: the fortunate and the unfortunate. In this world, evidently the vestibule of another, there are no fortunate.

The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady.

To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous—that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.

The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous—that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science!

To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.

However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn without ceasing to fly—therein lies the marvel of genius.

However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy.

People suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing.

To burn without ceasing to fly—therein lies the marvel of genius.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer.

The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.

Slang is the tongue of those who sit in darkness.

Thought is moved in its most sombre depths, social philosophy is bidden to its most poignant meditations, in the presence of that enigmatic dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. Therein lies chastisement made visible. Every syllable has an air of being marked.

The thief also has his food for cannon, stealable matter, you, I, whoever passes by; le pantre. (Pan, everybody.)

Slang is language turned convict.

That the thinking principle of man be thrust down ever so low, that it can be dragged and pinioned there by obscure tyrannies of fatality, that it can be bound by no one knows what fetters in that abyss, is sufficient to create consternation.

… the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep, which is the same thing as shutting one’s eyes, the hatred of the unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-made spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny of society.

The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing.

Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful commotions which were formerly called jacqueries, beside which purely political agitations are the merest child’s play, which are no longer the conflict of the oppressed and the oppressor, but the revolt of discomfort …

Then everything crumbles.

Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people.

It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the eighteenth century, which the French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut short.

The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and today, the social catastrophe to which we lately alluded is simply impossible. Blind is he who announces it! Foolish is he who fears it!

Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie.

Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed. Feudal and monarchical maladies no longer run in our blood. There is no more of the Middle Ages in our constitution.

Certainly not. There is no Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood will no longer rush to its head. But let society take heed to the manner in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but phthisis is there.

Social phthisis is called misery.

One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by lightning.

society may rest assured on that point; blood will no longer rush to its head. But let society take heed to the manner in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but phthisis is there. Social phthisis is called misery.

One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by lightning.

Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget that this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts must understand that the first of political necessities consists in thinking first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in solacing, …

We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place for that.

If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself foresight.

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement. To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity, truth is nourishment as well as grain. A reason which fasts from science and wisdom grows thin.

To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity, truth is nourishment as well as grain. A reason which fasts from science and wisdom grows thin. Let us enter equal complaint against stomachs and minds which do not eat.

If there is anything more heartbreaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light.

The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we shall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge naturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery will be accomplished by a simple elevation of level.

The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we shall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge naturally from the zone of distress.

The obliteration of misery will be accomplished by a simple elevation of level.

We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation.

But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. When they say “no” to progress, it is not the future but themselves that they are condemning. They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are inoculating themselves with the past.

There is but one way of rejecting Tomorrow, and that is to die.

Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soul never—this is what we desire.

If, at that period of her existence, Cosette had fallen in love with a man in the least unscrupulous or debauched, she would have been lost; for there are generous natures which yield themselves, and Cosette was one of them.

One of woman’s magnanimities is to yield.

Love, at the height where it is absolute, is complicated with some indescribably celestial blindness of modesty. But what dangers you run, O noble souls! Often you give the heart, and we take the body.

But what dangers you run, O noble souls! Often you give the heart, and we take the body. Your heart remains with you, you gaze upon it in the gloom with a shudder.

Love has no middle course; it either ruins or it saves.

All human destiny lies in this dilemma. This dilemma, ruin, or safety, is set forth no more inexorably by any fatality than by love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; also coffin.

This dilemma, ruin, or safety, is set forth no more inexorably by any fatality than by love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; also coffin. The same sentiment says “yes” and “no” in the human heart.

Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.

God willed that Cosette’s love should encounter one of the loves which save.

and Cosette of a support, Marius’ loyalty. The first kiss had also been the last. Marius, since that time, had not gone further than to touch Cosette’s hand, or her kerchief, or a lock of her hair, with his lips.

For him, Cosette was a perfume and not a woman. He inhaled her.

She refused nothing, and he asked nothing. Cosette was happy, and Marius was satisfied. They lived in this ecstatic state which can be described as the dazzling of one soul by another soul.

Cosette was happy, and Marius was satisfied. They lived in this ecstatic state which can be described as the dazzling of one soul by another soul. It was the ineffable first embrace of two maiden souls in the ideal.

Two swans meeting on the Jungfrau.

At that hour of love, an hour when voluptuousness is absolutely mute, beneath the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic Marius, would rather have gone to a woman of the town than have raised Cosette’s robe to the height of her ankle.

you say: “What! is that all!” eh! yes, childish prattle, repetitions, laughter at nothing, nonsense, everything that is deepest and most sublime in the world! The only things which are worth the trouble of saying and hearing!

The man who has never heard, the man who has never uttered these absurdities, these paltry remarks, is an imbecile and a malicious fellow.

Cosette said to Marius:—

And the smile that she added made of this dialogue an idyl worthy of a grove situated in heaven. On another occasion she gazed intently at him and exclaimed:—

“Monsieur, you are handsome, you are good-looking, you are witty, you are not at all stupid, you are much more learned than I am, but I bid you defiance with this word: I love you!”

And Marius, in the very heavens, thought he heard a strain sung by a star.

During this time, clouds passed above their heads.

Every time that the wind blows it bears with it more of the dreams of men than of the clouds of heaven.

This chaste, almost shy love was not devoid of gallantry, by any means. To pay compliments to the woman whom a man loves is the first method of bestowing caresses, and he is half audacious who tries it.

This chaste, almost shy love was not devoid of gallantry, by any means. To pay compliments to the woman whom a man loves is the first method of bestowing caresses, and he is half audacious who tries it.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Voluptuousness mingles there with its sweet tiny point, while it hides itself. The heart draws back before voluptuousness only to love the more. Marius’ blandishments, all saturated with fancy, were, so to speak, of azure hue.

Cosette’s whole person was ingenuousness, ingenuity, transparency, whiteness, candor, radiance. It might have been said of Cosette that she was clear. She produced on those who saw her the sensation of April and dawn. There was dew in her eyes.

Cosette was a condensation of the auroral light in the form of a woman.

It was quite simple that Marius should admire her, since he adored her. But the truth is, that this little schoolgirl, fresh from the convent, talked with exquisite penetration and uttered, at times, all sorts of true and delicate sayings. Her prattle was conversation.

No one understands so well as a woman, how to say things that are, at once, both sweet and deep.

Sweetness and depth, they are the whole of woman; in them lies the whole of heaven.

In this full felicity, tears welled up to their eyes every instant. A crushed ladybug, a feather fallen from a nest, a branch of hawthorn broken, aroused their pity, and their ecstasy, sweetly mingled with melancholy, seemed to ask nothing better than to weep.

In this full felicity, tears welled up to their eyes every instant. A crushed ladybug, a feather fallen from a nest, a branch of hawthorn broken, aroused their pity, and their ecstasy, sweetly mingled with melancholy, seemed to ask nothing better than to weep.

The most sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness that is, at times, almost unbearable.

And, in addition to this—all these contradictions are the lightning play of love—they were fond of laughing, they laughed readily and with a delicious freedom, and so familiarly that they sometimes presented the air of two boys.

Alas! Who is there who has not felt all these things? Why does there come an hour when one emerges from this azure, and why does life go on afterwards?

Loving almost takes the place of thinking. Love is an ardent forgetfulness of all the rest.

Then ask logic of passion if you will. There is no more absolute logical sequence in the human heart than there is a perfect geometrical figure in the celestial mechanism. For Cosette and Marius nothing existed except Marius and Cosette.

Sometimes, beautiful as Cosette was, Marius shut his eyes in her presence.

The best way to look at the soul is through closed eyes.

Marius and Cosette never asked themselves whither this was to lead them. They considered that they had already arrived. It is a strange claim on man’s part to wish that love should lead to something.

Marius and Cosette never asked themselves whither this was to lead them. They considered that they had already arrived.

It is a strange claim on man’s part to wish that love should lead to something.

But nothing could induce Marius “to talk.” They might have torn out his nails before one of the two sacred syllables of which that ineffable name, Cosette, was composed.

True love is as luminous as the dawn and as silent as the tomb.

Only, Courfeyrac saw this change in Marius, that his taciturnity was of the beaming order.

“I have only to cry out, and people will come, and then slap, bang!

There are six of you; I represent the whole world.

”

Marius shivered from head to foot.

When one is at the end of one’s life, to die means to go away; when one is at the beginning of it, to go away means to die.

For the last six weeks, Marius had little by little, slowly, by degrees, taken possession of Cosette each day. As we have already explained, in the case of first love, the soul is taken long before the body;

When his eyes fell again, he saw Cosette smiling at him.

The smile of a woman whom one loves possesses a visible radiance, even at night.

“How silly we are! Marius, I have an idea.”

She let him have his way in silence.

There are moments when a woman accepts, like a sombre and resigned goddess, the religion of love.

“Do not weep,” he said.

At that epoch, Father Gillenormand was well past his ninety-first birthday. He still lived with Mademoiselle Gillenormand in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the old house which he owned.

He was, as the reader will remember, one of those antique old men who await death perfectly erect, whom age bears down without bending, and whom even sorrow cannot curve.

Still, his daughter had been saying for some time: “My father is sinking.” He no longer boxed the maids’ ears; he no longer thumped the landing-place so vigorously with his cane when Basque was slow in opening the door.

now the thought began to recur to him, and it chilled him. Absence, as is always the case in genuine and natural sentiments, had only served to augment the grandfather’s love for the ungrateful child, who had gone off like a flash.

It is during December nights, when the cold stands at ten degrees, that one thinks oftenest of the son.

M. Gillenormand was, or thought himself, above all things, incapable of taking a single step, he—the grandfather, towards his grandson; “I would die rather,” he said to himself. He did not consider himself as the least to blame;

However, as the reader has been able to conjecture, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had failed in her attempt to substitute her favorite, the officer of lancers, for Marius. The substitute, Théodule, had not been a success. M. Gillenormand had not accepted the quid pro quo.

A vacancy in the heart does not accommodate itself to a stopgap.

Théodule, on his side, though he scented the inheritance, was disgusted at the task of pleasing. The goodman bored the lancer; and the lancer shocked the goodman. Lieutenant Théodule was gay, no doubt, but a chatterbox, frivolous, but vulgar;

Marius stared at him in bewilderment. M. Gillenormand’s mobile face was no longer expressive of anything but rough and ineffable good-nature.

The grandsire had given way before the grandfather.

“Come, see here, speak, tell me about your love affairs, jabber, tell me everything! Sapristi! how stupid young folks are!”

He rose, picked up his hat which lay on the floor, and walked to the door with a firm, assured step. There he turned round, bowed deeply to his grandfather, raised his head erect again, and said:—

“Five years ago you insulted my father; today you have insulted my wife. I ask nothing more of you, sir. Farewell.”

Father Gillenormand, utterly confounded, opened his mouth, extended his arms, tried to rise, and before he could utter a word, the door closed once more, and Marius had disappeared.

But what the drama would gain thereby, truth would lose. Marius was at an age when one believes nothing in the line of evil; later on comes the age when one believes everything.

Suspicions are nothing else than wrinkles. Early youth has none of them.

That which overwhelmed Othello glides innocuous over Candide. Suspect Cosette! There are hosts of crimes which Marius could sooner have committed.

M. Mabeuf never had any fire in his chamber, and went to bed at sundown, in order not to consume any candles. It seemed as though he had no longer any neighbors: people avoided him when he went out; he perceived the fact.

The wretchedness of a child interests a mother, the wretchedness of a young man interests a young girl, the wretchedness of an old man interests no one. It is, of all distresses, the coldest.

Still, Father Mabeuf had not entirely lost his childlike serenity. His eyes acquired some vivacity when they rested on his books, and he smiled when he gazed at the Diogenes Laertius, which was a unique copy.

Of what is revolt composed? Of nothing and of everything.

Of an electricity disengaged, little by little, of a flame suddenly darting forth, of a wandering force, of a passing breath. This breath encounters heads which speak, brains which dream, souls which suffer, passions which burn, wretchedness which howls, and bears them away.

It communicates to those whom it seizes an indescribable and extraordinary power. It fills the firstcomer with the force of events; it converts everything into projectiles.

It makes a cannonball of a rough stone, and a general of a porter.

If we are to believe certain oracles of crafty political views, a little revolt is desirable from the point of view of power. System: revolt strengthens those governments which it does not overthrow. It puts the army to the test;

The brawl of passions and ignorances is quite another thing from the shock of progress. Show me in what direction you are going. Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may grow great.

There is no insurrection except in a forward direction.

Any other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth;

Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power. Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing powers.

Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.

The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering of peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest …

… universal suffrage being an absolutely modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering of peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest of which it is capable.

Under the Caesars, there was no insurrection, but there was Juvenal.

The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.

Despots count for something in the question of philosophers.

A word that is chained is a terrible word.

The writer doubles and trebles his style when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this silence there arises a certain mysterious plenitude which filters into thought and there congeals into bronze. The compression of history produces conciseness in the historian.

Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula.

The less spread of sail in the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his might.

The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth, overwhelms as with lightning.

“To arms!” they run, tumble down, flee, resist.

Wrath spreads abroad the riot as wind spreads a fire.

the curious laugh and chat a couple of paces distant from these streets filled with war. Hackney-carriages go their way; passersby are going to a dinner somewhere in town. Sometimes in the very quarter where the fighting is going on.

In 1831, a fusillade was stopped to allow a wedding party to pass.

At the time of the insurrection of 1839, in the Rue Saint-Martin a little, infirm old man, pushing a handcart surmounted by a tricolored rag, in which he had carafes filled with some sort of liquid, went and came from barricade to troops and from …

to that poor queen whom I saw pass in the tumbril! And all this is going to make tobacco dearer. It’s infamous! And I shall certainly go to see him beheaded on the guillotine, the wretch!”

“You’ve got the sniffles, old lady,” said Gavroche. “Blow your promontory.”

And he passed on. When he was in the Rue Pavée, the ragpicker occurred to his mind, and he indulged in this soliloquy:—

And he was seized with a fit of melancholy. He gazed at his pistol with an air of reproach which seemed an attempt to appease it:—

“I’m going off,” said he, “but you won’t go off!”

One dog may distract the attention from another dog. A very gaunt poodle came along at the moment. Gavroche felt compassion for him.

One winter, the rainstorms and the showers had taken a fancy to obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G which began the third; this is what remained:—

Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had become a profound piece of advice.

In this way it came about, that though he knew no French, Father Hucheloup understood Latin, that he had evoked philosophy from his kitchen, and that, desirous simply of effacing Lent, he had equalled Horace.

It has acquired all my folds, it does not bind me anywhere, it is moulded on my deformities, it falls in with all my movements, I am only conscious of it because it keeps me warm.

Old coats are just like old friends.

”

At the moment when one expects it the least, God placards a meteor on the wall of the firmament. Some queer star turns up, underlined by an enormous tail. And that causes the death of Caesar.

Brutus deals him a blow with a knife, and God a blow with a comet.

Crac, and behold an aurora borealis, behold a revolution, behold a great man; ’93 in big letters, Napoleon on guard, the comet of 1811 at the head of the poster. Ah! what a beautiful blue theatre all studded with unexpected flashes! Boum! Boum! extraordinary show!

wine is only white magic. Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The blackness of a terrible fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him, attracted him. He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass.

The beer-glass is the abyss.

Having neither opium nor hashish on hand, and being desirous of filling his brain with twilight, he had had recourse to that fearful mixture of brandy, stout, absinthe, which produces the most terrible of lethargies.

He besought Love to give it life, and this produced Matelote. Look at her, citizens! She has chromate-of-lead-colored hair, like Titian’s mistress, and she is a good girl. I guarantee that she will fight well.

Every good girl contains a hero.

As for Mother Hucheloup, she’s an old warrior. Look at her moustaches! She inherited them from her husband. A hussar indeed! She will fight too. These two alone will strike terror to the heart of the banlieue.

Terrible sayings with which was mingled a sort of cordial joviality. One would have pronounced them brothers, but they did not know each other’s names.

Great perils have this fine characteristic, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

A fire had been lighted in the kitchen, and there they were engaged in moulding into bullets, pewter mugs, spoons, forks, and all the brass tableware of the establishment. In the midst of it all, they drank.

Gavroche wheeled round haughtily, and answered:—

“If you are killed before me, I shall take yours.”

A dandy who had lost his way and who lounged past the end of the street created a diversion! Gavroche shouted to him:—

All that they heard was confused noises, and at intervals, fusillades; but these were rare, badly sustained and distant. This respite, which was thus prolonged, was a sign that the Government was taking its time, and collecting its forces.

These fifty men were waiting for sixty thousand.

Enjolras felt attacked by that impatience which seizes on strong souls on the threshold of redoubtable events.

Gavroche, who had looked on at the whole of this scene and had approved of everything with a silent toss of his head, stepped up to Javert and said to him:—

“It’s the mouse who has caught the cat.”

All this was so rapidly executed, that it was all over when those about the wine-shop noticed it.

“Then finish the business with a blow from a knife.”

“Spy,” said the handsome Enjolras, “we are judges and not assassins.”

“Here you! go about your business! Do what I told you!”

… grand moments of social birth-pangs in a revolutionary birth, which contain convulsion mingled with effort, in their exact and real relief, were we to omit, in the sketch here outlined, an incident full of epic and savage horror which occurred almost immediately after Gavroche’s departure.

Mobs, as the reader knows, are like a snowball, and collect as they roll along, a throng of tumultuous men.

These men do not ask each other whence they come.

“One word more. In executing this man, I have obeyed necessity; but necessity is a monster of the old world, necessity’s name is Fatality. Now, the law of progress is, that monsters shall disappear before the angels, and that Fatality shall vanish before Fraternity.

It is a bad moment to pronounce the word love. No matter, I do pronounce it.

And I glorify it. Love, the future is thine. Death, I make use of thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, in the future there will be neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance, nor bloody retaliation.

neither ferocious ignorance, nor bloody retaliation. As there will be no more Satan, there will be no more Michael. In the future no one will kill anyone else, the earth will beam with radiance, the human race will love.

The day will come, citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it will come, and it is in order that it may come that we are about to die.

”

he found himself in something startling. There was no longer a passerby, no longer a soldier, no longer a light, there was no one; solitude, silence, night, I know not what chill which seized hold upon one.

Entering a street was like entering a cellar.

He took a few steps. Someone passed close to him at a run. Was it a man? Or a woman? Were there many of them? he could not have told. It had passed and vanished.

This shot still betokened life. From that instant forth he encountered nothing more.

The whole of this itinerary resembled a descent of black steps.

All at once he raised it. A sort of splendid rectification had just been effected in his mind.

There is a widening of the sphere of thought which is peculiar to the vicinity of the grave; it makes one see clearly to be near death.

The vision of the action into which he felt that he was, perhaps, on the point of entering, appeared to him no more as lamentable, but as superb.

Civil war—what does that mean? Is there a foreign war? Is not all war between men, war between brothers? War is qualified only by its object.

There is no such thing as foreign or civil war; there is only just and unjust war.

Until that day when the grand human agreement is concluded, war, that at least which is the effort of the future, which is hastening on against the past, which is lagging in the rear, may be necessary. What have we to reproach that war with?

These wars build up peace. An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred. It must be cast down. This monstrous mass must be made to crumble.

To conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.

There is no one who has not noticed it in his own case—the soul—and therein lies the marvel of its unity complicated with ubiquity, has a strange aptitude for reasoning almost coldly in the most violent extremities, and it often happens that heartbroken passion and …

But this man was anything rather than a regicide. I knew him. His name was Father Mabeuf. I do not know what was the matter with him today. But he was a brave blockhead. Just look at his head.”

“The head of a blockhead and the heart of a Brutus,” replied Enjolras.

Then he raised his voice:—

“Citizens! This is the example which the old give to the young. We hesitated, he came! We were drawing back, he advanced!

This is what those who are trembling with age teach to those who tremble with fear!

This aged man is august in the eyes of his country. He has had a long life and a magnificent death!

“Be off with you, or I’ll blow up the barricade!”

Marius on that barricade after the octogenarian was the vision of the young revolution after the apparition of the old.

“Blow up the barricade!” said a sergeant, “and yourself with it!”

Mabeuf getting himself killed for the Republic, himself the leader of the insurgents—all these things appeared to him like a tremendous nightmare. He was obliged to make a mental effort to recall the fact that all that surrounded him was real.

Marius had already seen too much of life not to know that nothing is more imminent than the impossible, and that what it is always necessary to foresee is the unforeseen.

He had looked on at his own drama as a piece which one does not understand.

She paused, and overstepping the sombre transitions that undoubtedly existed in her mind, she resumed with a heartrending smile:—

“You thought me ugly, didn’t you?”

“You see, you are lost! Now, no one can get out of the barricade. It was I who led you here, by the way! You are going to die, I count upon that.

What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections of the soul? Man is a depth still greater than the people.

Jean Valjean at that very moment was the prey of a terrible upheaval. Every sort of gulf had opened again within him. He also was trembling, like Paris, on the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution.

He perceived the possibility of not returning to the Rue Plumet, and he could neither leave Toussaint behind nor confide his secret to her. Besides, he felt that she was devoted and trustworthy.

Treachery between master and servant begins in curiosity.

Now Toussaint, as though she had been destined to be Jean Valjean’s servant, was not curious. She stammered in her peasant dialect of Barneville: “I am made so; I do my work; the rest is no affair of mine.”

The dining-room was an antechamber as well, and separated the two bedrooms. The apartment was provided with all necessary utensils.

People re-acquire confidence as foolishly as they lose it; human nature is so constituted.

Hardly had Jean Valjean reached the Rue de l’Homme Armé when his anxiety was lightened and by degrees dissipated. There are soothing spots which act in some sort mechanically on the mind. An obscure street, peaceable inhabitants.

He slept well.

Night brings wisdom; we may add, night soothes.

On the following morning he awoke in a mood that was almost gay.

Perhaps it would be wise to go abroad, if only for a few months, and to set out for London. Well, they would go. What difference did it make to him whether he was in France or in England, provided he had Cosette beside him?

Cosette was his nation.

Cosette sufficed for his happiness; the idea that he, perhaps, did not suffice for Cosette’s happiness, that idea which had formerly been the cause of his fever and sleeplessness, did not even present itself to his mind.

Then he said to himself: “But this signifies nothing; there is nothing written here.” And he drew a long breath with inexpressible relief. Who has not experienced those foolish joys in horrible instants?

The soul does not surrender to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.

He held the blotter in his hand and contemplated it in stupid delight, almost ready to laugh at the hallucination of which he had been the dupe. All at once his eyes fell upon the mirror again, and again he beheld the vision.

He told himself that it was plain, that the light of the world had been eclipsed forever, and that Cosette had written that to someone. Then he heard his soul, which had become terrible once more, give vent to a dull roar in the gloom.

Try then the effect of taking from the lion the dog which he has in his cage!

Strange and sad to say, at that very moment, Marius had not yet received Cosette’s letter; chance had treacherously carried it to Jean Valjean before delivering it to Marius. Up to that day, Jean Valjean had not been vanquished by trial.

Never had such pincers seized him hitherto. He felt the mysterious stirring of all his latent sensibilities. He felt the plucking at the strange chord.

Alas! the supreme trial, let us say rather, the only trial, is the loss of the beloved being.

Poor old Jean Valjean certainly did not love Cosette otherwise than as a father; but we have already remarked, above, that into this paternity the widowhood of his life had introduced all the shades of love;

The unprecedented and heartrending thing about it was that he had fallen without perceiving it.

All the light of his life had departed, while he still fancied that he beheld the sun.

His instinct did not hesitate. He put together certain circumstances, certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette’s part, and he said to himself: “It is he.”

His instinct did not hesitate. He put together certain circumstances, certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette’s part, and he said to himself: “It is he.”

The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never misses its aim.

He struck Marius with his first conjecture. He did not know the name, but he found the man instantly.

7, and then went away. Jean Valjean would not have appeared like a living man to anyone who had examined him in that shadow. He sat there on the post of his door, motionless as a form of ice.

There is congealment in despair.

The alarm bells and a vague and stormy uproar were audible. In the midst of all these convulsions of the bell mingled with the revolt, the clock of Saint-Paul struck eleven, gravely and without haste; for the tocsin is man; the hour is God.

The street was deserted. A few uneasy bourgeois, who were rapidly returning home, hardly saw him.

Each one for himself in times of peril.

The lamplighter came as usual to light the lantern which was situated precisely opposite the door of No. 7, and then went away. Jean Valjean would not have appeared like a living man to anyone who had examined him in that shadow.

“What is the matter with you, my little fellow?” he said.

“The matter with me is that I am hungry,” replied Gavroche frankly. And he added: “Little fellow yourself.”

Jean Valjean fumbled in his fob and pulled out a five-franc piece.

The lantern oscillated violently, and went out. The street had suddenly become black.

“That’s right, old street,” ejaculated Gavroche, “put on your nightcap.”

And turning to Jean Valjean:—

he stared at it in the darkness, and the whiteness of the big sou dazzled him. He knew five-franc pieces by hearsay; their reputation was agreeable to him; he was delighted to see one close to. He said:—

“Let us contemplate the tiger.”

He gazed at it for several minutes in ecstasy; then, turning to Jean Valjean, he held out the coin to him, and said majestically to him:—

All at once, he stopped short.

“Let us interrupt the romance,” said he.

His feline eye had just descried, in the recess of a carriage door, what is called in painting, an ensemble, that is to say, a person and a thing; the thing was a handcart, the person was a man from Auvergene who was sleeping therein.

For the second time, he stopped short.

“Hullo,” said he, “it’s him. Good day, public order.”

Gavroche’s amazement was always brief and speedily thawed.

“Hullo,” said he, “it’s him. Good day, public order.”

Gavroche’s amazement was always brief and speedily thawed.

“Where are you going, you rascal?” shouted the sergeant.

“Where are you going, you rascal?” shouted the sergeant.

“Citizen,” retorted Gavroche, “I haven’t called you ‘bourgeois’ yet. Why do you insult me?”

“Where are you going, you rogue?”

“Will you tell me where you are going, you wretch?”

“General,” said Gavroche, “I’m on my way to look for a doctor for my wife who is in labor.”

“To arms!” shouted the sergeant.

The spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where rumbled that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God; a strange majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish.

It was a heap of filth and it was Sinai.

As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the revolution—what? The revolution. It—that barricade, chance, hazard, disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown—had facing it the Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, the nation, the republic;

There was no waste of useless powder. Nearly every shot told. There were corpses here and there, and pools of blood on the pavement.

I remember a white butterfly which went and came in the street. Summer does not abdicate.

In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes-cochères were encumbered with wounded.

Not one of the eighty cowards thought of flight, all were killed there with the exception of the leader, Barthélemy, of whom we shall speak presently.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade of the Temple was silence.

The difference between these two redoubts was the difference between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed a maw; the other a mask.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade of the Temple was silence. The difference between these two redoubts was the difference between the formidable and the sinister.

One seemed a maw; the other a mask.

Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection of June was composed of a wrath and of an enigma, one divined in the first barricade the dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.

No repast had been possible. There was neither bread nor meat. The fifty men in the barricade had speedily exhausted the scanty provisions of the wine-shop during the sixteen hours which they had passed there.

At a given moment, every barricade inevitably becomes the raft of La Méduse.

They were obliged to resign themselves to hunger. They had then reached the first hours of that Spartan day of the 6th of June when, in the barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by the insurgents who demanded bread, replied to all combatants crying: “Something to eat!”

“I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished,” said Courfeyrac to Feuilly. “That torch flickering in the wind annoyed me. It had the appearance of being afraid.

The light of torches resembles the wisdom of cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles.

”

“I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished,” said Courfeyrac to Feuilly. “That torch flickering in the wind annoyed me. It had the appearance of being afraid. The light of torches resembles the wisdom of cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles.”

Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to talk.

Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy from it.

“What is the cat?” he exclaimed. “It is a corrective. The good God, having made the mouse, said: ‘Hullo! I have committed a blunder.’ And so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse.

The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected.

”

Ah! you want to get yourselves killed, so do I—I, who am speaking to you; but I do not want to feel the phantoms of women wreathing their arms around me.

Die, if you will, but don’t make others die.

Suicides like that which is on the brink of accomplishment here are sublime; but suicide is narrow, and does not admit of extension; and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide is murder. Think of the little blond heads; think of the white locks.

Ah! you want to get yourselves killed, so do I—I, who am speaking to you; but I do not want to feel the phantoms of women wreathing their arms around me. Die, if you will, but don’t make others die.

Suicides like that which is on the brink of accomplishment here are sublime; but suicide is narrow, and does not admit of extension; and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide is murder.

Think of the little blond heads; think of the white locks.

A physiologist might have studied in him the growing symptoms of that febrile absorption known to, and classified by, science, and which is to suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure.

Despair, also, has its ecstasy.

Marius had reached this point. He looked on at everything as from without; as we have said, things which passed before him seemed far away; he made out the whole, but did not perceive the details.

“Who is this man?” demanded Bossuet.

“He is a man who saves others,” replied Combeferre.

Marius added in a grave voice:

The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction! light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns.

Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy.

Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as today, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a …

harmony will be reestablished between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light. Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future.

A revolution is a toll.

Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up, consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice?

this barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes.

Here misery meets the ideal.

The day embraces the night, and says to it: ‘I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.’ From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality.

‘I am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.’ From the embrace of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are about to join and constitute our death.

Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.

”

his lips continued to move silently, as though he were talking to himself, which caused them all to gaze attentively at him, in the endeavor to hear more. There was no applause; but they whispered together for a long time.

Speech being a breath, the rustling of intelligences resembles the rustling of leaves.

The Rue Saint-Denis was as dumb as the avenue of Sphinxes at Thebes. Not a living being in the crossroads, which gleamed white in the light of the sun.

Nothing is so mournful as this light in deserted streets.

Nothing was to be seen, but there was something to be heard. A mysterious movement was going on at a certain distance. It was evident that the critical moment was approaching. As on the previous evening, the sentinels had come in;

it is true that they were fatally hemmed in there. It had three fronts, but no exit.—

“A fortress but a rat hole too,” said Courfeyrac with a laugh.

Enjolras had about thirty paving-stones “torn up in excess,” said Bossuet, piled up near the door of the wine-shop.

there is no more pulling from one another; there are no more coteries; no more asides, there is no more holding aloof; everything in their spirits converges in, and changes into, a waiting for the assailants.

A barricade before the arrival of danger is chaos; in danger, it is discipline itself.

Peril produces order.

there are no more coteries; no more asides, there is no more holding aloof; everything in their spirits converges in, and changes into, a waiting for the assailants. A barricade before the arrival of danger is chaos; in danger, it is discipline itself.

Peril produces order.

As soon as Enjolras had seized his double-barrelled rifle, and had placed himself in a sort of embrasure which he had reserved for himself, all the rest held their peace. A series of faint, sharp noises resounded confusedly along the wall of paving-stones.

small charges for that sort of engine are imposed by the ballistic necessities, such, for instance, as the preservation of the gun-carriage. In short, that despot, the cannon, cannot do all that it desires; force is a great weakness.

A cannonball only travels six hundred leagues an hour; light travels seventy thousand leagues a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.

”

He came from the direction of the Rue du Cygne, and he had nimbly climbed over the auxiliary barricade which fronted on the labyrinth of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.

Gavroche produced a greater sensation in the barricade than the cannonball.

The ball buried itself in the mass of rubbish. At the most there was an omnibus wheel broken, and the old Anceau cart was demolished. On seeing this, the barricade burst into a laugh.

This information given, Gavroche added:

“I authorize you to hit ’em a tremendous whack.”

Meanwhile, Enjolras was straining his ears and watching at his embrasure.

Marius absent three days, this was horrible on the part of the good God. Now, this cruel teasing from on high had been gone through with. Marius was about to arrive, and he would bring good news.

Youth is made thus; it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow useless and does not accept it.

Youth is the smile of the future in the presence of an unknown quantity, which is itself. It is natural to it to be happy. It seems as though its respiration were made of hope.

Now, this cruel teasing from on high had been gone through with. Marius was about to arrive, and he would bring good news. Youth is made thus; it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow useless and does not accept it.

Youth is the smile of the future in the presence of an unknown quantity, which is itself.

It is natural to it to be happy. It seems as though its respiration were made of hope.

It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is whiteness in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily, which must not be gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not gazed upon it.

Woman in the bud is sacred.

That innocent bud which opens, that adorable half-nudity which is afraid of itself, that white foot which takes refuge in a slipper, that throat which veils itself before a mirror as though a mirror were an eye, that chemise which makes haste to rise up …

The young girl is only the flash of a dream, and is not yet a statue. Her bedchamber is hidden in the sombre part of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of a glance brutalizes this vague penumbra.

Here, contemplation is profanation.

We shall, therefore, show nothing of that sweet little flutter of Cosette’s rising.

“He did not answer my question.”

“He is a man who does good by gunshots,” said Combeferre.

Those who have preserved some memory of this already distant epoch know that the National Guard from the suburbs was valiant against insurrections. It was particularly zealous and intrepid in the days of June, 1832.

In that bourgeois and heroic time, in the presence of ideas which had their knights, interests had their paladins. The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing from the bravery of the movement. The diminution of a pile of crowns made bankers sing the Marseillaise.

They shed their blood lyrically for the countinghouse; and they defended the shop, that immense diminutive of the fatherland, with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm.

At bottom, we will observe, there was nothing in all this that was not extremely serious. It was social elements entering into strife, while awaiting the day when they should enter into equilibrium.

Enjolras spoke like the real general of insurrection which he was.

Insurrection and repression do not fight with equal weapons.

Insurrection, which is speedily exhausted, has only a certain number of shots to fire and a certain number of combatants to expend. An empty cartridge-box, a man killed, cannot be replaced.

“You are wearing out your lungs, poor, brutal, old fellow, you pain me, you are wasting your row.

That’s not thunder, it’s a cough.

”

That is one way of taking our revenge for the capers that mesdames our grisettes play on us. Roland gets himself killed for Angélique; all our heroism comes from our women.

A man without a woman is a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman that sets the man off.

Well, Enjolras has no woman. He is not in love, and yet he manages to be intrepid. It is a thing unheard of that a man should be as cold as ice and as bold as fire.”

“Don’t you see the grapeshot?”

“Well, it is raining. What then?”

And with a single bound he plunged into the street.

At the moment when Gavroche was relieving a sergeant, who was lying near a stone doorpost, of his cartridges, a bullet struck the body.

“Fichtre!” ejaculated Gavroche. “They are killing my dead men for me.”

A second bullet struck a spark from the pavement beside him.—A third overturned his basket.

It was a charming and terrible sight. Gavroche, though shot at, was teasing the fusillade. He had the air of being greatly diverted.

It was the sparrow pecking at the sportsmen.

To each discharge he retorted with a couplet. They aimed at him constantly, and always missed him. The National Guardsmen and the soldiers laughed as they took aim at him.

The barricade trembled; he sang. He was not a child, he was not a man; he was a strange gamin-fairy. He might have been called the invulnerable dwarf of the fray. The bullets flew after him, he was more nimble than they.

He played a fearful game of hide and seek with death; every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached, the urchin administered to it a fillip.

One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest, finally struck the will-o’-the-wisp of a child. Gavroche was seen to stagger, then he sank to the earth. The whole barricade gave vent to a cry;

The fact is, they were stray lambs and they seemed free.

To be astray and to seem free is to be lost.

These poor little creatures were, in fact, lost.

It had rained the night before, and even a little in the morning. But in June, showers do not count for much. An hour after a storm, it can hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day has wept.

The earth, in summer, is as quickly dried as the cheek of a child.

At that period of the solstice, the light of full noonday is, so to speak, poignant. It takes everything. It applies itself to the earth, and superposes itself with a sort of suction. One would say that the sun was thirsty.

it is warm freshness. The gardens and meadows, having water at their roots, and sun in their flowers, become perfuming-pans of incense, and smoke with all their odors at once. Everything smiles, sings and offers itself. One feels gently intoxicated.

The springtime is a provisional paradise, the sun helps man to have patience.

There are beings who demand nothing further; mortals, who, having the azure of heaven, say: “It is enough!”

I know nothing about that, but just look at this wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells of the pine presents under the microscope! Compare the most beautiful Mechlin lace to that if you can!

These thinkers forget to love.

The zodiac thrives with them to such a point that it prevents their seeing the weeping child. God eclipses their souls. This is a family of minds which are, at once, great and petty. Horace was one of them; so was Goethe. La Fontaine perhaps;

These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so.

He who does not weep does not see.

They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.

That may be; but in this superiority there is some infirmity. One may be immortal and yet limp: witness Vulcan. One may be more than man and less than man. There is incomplete immensity in nature.

Who knows whether the sun is not a blind man?

But then, what? In whom can we trust? Solem quis dicere falsum audeat? Who shall dare to say that the sun is false? Thus certain geniuses, themselves, certain Very-Lofty mortals, man-stars, may be mistaken?

and, behind this splendor as behind a curtain of flame, one caught a glimpse of

God, that millionaire of stars.

Thanks to the sand, there was not a speck of mud; thanks to the rain, there was not a grain of ashes. The clumps of blossoms had just been bathed;

The child hesitated.

A person may not want any more of his cake; but that is no reason for giving it away.

“Be humane. You must have compassion on animals.”

This deliberation permitted Enjolras to take a review of everything and to perfect everything.

He felt that, since such men were to die, their death ought to be a masterpiece.

He said to Marius: “We are the two leaders. I will give the last orders inside. Do you remain outside and observe.”

… admitted, when the masses disowned the movement, all was over with the combatants, the city was changed into a desert around the revolt, souls grew chilled, refuges were nailed up, and the street turned into a defile to help the army to take the barricade.

A people cannot be forced, through surprise, to walk more quickly than it chooses.

Woe to whomsoever tries to force its hand! A people does not let itself go at random. Then it abandons the insurrection to itself. The insurgents become noxious, infected with the plague.

it suppresses living beings and flings them into unknown darkness. It makes use of death, a serious matter. It seems as though Utopia had no longer any faith in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible force. It strikes with the sword. Now, no sword is simple.

Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.

Having made this reservation, and made it with all severity, it is impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not, those the glorious combatants of the future, the confessors of Utopia. Even when they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration;

Even when they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in failure, that they possess the most majesty.

Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime.

For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.

and it is, perhaps, in failure, that they possess the most majesty. Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime.

For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.

It certainly is necessary that someone should take the part of the vanquished.

People shout to them: “You are tearing up the pavements of hell!”

They might reply: “That is because our barricade is made of good intentions.”

The best thing, assuredly, is the pacific solution. In short, let us agree that when we behold the pavement, we think of the bear, and it is a good will which renders society uneasy.

Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not very friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way.

Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart.

The grandeur and beauty of France lies in this, that she takes less from the stomach than other nations: she more easily knots the rope about her loins. She is the first awake, the last asleep. She marches forwards. She is a seeker.

The grandeur and beauty of France lies in this, that she takes less from the stomach than other nations: she more easily knots the rope about her loins.

She is the first awake, the last asleep.

She marches forwards. She is a seeker.

It is an admirable thing that the poetry of a people is the element of its progress.

The amount of civilization is measured by the quantity of imagination.

Only, a civilizing people should remain a manly people. Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no. Whoever becomes effeminate makes himself a bastard. He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso: but he must be artistic.

To this there is nothing to say.

Peoples, like planets, possess the right to an eclipse.

And all is well, provided that the light returns and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is identical with the persistence of the “I.”

… a whole and in detail, whatever may be its intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.

Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.

there is no man more terrible in action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive. In battle he was as in a dream. One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in firing a gun.

The insurgents’ cartridges were giving out; but not their sarcasms.

In this whirlwind of the sepulchre in which they stood, they laughed.

“

There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the stars, from a great distance.

”

A hand projected from beneath the winding sheet and hung near the floor. It was that of the old man.

Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as he had kissed his brow on the preceding evening.

These were the only two kisses which he had bestowed in the course of his life.

Let us abridge the tale. The barricade had fought like a gate of Thebes; the wine-shop fought like a house of Saragossa. These resistances are dogged. No quarter. No flag of truce possible.

Men are willing to die, provided their opponent will kill them.

When Suchet says:—“Capitulate,”—Palafox replies: “After the war with cannon, the war with knives.” Nothing was lacking in the capture by assault of the Hucheloup wine-shop;

Words are lacking to express horror when it has reached this pitch. There were no longer men in this conflict, which was now infernal. They were no longer giants matched with colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer. Demons attacked, spectres resisted.

It was heroism become monstrous.

It was of him, possibly, that a witness spoke afterwards, before the council of war: “There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo.”

A National Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras, lowered his gun, saying: “It seems to me that I am about to shoot a flower.”

Twelve men formed into a squad in the corner opposite Enjolras, and silently made ready their guns.

He seemed to be waiting there for a bullet which should spare him the trouble of waking. Many corpses were strewn around him; and, at the first glance, there was nothing to distinguish him from those profound sleepers of death.

Noise does not rouse a drunken man; silence awakens him.

The fall of everything around him only augmented Grantaire’s prostration; the crumbling of all things was his lullaby. The sort of halt which the tumult underwent in the presence of Enjolras was a shock to this heavy slumber.

It had the effect of a carriage going at full speed, which suddenly comes to a dead stop. The persons dozing within it wake up. Grantaire rose to his feet with a start, stretched out his arms, rubbed his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood.

A fit of drunkenness reaching its end resembles a curtain which is torn away.

One beholds, at a single glance and as a whole, all that it has concealed. All suddenly presents itself to the memory;

In the intervals, he reappeared on the barricade. But nothing which could resemble a blow, an attack or even personal defence proceeded from his hands. He held his peace and lent succor. Moreover, he had received only a few scratches.

The bullets would have none of him.

If suicide formed part of what he had meditated on coming to this sepulchre, to that spot, he had not succeeded. But we doubt whether he had thought of suicide, an irreligious act.

Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water.

And this without metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day and night. With what object? With no object. With what intention? With no intention. Why? For no reason. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What is its intestine? The sewer.

… impulse and of effort, that centre and that dwelling of minds, that nation-city, that hive of the future, that marvellous combination of Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug his shoulders, from the point of view which we have just indicated.

Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourselves.

Moreover, and particularly in this immemorial and senseless waste, Paris is itself an imitator.

The sewer of Rome has engulfed the world. This cesspool offered its engulfment to the city and the universe. Urbi et orbi.

Eternal city, unfathomable sewer.

Rome sets the example for these things as well as for others.

It was from the sewer of Münster that John of Leyden produced his false moon, and it was from the cesspool of Kekscheb that oriental menalchme, Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan, caused his false sun to emerge.

The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers.

The Germoniae narrated Rome. The sewer of Paris has been an ancient and formidable thing. It has been a sepulchre, it has served as an asylum.

The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all exhaustions and of all attempts. Political economy therein spies a detritus, social philosophy there beholds a residuum.

The sewer is the conscience of the city.

Everything there converges and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at least, its definitive form.

it is more than fraternization, it is equivalent to addressing each other as “thou.” All which was formerly rouged, is washed free. The last veil is torn away.

A sewer is a cynic. It tells everything.

The sincerity of foulness pleases us, and rests the soul.

The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at least, its definitive form.

The mass of filth has this in its favor, that it is not a liar.

Ingenuousness has taken refuge there. The mask of Basil is to be found there, but one beholds its cardboard and its strings and the inside as well as the outside, and it is accentuated by honest mud. Scapin’s false nose is its next-door neighbor.

it is more than fraternization, it is equivalent to addressing each other as “thou.” All which was formerly rouged, is washed free. The last veil is torn away. A sewer is a cynic. It tells everything.

The sincerity of foulness pleases us, and rests the soul.

When one has passed one’s time in enduring upon earth the spectacle of the great airs which reasons of state, the oath, political sagacity, human justice, professional probity, the austerities of situation, incorruptible robes all assume, it solaces one to enter a sewer and to …

The sewer, for example, was refractory to every itinerary. One could no more find one’s bearings in the sewer than one could understand one’s position in the city; above the unintelligible, below the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues there reigned the confusion of caverns;

Daedalus backed up Babel.

Sometimes the Paris sewer took a notion to overflow, as though this misunderstood Nile were suddenly seized with a fit of rage. There occurred, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer.

To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of discovery in that abyss—who would have dared? It was alarming. Nevertheless, someone did present himself.

The cesspool had its Christopher Columbus.

One day, in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which the Emperor made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, some Decrès or Crétet or other, came to the master’s intimate levee.

The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied. Perils of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them, perchance. After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer.

Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle of hell into another.

When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt. A problem presented itself. The passage terminated in another gut which he encountered across his path. There two ways presented themselves. Which should he take?

… this opaque gloom, or whether his eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision returned to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea, now of the wall which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing.

The pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends by finding God there.

It was not easy to direct his course.

but of all this he knew nothing.

He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, knowing nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in providence.

By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit. He walked in an enigma. This aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion.

should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two skeletons in a nook of that night? He did not know. He put all these questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris form a precipice.

Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.

All at once, he had a surprise. At the most unforeseen moment, and without having ceased to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he was no longer ascending;

Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just passed through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing the dense obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had the air of surveying him.

It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.

In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about in a confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.

Probably to succeed in clothing the first more warmly.

When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order to make of him a man who is also clothed by the state.

Only, the whole question lies in the color. To be dressed in blue is glorious; to be dressed in red is disagreeable.

When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order to make of him a man who is also clothed by the state. Only, the whole question lies in the color.

To be dressed in blue is glorious; to be dressed in red is disagreeable.

There is a purple from below.

Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter is swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that strand. It is shipwreck elsewhere than in the water.

It is the earth drowning a man.

The earth, permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents itself in the guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is subject to these treacheries.

in the flames as in the foam, a superb attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as one perishes. But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme floating visions are abject.

Mud is synonymous with shame.

It is petty, ugly, infamous. To die in a butt of Malvoisie, like Clarence, is permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger, like Escoubleau, is horrible. To struggle therein is hideous;

There are shadows enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a spectre or a frog.

Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed.

The depth of the fontis varied, as well as their length and their density, according to the more or less bad quality of the subsoil. Sometimes a fontis was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or ten; sometimes the bottom was unfathomable.

Madame de Sourdis, when informed of his death, demanded her smelling-bottle, and forgot to weep, through sniffling at her salts. In such cases, there is no love which holds fast; the sewer extinguishes it.

Hero refuses to wash the body of Leander. Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of Pyramus and says: “Phew!”

He still held Marius on high, and with an unheard-of expenditure of force, he advanced still; but he was sinking. He had only his head above the water now and his two arms holding up Marius.

In the old paintings of the deluge there is a mother holding her child thus.

He sank still deeper, he turned his face to the rear, to escape the water, and in order that he might be able to breathe;

He straightened himself up, and rooted himself upon that point of support with a sort of fury.

This produced upon him the effect of the first step in a staircase leading back to life.

The point of support, thus encountered in the mire at the supreme moment, was the beginning of the other watershed of the pavement, which had bent but had not given way, and which had curved under the water like a plank and in a single …

Some person in that gloom?

Nothing so closely resembles a dream as despair.

Jean Valjean thought that he was dreaming. He had heard no footsteps. Was it possible? He raised his eyes.

Jean Valjean “remained stupid”—the expression belongs to the elder Corneille—to such a degree that he doubted whether what he beheld was real.

It was Providence appearing in horrible guise, and his good angel springing from the earth in the form of Thénardier.

Thénardier thrust his fist into a large pocket concealed under his blouse, drew out a rope and offered it to Jean Valjean.

The police are full of cleverness. The sewer is treacherous and tells tales of you. Such a find is a rarity, it attracts attention, very few people make use of the sewers for their affairs, while the river belongs to everybody.

The river is the true grave.

At the end of a month they fish up your man in the nets at Saint-Cloud. Well, what does one care for that? It’s carrion! Who killed that man? Paris. And justice makes no inquiries. You have done well.”

The river is the true grave. At the end of a month they fish up your man in the nets at Saint-Cloud. Well, what does one care for that? It’s carrion!

Who killed that man? Paris. And justice makes no inquiries.

You have done well.”

“That’s true,” said he, “both of you together have no more than that.”

And, forgetting his motto: “half shares,” he took all.

He hesitated a little over the large sous. After due reflection, he took them also, muttering:

With the aid of the darkness, it seemed a sort of apparition.

An ordinary man would have been alarmed because of the twilight, a thoughtful man on account of the bludgeon.

Jean Valjean recognized Javert.

Their faces almost touched. Javert’s look was terrible.

Jean Valjean remained inert beneath Javert’s grasp, like a lion submitting to the claws of a lynx.

“Inspector Javert,” said he, “you have me in your power. Moreover, I have regarded myself as your prisoner ever since this morning. I did not give you my address with any intention of escaping from you. Take me. Only grant me one favor.”

A glacial silence reigned in the carriage. Marius, motionless, with his body resting in the corner, and his head drooping on his breast, his arms hanging, his legs stiff, seemed to be awaiting only a coffin;

Jean Valjean seemed made of shadow, and Javert of stone, and in that vehicle full of night, whose interior, every time that it passed in front of a street lantern, appeared to be turned lividly wan, as by an intermittent flash of lightning, chance had united and seemed to be bringing face to face the three forms of tragic immobility, the corpse, the spectre, and the statue.

At every jolt over the pavement, a drop of blood trickled from Marius’ hair.

Night had fully closed in when the carriage arrived at No. 6, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.

On arriving at the first floor, he paused.

All sorrowful roads have their stations.

The window on the landing-place, which was a sash-window, was open. As in many ancient houses, the staircase got its light from without and had a view on the street.

In the morning, when he entered my room, I grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all the same.

One cannot defend oneself against those brats. They take hold of you, they hold you fast, they never let you go again.

The truth is, that there never was a cupid like that child. Now, what can you say for your Lafayettes, your Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de Corcelles who have killed him? This cannot be allowed to pass in this fashion.”

“Ah! heartless lad! Ah! clubbist! Ah! wretch! Ah! Septembrist!”

Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed to a corpse.

Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal eruptions should come to the light, the sequence of words returned, but the grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength to utter them, his voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed to …

He found that he was a coward. He conceived a horror of himself.

Javert’s ideal, was not to be human, to be grand, to be sublime; it was to be irreproachable.

Now, he had just failed in this.

… fact that the subordinate is bound always to bow, that he must not disobey, nor find fault, nor discuss, and that, in the presence of a superior who amazes him too greatly, the inferior has no other resource than that of handing in his resignation.

But how was he to set about handing in his resignation to God?

However things might stand—and it was to this point that he reverted constantly—one fact dominated everything else for him, and that was, that he had just committed a terrible infraction of the law.

A terrible situation! to be touched.

To be granite and to doubt! to be the statue of Chastisement cast in one piece in the mould of the law, and suddenly to become aware of the fact that one cherishes beneath one’s breast of bronze something absurd and disobedient which almost resembles a heart!

To come to the pass of returning good for good, although one has said to oneself up to that day that that good is evil! to be the watchdog, and to lick the intruder’s hand! to be ice and melt!

This glade was the one which was formerly called the Blaru-bottom. The heap of stones, destined for no one knows what employment, which was visible there thirty years ago, is doubtless still there.

Nothing equals a heap of stones in longevity, unless it is a board fence.

They are temporary expedients. What a reason for lasting!

He was content, joyous, delighted, charming, young. His white locks added a gentle majesty to the gay radiance of his visage. When grace is mingled with wrinkles, it is adorable.

There is an indescribable aurora in beaming old age.

As for Marius, as he allowed them to dress his wounds and care for him, he had but one fixed idea: Cosette.

Do you still love me? We live in the Rue de l’Homme Armé. There is no garden. I made lint all the time; stay, sir, look, it is your fault, I have a callous on my fingers.”

“Angel” is the only word in the language which cannot be worn out.

No other word could resist the merciless use which lovers make of it.

She will only be a Baroness, which is a come down for her; she was born a Marquise. What eyelashes she has! Get it well fixed in your noddles, my children, that you are in the true road. Love each other. Be foolish about it.

Love is the folly of men and the wit of God.

Adore each other. Only,” he added, suddenly becoming gloomy, “what a misfortune! It has just occurred to me! More than half of what I possess is swallowed up in an annuity;

Fetch me Phyllis crowned with cornflowers, and add a hundred thousand francs income. Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you can see, beneath a marble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also to the fairy spectacle of marble and gold.

Dry happiness resembles dry bread. One eats, but one does not dine.

I want the superfluous, the useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose.

Where were they all then? was it really true that all were dead? A fall into the shadows had carried off all except himself. It all seemed to him to have disappeared as though behind the curtain of a theatre.

There are curtains like this which drop in life. God passes on to the following act.

And he himself—was he actually the same man? He, the poor man, was rich; he, the abandoned, had a family; he, the despairing, was to marry Cosette.

It must not be supposed that he was delivered from all those obsessions of the memory which force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to glance sadly behind us.

The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have vanished contains neither thought nor love.

At times, Marius clasped his face between his hands, and the vague and tumultuous past traversed the twilight which reigned in his brain. Again he beheld Mabeuf fall, he heard Gavroche singing amid the grapeshot, he felt beneath his lips the cold brow of Éponine;

However, the natures of both men were rigid, no question from Marius to M. Fauchelevent was possible. Such an idea had not even occurred to him. We have already indicated this characteristic detail.

Two men who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of tacit agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less rare than is commonly supposed.

Once only, did Marius make the attempt. He introduced into the conversation the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and, turning to M. Fauchelevent, he said to him:

Accordingly, the marriage took place on the 16th, notwithstanding the public merrymaking.

It rained that day, but there is always in the sky a tiny scrap of blue at the service of happiness, which lovers see, even when the rest of creation is under an umbrella.

On the preceding evening, Jean Valjean handed to Marius, in the presence of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.

Greece stood in need of the chariot of Thespis, France stands in need of the hackney-coach of Vadé.

Everything can be parodied, even parody.

The Saturnalia, that grimace of antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration, in Shrove Tuesday;

The laughter of all is the accomplice of universal degradation. Certain unhealthy festivals disaggregate the people and convert them into the populace. And populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons. The King has Roquelaure, the populace has the Merry-Andrew.

Paris is a great, mad city on every occasion that it is a great sublime city.

There the Carnival forms part of politics. Paris—let us confess it—willingly allows infamy to furnish it with comedy. She only demands of her masters—when she has masters—one thing: “Paint me the mud.” Rome was of the same mind. She loved Nero.

To realize one’s dream. To whom is this accorded? There must be elections for this in heaven; we are all candidates, unknown to ourselves; the angels vote.

Cosette and Marius had been elected.

and that their griefs were but so many handmaidens who were preparing the toilet of joy.

How good it is to have suffered! Their unhappiness formed a halo round their happiness.

The long agony of their love was terminating in an ascension.

A banquet had been spread in the dining-room.

Illumination as brilliant as the daylight is the necessary seasoning of a great joy.

Mist and obscurity are not accepted by the happy. They do not consent to be black. The night, yes; the shadows, no. If there is no sun, one must be made.

Fine stupidity, in sooth! Can people enchant each other too much, cajole each other too much, charm each other too much? Can one be too much alive, too happy? Moderate your joys. Ah, indeed! Down with the philosophers!

Wisdom consists in jubilation.

Make merry, let us make merry. Are we happy because we are good, or are we good because we are happy? Is the Sancy diamond called the Sancy because it belonged to Harley de Sancy, or because it weighs six hundred carats?

Don’t imagine that you have invented that. I, too, have had my dream, I, too, have meditated, I, too, have sighed; I, too, have had a moonlight soul. Love is a child six thousand years old.

Love has the right to a long white beard.

Methusalem is a street arab beside Cupid. For sixty centuries men and women have got out of their scrape by loving. The devil, who is cunning, took to hating man; man, who is still more cunning, took to loving woman.

If at that supreme hour, the wedded pair, dazzled with voluptuousness and believing themselves alone, were to listen, they would hear in their chamber a confused rustling of wings.

Perfect happiness implies a mutual understanding with the angels.

That dark little chamber has all heaven for its ceiling. When two mouths, rendered sacred by love, approach to create, it is impossible that there should not be, above that ineffable kiss, a quivering throughout the immense mystery of stars.

These felicities are the true ones. There is no joy outside of these joys.

Love is the only ecstasy. All the rest weeps.

To love, or to have loved—this suffices. Demand nothing more. There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is a fulfilment.

These felicities are the true ones. There is no joy outside of these joys. Love is the only ecstasy. All the rest weeps.

To love, or to have loved⁠—this suffices. Demand nothing more.

There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is a fulfilment.

The old and formidable struggle, of which we have already witnessed so many phases, began once more.

Jacob struggled with the angel but one night.

Alas! how many times have we beheld Jean Valjean seized bodily by his conscience, in the darkness, and struggling desperately against it!

Is not one pardonable, if one at last refuses! Can the inexhaustible have any right? Are not chains which are endless above human strength? Who would blame Sisyphus and Jean Valjean for saying: “It is enough!”

The obedience of matter is limited by friction; is there no limit to the obedience of the soul? If perpetual motion is impossible, can perpetual self-sacrifice be exacted?

The first step is nothing, it is the last which is difficult. What was the Champmathieu affair in comparison with Cosette’s marriage and of that which it entailed? What is a re-entrance into the galleys, compared to entrance into the void?

Marius looked at the man. He was melancholy yet tranquil. No lie could proceed from such a calm.

That which is icy is sincere.

The truth could be felt in that chill of the tomb.

Each one of us would have had his share of happiness. If I continued to be Monsieur Fauchelevent, that would arrange everything. Yes, with the exception of my soul. There was joy everywhere upon my surface, but the bottom of my soul remained black.

It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.

Thus I should have remained Monsieur Fauchelevent, thus I should have concealed my true visage, thus, in the presence of your expansion, I should have had an enigma, thus, in the midst of your full noonday, I should have had shadows, thus, without crying ‘ …

every day! to you, my dearly beloved, my children, to you, my innocent creatures! Is it nothing to hold one’s peace? is it a simple matter to keep silence? No, it is not simple.

There is a silence which lies.

And my lie, and my fraud and my indignity, and my cowardice and my treason and my crime, I should have drained drop by drop, I should have spit it out, then swallowed it again, I should have finished at midnight and have begun again …

Why should I do it? in order to be happy. In order to be happy. Have I the right to be happy?

I stand outside of life, sir.

”