Les Misérables
This latter can say, like Julia Alpinula: _“Hic jaceo. Vixi annos
viginti et tres.” _ It is in consequence of this decay that the convent
gave up the education of girls.
We have not felt able to pass before this extraordinary house without
entering it, and without introducing the minds which accompany us, and
which are listening to our tale, to the profit of some, perchance, of
the melancholy history of Jean Valjean. We have penetrated into this
community, full of those old practices which seem so novel to-day. It
is the closed garden, _hortus conclusus_. We have spoken of this
singular place in detail, but with respect, in so far, at least, as
detail and respect are compatible. We do not understand all, but we
insult nothing. We are equally far removed from the hosanna of Joseph
de Maistre, who wound up by anointing the executioner, and from the
sneer of Voltaire, who even goes so far as to ridicule the cross.
An illogical act on Voltaire’s part, we may remark, by the way; for
Voltaire would have defended Jesus as he defended Calas; and even for
those who deny superhuman incarnations, what does the crucifix
represent? The assassinated sage.
In this nineteenth century, the religious idea is undergoing a crisis.
People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that,
while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human
heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but
on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.
In the meantime, let us study things which are no more. It is necessary
to know them, if only for the purpose of avoiding them. The
counterfeits of the past assume false names, and gladly call themselves
the future. This spectre, this past, is given to falsifying its own
passport. Let us inform ourselves of the trap. Let us be on our guard.
The past has a visage, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy. Let us
denounce the visage and let us tear off the mask.
As for convents, they present a complex problem,—a question of
civilization, which condemns them; a question of liberty, which
protects them.
BOOK SEVENTH—PARENTHESIS
CHAPTER I—THE CONVENT AS AN ABSTRACT IDEA
This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite.
Man is the second.
Such being the case, and a convent having happened to be on our road,
it has been our duty to enter it. Why? Because the convent, which is
common to the Orient as well as to the Occident, to antiquity as well
as to modern times, to paganism, to Buddhism, to Mahometanism, as well
as to Christianity, is one of the optical apparatuses applied by man to
the Infinite.
This is not the place for enlarging disproportionately on certain
ideas; nevertheless, while absolutely maintaining our reserves, our
restrictions, and even our indignations, we must say that every time we
encounter man in the Infinite, either well or ill understood, we feel
ourselves overpowered with respect. There is, in the synagogue, in the
mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, a hideous side which we execrate,
and a sublime side, which we adore. What a contemplation for the mind,
and what endless food for thought, is the reverberation of God upon the
human wall!
CHAPTER II—THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT
From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticism
is condemned. Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs in
its circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness where
centres of labor should exist. Monastic communities are to the great
social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to
the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean the
impoverishment of the country. The monastic regime, good at the
beginning of civilization, useful in the reduction of the brutal by the
spiritual, is bad when peoples have reached their manhood. Moreover,
when it becomes relaxed, and when it enters into its period of
disorder, it becomes bad for the very reasons which rendered it
salutary in its period of purity, because it still continues to set the
example.
Claustration has had its day. Cloisters, useful in the early education
of modern civilization, have embarrassed its growth, and are injurious
to its development. So far as institution and formation with relation
to man are concerned, monasteries, which were good in the tenth
century, questionable in the fifteenth, are detestable in the
nineteenth. The leprosy of monasticism has gnawed nearly to a skeleton
two wonderful nations, Italy and Spain; the one the light, the other
the splendor of Europe for centuries; and, at the present day, these
two illustrious peoples are but just beginning to convalesce, thanks to
the healthy and vigorous hygiene of 1789 alone.
The convent—the ancient female convent in particular, such as it still
presents itself on the threshold of this century, in Italy, in Austria,
in Spain—is one of the most sombre concretions of the Middle Ages. The
cloister, that cloister, is the point of intersection of horrors. The
Catholic cloister, properly speaking, is wholly filled with the black
radiance of death.
The Spanish convent is the most funereal of all. There rise, in
obscurity, beneath vaults filled with gloom, beneath domes vague with
shadow, massive altars of Babel, as high as cathedrals; there immense
white crucifixes hang from chains in the dark; there are extended, all
nude on the ebony, great Christs of ivory; more than bleeding,—bloody;
hideous and magnificent, with their elbows displaying the bones, their
knee-pans showing their integuments, their wounds showing their flesh,
crowned with silver thorns, nailed with nails of gold, with blood drops
of rubies on their brows, and diamond tears in their eyes. The diamonds
and rubies seem wet, and make veiled beings in the shadow below weep,
their sides bruised with the hair shirt and their iron-tipped scourges,
their breasts crushed with wicker hurdles, their knees excoriated with
prayer; women who think themselves wives, spectres who think themselves
seraphim. Do these women think? No. Have they any will? No. Do they
love? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have turned to bone; their
bones have turned to stone. Their veil is of woven night. Their breath
under their veil resembles the indescribably tragic respiration of
death. The abbess, a spectre, sanctifies them and terrifies them. The
immaculate one is there, and very fierce. Such are the ancient
monasteries of Spain. Liars of terrible devotion, caverns of virgins,
ferocious places.
Catholic Spain is more Roman than Rome herself. The Spanish convent
was, above all others, the Catholic convent. There was a flavor of the
Orient about it. The archbishop, the kislar-aga of heaven, locked up
and kept watch over this seraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun
was the odalisque, the priest was the eunuch. The fervent were chosen
in dreams and possessed Christ. At night, the beautiful, nude young man
descended from the cross and became the ecstasy of the cloistered one.
Lofty walls guarded the mystic sultana, who had the crucified for her
sultan, from all living distraction. A glance on the outer world was
infidelity. The _in pace_ replaced the leather sack. That which was
cast into the sea in the East was thrown into the ground in the West.
In both quarters, women wrung their hands; the waves for the first, the
grave for the last; here the drowned, there the buried. Monstrous
parallel.
To-day the upholders of the past, unable to deny these things, have
adopted the expedient of smiling at them. There has come into fashion a
strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, of
invalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all
embarrassing facts and all gloomy questions. _A matter for
declamations_, say the clever. Declamations, repeat the foolish.
Jean-Jacques a declaimer; Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas,
Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers. I know not who has recently discovered
that Tacitus was a declaimer, that Nero was a victim, and that pity is
decidedly due to “that poor Holofernes.”
Facts, however, are awkward things to disconcert, and they are
obstinate. The author of this book has seen, with his own eyes, eight
leagues distant from Brussels,—there are relics of the Middle Ages
there which are attainable for everybody,—at the Abbey of Villers, the
hole of the oubliettes, in the middle of the field which was formerly
the courtyard of the cloister, and on the banks of the Thil, four stone
dungeons, half under ground, half under the water. They were _in pace_.
Each of these dungeons has the remains of an iron door, a vault, and a
grated opening which, on the outside, is two feet above the level of
the river, and on the inside, six feet above the level of the ground.
Four feet of river flow past along the outside wall. The ground is
always soaked. The occupant of the _in pace_ had this wet soil for his
bed. In one of these dungeons, there is a fragment of an iron necklet
riveted to the wall; in another, there can be seen a square box made of
four slabs of granite, too short for a person to lie down in, too low
for him to stand upright in. A human being was put inside, with a
coverlid of stone on top. This exists. It can be seen. It can be
touched. These _in pace_, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these
necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river’s current,
that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this
difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which
is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls,—what declaimers!
CHAPTER III—ON WHAT CONDITIONS ONE CAN RESPECT THE PAST
Monasticism, such as it existed in Spain, and such as it still exists
in Thibet, is a sort of phthisis for civilization. It stops life short.
It simply depopulates. Claustration, castration. It has been the
scourge of Europe. Add to this the violence so often done to the
conscience, the forced vocations, feudalism bolstered up by the
cloister, the right of the first-born pouring the excess of the family
into monasticism, the ferocities of which we have just spoken, the _in
pace_, the closed mouths, the walled-up brains, so many unfortunate
minds placed in the dungeon of eternal vows, the taking of the habit,
the interment of living souls. Add individual tortures to national
degradations, and, whoever you may be, you will shudder before the
frock and the veil,—those two winding-sheets of human devising.
Nevertheless, at certain points and in certain places, in spite of
philosophy, in spite of progress, the spirit of the cloister persists
in the midst of the nineteenth century, and a singular ascetic
recrudescence is, at this moment, astonishing the civilized world. The
obstinacy of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves
resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume which should claim our
hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which should persist in being
eaten, the persecution of the child’s garment which should insist on
clothing the man, the tenderness of corpses which should return to
embrace the living.
“Ingrates!” says the garment, “I protected you in inclement weather.
Why will you have nothing to do with me?” “I have just come from the
deep sea,” says the fish. “I have been a rose,” says the perfume. “I
have loved you,” says the corpse. “I have civilized you,” says the
convent.
To this there is but one reply: “In former days.”
To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things, and of the
government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition,
to regild shrines, to patch up cloisters, to rebless reliquaries, to
refurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handles