Les Misérables
blossoming out of truths. Contemplation leads to action. The absolute
should be practicable. It is necessary that the ideal should be
breathable, drinkable, and eatable to the human mind. It is the ideal
which has the right to say: _Take, this is my body, this is my blood_.
Wisdom is holy communion. It is on this condition that it ceases to be
a sterile love of science and becomes the one and sovereign mode of
human rallying, and that philosophy herself is promoted to religion.
Philosophy should not be a corbel erected on mystery to gaze upon it at
its ease, without any other result than that of being convenient to
curiosity.
For our part, adjourning the development of our thought to another
occasion, we will confine ourselves to saying that we neither
understand man as a point of departure nor progress as an end, without
those two forces which are their two motors: faith and love.
Progress is the goal, the ideal is the type.
What is this ideal? It is God.
Ideal, absolute, perfection, infinity: identical words.
CHAPTER VII—PRECAUTIONS TO BE OBSERVED IN BLAME
History and philosophy have eternal duties, which are, at the same
time, simple duties; to combat Caiphas the High-priest, Draco the
Lawgiver, Trimalcion the Legislator, Tiberius the Emperor; this is
clear, direct, and limpid, and offers no obscurity.
But the right to live apart, even with its inconveniences and its
abuses, insists on being stated and taken into account. Cenobitism is a
human problem.
When one speaks of convents, those abodes of error, but of innocence,
of aberration but of good-will, of ignorance but of devotion, of
torture but of martyrdom, it always becomes necessary to say either yes
or no.
A convent is a contradiction. Its object, salvation; its means thereto,
sacrifice. The convent is supreme egoism having for its result supreme
abnegation.
To abdicate with the object of reigning seems to be the device of
monasticism.
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.
The just man frowns, but never smiles with a malicious sneer. We
understand wrath, but not malice.
CHAPTER VIII—FAITH, LAW
A few words more.
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.
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.
Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.
In our opinion, cenobites are not lazy men, and recluses are not
idlers.
To meditate on the Shadow is a serious thing.
Without invalidating anything that we have just said, we believe that a
perpetual memory of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point,
the priest and the philosopher agree. _We must die_. The Abbé de la
Trappe replies to Horace.
To mingle with one’s life a certain presence of the sepulchre,—this is
the law of the sage; and it is the law of the ascetic. In this respect,
the ascetic and the sage converge. There is a material growth; we admit
it. There is a moral grandeur; we hold to that. Thoughtless and
vivacious spirits say:—
“What is the good of those motionless figures on the side of mystery?
What purpose do they serve? What do they do?”
Alas! In the presence of the darkness which environs us, and which
awaits us, in our ignorance of what the immense dispersion will make of
us, we reply: “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.
Leibnitz praying is grand, Voltaire adoring is fine. _Deo erexit
Voltaire_.
We are for religion as against religions.
We are of the number who believe in the wretchedness of orisons, and
the sublimity of prayer.
Moreover, at this minute which we are now traversing,—a minute which
will not, fortunately, leave its impress on the nineteenth century,—at
this hour, when so many men have low brows and souls but little
elevated, among so many mortals whose morality consists in enjoyment,
and who are busied with the brief and misshapen things of matter,
whoever exiles himself seems worthy of veneration to us.
The monastery is a renunciation. Sacrifice wrongly directed is still
sacrifice. To mistake a grave error for a duty has a grandeur of its
own.
Taken by itself, and ideally, and in order to examine the truth on all
sides until all aspects have been impartially exhausted, the monastery,
the female convent in particular,—for in our century it is woman who
suffers the most, and in this exile of the cloister there is something
of protestation,—the female convent has incontestably a certain
majesty.
This cloistered existence which is so austere, so depressing, a few of
whose features we have just traced, is not life, for it is not liberty;
it is not the tomb, for it is not plenitude; it is the strange place
whence one beholds, as from the crest of a lofty mountain, on one side
the abyss where we are, on the other, the abyss whither we shall go; it
is the narrow and misty frontier separating two worlds, illuminated and
obscured by both at the same time, where the ray of life which has
become enfeebled is mingled with the vague ray of death; it is the half
obscurity of the tomb.
We, who do not believe what these women believe, but who, like them,
live by faith,—we have never been able to think without a sort of
tender and religious terror, without a sort of pity, that is full of
envy, of those devoted, trembling and trusting creatures, of these
humble and august souls, who dare to dwell on the very brink of the
mystery, waiting between the world which is closed and heaven which is
not yet open, turned towards the light which one cannot see, possessing
the sole happiness of thinking that they know where it is, aspiring
towards the gulf, and the unknown, their eyes fixed motionless on the
darkness, kneeling, bewildered, stupefied, shuddering, half lifted, at
times, by the deep breaths of eternity.
BOOK EIGHTH—CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM
CHAPTER I—WHICH TREATS OF THE MANNER OF ENTERING A CONVENT
It was into this house that Jean Valjean had, as Fauchelevent expressed
it, “fallen from the sky.”
He had scaled the wall of the garden which formed the angle of the Rue
Polonceau. That hymn of the angels which he had heard in the middle of
the night, was the nuns chanting matins; that hall, of which he had
caught a glimpse in the gloom, was the chapel. That phantom which he
had seen stretched on the ground was the sister who was making
reparation; that bell, the sound of which had so strangely surprised
him, was the gardener’s bell attached to the knee of Father
Fauchelevent.
Cosette once put to bed, Jean Valjean and Fauchelevent had, as we have
already seen, supped on a glass of wine and a bit of cheese before a
good, crackling fire; then, the only bed in the hut being occupied by
Cosette, each threw himself on a truss of straw.
Before he shut his eyes, Jean Valjean said: “I must remain here
henceforth.” This remark trotted through Fauchelevent’s head all night
long.
To tell the truth, neither of them slept.
Jean Valjean, feeling that he was discovered and that Javert was on his
scent, understood that he and Cosette were lost if they returned to
Paris. Then the new storm which had just burst upon him had stranded
him in this cloister. Jean Valjean had, henceforth, but one thought,—to
remain there. Now, for an unfortunate man in his position, this convent
was both the safest and the most dangerous of places; the most
dangerous, because, as no men might enter there, if he were discovered,
it was a flagrant offence, and Jean Valjean would find but one step
intervening between the convent and prison; the safest, because, if he
could manage to get himself accepted there and remain there, who would
ever seek him in such a place? To dwell in an impossible place was
safety.
On his side, Fauchelevent was cudgelling his brains. He began by
declaring to himself that he understood nothing of the matter. How had
M. Madeleine got there, when the walls were what they were? Cloister
walls are not to be stepped over. How did he get there with a child?
One cannot scale a perpendicular wall with a child in one’s arms. Who
was that child? Where did they both come from? Since Fauchelevent had
lived in the convent, he had heard nothing of M. sur M., and he knew
nothing of what had taken place there. Father Madeleine had an air
which discouraged questions; and besides, Fauchelevent said to himself:
“One does not question a saint.” M. Madeleine had preserved all his
prestige in Fauchelevent’s eyes. Only, from some words which Jean
Valjean had let fall, the gardener thought he could draw the inference
that M. Madeleine had probably become bankrupt through the hard times,
and that he was pursued by his creditors; or that he had compromised
himself in some political affair, and was in hiding; which last did not
displease Fauchelevent, who, like many of our peasants of the North,
had an old fund of Bonapartism about him. While in hiding, M. Madeleine
had selected the convent as a refuge, and it was quite simple that he
should wish to remain there. But the inexplicable point, to which
Fauchelevent returned constantly and over which he wearied his brain,
was that M. Madeleine should be there, and that he should have that
little girl with him. Fauchelevent saw them, touched them, spoke to
them, and still did not believe it possible. The incomprehensible had
just made its entrance into Fauchelevent’s hut. Fauchelevent groped
about amid conjectures, and could see nothing clearly but this: “M.
Madeleine saved my life.” This certainty alone was sufficient and
decided his course. He said to himself: “It is my turn now.” He added
in his conscience: “M. Madeleine did not stop to deliberate when it was
a question of thrusting himself under the cart for the purpose of
dragging me out.” He made up his mind to save M. Madeleine.
Nevertheless, he put many questions to himself and made himself divers
replies: “After what he did for me, would I save him if he were a
thief? Just the same. If he were an assassin, would I save him? Just
the same. Since he is a saint, shall I save him? Just the same.”
But what a problem it was to manage to have him remain in the convent!
Fauchelevent did not recoil in the face of this almost chimerical
undertaking; this poor peasant of Picardy without any other ladder than
his self-devotion, his good will, and a little of that old rustic
cunning, on this occasion enlisted in the service of a generous
enterprise, undertook to scale the difficulties of the cloister, and
the steep escarpments of the rule of Saint-Benoît. Father Fauchelevent
was an old man who had been an egoist all his life, and who, towards
the end of his days, halt, infirm, with no interest left to him in the
world, found it sweet to be grateful, and perceiving a generous action