Les Misérables
assassinated. They were bandits, counterfeiters, poisoners,
incendiaries, murderers, parricides. What had these women done? They
had done nothing whatever.
On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, violence, sensuality,
homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every variety of crime; on the other,
one thing only, innocence.
Perfect innocence, almost caught up into heaven in a mysterious
assumption, attached to the earth by virtue, already possessing
something of heaven through holiness.
On the one hand, confidences over crimes, which are exchanged in
whispers; on the other, the confession of faults made aloud. And what
crimes! And what faults!
On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable perfume. On the one
hand, a moral pest, guarded from sight, penned up under the range of
cannon, and literally devouring its plague-stricken victims; on the
other, the chaste flame of all souls on the same hearth. There,
darkness; here, the shadow; but a shadow filled with gleams of light,
and of gleams full of radiance.
Two strongholds of slavery; but in the first, deliverance possible, a
legal limit always in sight, and then, escape. In the second,
perpetuity; the sole hope, at the distant extremity of the future, that
faint light of liberty which men call death.
In the first, men are bound only with chains; in the other, chained by
faith.
What flowed from the first? An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth,
hatred, desperate viciousness, a cry of rage against human society, a
sarcasm against heaven.
What results flowed from the second? Blessings and love.
And in these two places, so similar yet so unlike, these two species of
beings who were so very unlike, were undergoing the same work,
expiation.
Jean Valjean understood thoroughly the expiation of the former; that
personal expiation, the expiation for one’s self. But he did not
understand that of these last, that of creatures without reproach and
without stain, and he trembled as he asked himself: The expiation of
what? What expiation?
A voice within his conscience replied: “The most divine of human
generosities, the expiation for others.”
Here all personal theory is withheld; we are only the narrator; we
place ourselves at Jean Valjean’s point of view, and we translate his
impressions.
Before his eyes he had the sublime summit of abnegation, the highest
possible pitch of virtue; the innocence which pardons men their faults,
and which expiates in their stead; servitude submitted to, torture
accepted, punishment claimed by souls which have not sinned, for the
sake of sparing it to souls which have fallen; the love of humanity
swallowed up in the love of God, but even there preserving its distinct
and mediatorial character; sweet and feeble beings possessing the
misery of those who are punished and the smile of those who are
recompensed.
And he remembered that he had dared to murmur!
Often, in the middle of the night, he rose to listen to the grateful
song of those innocent creatures weighed down with severities, and the
blood ran cold in his veins at the thought that those who were justly
chastised raised their voices heavenward only in blasphemy, and that
he, wretch that he was, had shaken his fist at God.
There was one striking thing which caused him to meditate deeply, like
a warning whisper from Providence itself: the scaling of that wall, the
passing of those barriers, the adventure accepted even at the risk of
death, the painful and difficult ascent, all those efforts even, which
he had made to escape from that other place of expiation, he had made
in order to gain entrance into this one. Was this a symbol of his
destiny? This house was a prison likewise and bore a melancholy
resemblance to that other one whence he had fled, and yet he had never
conceived an idea of anything similar.
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.
These virgins were even more heavily burdened than the convicts. A
cold, harsh wind, that wind which had chilled his youth, traversed the
barred and padlocked grating of the vultures; a still harsher and more
biting breeze blew in the cage of these doves.
Why?
When he thought on these things, all that was within him was lost in
amazement before this mystery of sublimity.
In these meditations, his pride vanished. He scrutinized his own heart
in all manner of ways; he felt his pettiness, and many a time he wept.
All that had entered into his life for the last six months had led him
back towards the Bishop’s holy injunctions; Cosette through love, the
convent through humility.
Sometimes at eventide, in the twilight, at an hour when the garden was
deserted, he could be seen on his knees in the middle of the walk which
skirted the chapel, in front of the window through which he had gazed
on the night of his arrival, and turned towards the spot where, as he
knew, the sister was making reparation, prostrated in prayer. Thus he
prayed as he knelt before the sister.
It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God.
Everything that surrounded him, that peaceful garden, those fragrant
flowers, those children who uttered joyous cries, those grave and
simple women, that silent cloister, slowly permeated him, and little by
little, his soul became compounded of silence like the cloister, of
perfume like the flowers, of simplicity like the women, of joy like the
children. And then he reflected that these had been two houses of God
which had received him in succession at two critical moments in his
life: the first, when all doors were closed and when human society
rejected him; the second, at a moment when human society had again set
out in pursuit of him, and when the galleys were again yawning; and
that, had it not been for the first, he should have relapsed into
crime, and had it not been for the second, into torment.
His whole heart melted in gratitude, and he loved more and more.
Many years passed in this manner; Cosette was growing up.
[THE END OF VOLUME II “COSETTE”]
VOLUME III
MARIUS
BOOK FIRST—PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM
CHAPTER I—PARVULUS
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.
This little being is joyous. He has not food every day, and he goes to
the play every evening, if he sees good. He has no shirt on his body,
no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head; he is like the flies of
heaven, who have none of these things. He is from seven to thirteen
years of age, he lives in bands, roams the streets, lodges in the open
air, wears an old pair of trousers of his father’s, which descend below
his heels, an old hat of some other father, which descends below his
ears, a single suspender of yellow listing; 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.
If one were to ask that enormous city: “What is this?” she would reply:
“It is my little one.”
CHAPTER II—SOME OF HIS PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS
The gamin—the street Arab—of Paris is the dwarf of the giant.
Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes has a shirt,
but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes has shoes, but then
they have no soles; he sometimes has a lodging, and he loves it, for he
finds his mother there; but he prefers the street, because there he
finds liberty. He has his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose
foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar
metaphors: to be dead is _to eat dandelions by the root_; his own
occupations, calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps,
establishing means of transit between the two sides of a street in
heavy rains, which he calls _making the bridge of arts_, crying
discourses pronounced by the authorities in favor of the French people,
cleaning out the cracks in the pavement; he has his own coinage, which
is composed of all the little morsels of worked copper which are found
on the public streets. This curious money, which receives the name of
_loques_—rags—has an invariable and well-regulated currency in this
little Bohemia of children.
Lastly, he has his own fauna, which he observes attentively in the
corners; the lady-bird, the death’s-head plant-louse, the
daddy-long-legs, “the devil,” a black insect, which menaces by twisting
about its tail armed with two horns. He has his fabulous monster, which
has scales under its belly, but is not a lizard, which has pustules on
its back, but is not a toad, which inhabits the nooks of old lime-kilns
and wells that have run dry, which is black, hairy, sticky, which
crawls sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which
has a look, and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls
this monster “the deaf thing.” The search for these “deaf things” among
the stones is a joy of formidable nature. Another pleasure consists in
suddenly prying up a paving-stone, and taking a look at the wood-lice.
Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which
are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the
Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in
the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.
As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of them as
Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more honest. He is endowed
with a certain indescribable, unexpected joviality; he upsets the
composure of the shopkeeper with his wild laughter. He ranges boldly
from high comedy to farce.
A funeral passes by. Among those who accompany the dead there is a
doctor. “Hey there!” shouts some street Arab, “how long has it been
customary for doctors to carry home their own work?”
Another is in a crowd. A grave man, adorned with spectacles and
trinkets, turns round indignantly: “You good-for-nothing, you have
seized my wife’s waist!”—“I, sir? Search me!”
CHAPTER III—HE IS AGREEABLE
In the evening, thanks to a few sous, which he always finds means to
procure, the _homuncio_ enters a theatre. On crossing that magic
threshold, he becomes transfigured; he was the street Arab, he becomes
the titi.18 Theatres are a sort of ship turned upside down with the
keel in the air. It is in that keel that the titi huddle together. The
titi is to the gamin what the moth is to the larva; the same being
endowed with wings and soaring. 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. Thus, to give an example, the