Les Misérables
“On the front?” he asked.
“Parbleu!” said the porter, “the house is only built on the street.”
“And what is that gentleman’s business?” began Marius again.
“He is a gentleman of property, sir. A very kind man who does good to
the unfortunate, though not rich himself.”
“What is his name?” resumed Marius.
The porter raised his head and said:—
“Are you a police spy, sir?”
Marius went off quite abashed, but delighted. He was getting on.
“Good,” thought he, “I know that her name is Ursule, that she is the
daughter of a gentleman who lives on his income, and that she lives
there, on the third floor, in the Rue de l’Ouest.”
On the following day, M. Leblanc and his daughter made only a very
brief stay in the Luxembourg; they went away while it was still broad
daylight. Marius followed them to the Rue de l’Ouest, as he had taken
up the habit of doing. On arriving at the carriage entrance M. Leblanc
made his daughter pass in first, then paused, before crossing the
threshold, and stared intently at Marius.
On the next day they did not come to the Luxembourg. Marius waited for
them all day in vain.
At nightfall, he went to the Rue de l’Ouest, and saw a light in the
windows of the third story.
He walked about beneath the windows until the light was extinguished.
The next day, no one at the Luxembourg. Marius waited all day, then
went and did sentinel duty under their windows. This carried him on to
ten o’clock in the evening.
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.
Marius indulged in melancholy conjectures; he dared not watch the
porte-cochère during the day; he contented himself with going at night
to gaze upon the red light of the windows. At times he saw shadows flit
across them, and his heart began to beat.
On the eighth day, when he arrived under the windows, there was no
light in them.
“Hello!” he said, “the lamp is not lighted yet. But it is dark. Can
they have gone out?” He waited until ten o’clock. Until midnight. Until
one in the morning. Not a light appeared in the windows of the third
story, and no one entered the house.
He went away in a very gloomy frame of mind.
On the morrow,—for he only existed from morrow to morrow, there was, so
to speak, no to-day for him,—on the morrow, he found no one at the
Luxembourg; he had expected this. At dusk, he went to the house.
No light in the windows; the shades were drawn; the third floor was
totally dark.
Marius rapped at the porte-cochère, entered, and said to the porter:—
“The gentleman on the third floor?”
“Has moved away,” replied the porter.
Marius reeled and said feebly:—
“How long ago?”
“Yesterday.”
“Where is he living now?”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“So he has not left his new address?”
“No.”
And the porter, raising his eyes, recognized Marius.
“Come! So it’s you!” said he; “but you are decidedly a spy then?”
BOOK SEVENTH—PATRON MINETTE
CHAPTER I—MINES AND MINERS
Human societies all have what is called in theatrical parlance, _a
third lower floor_. The social soil is everywhere undermined, sometimes
for good, sometimes for evil. These works are superposed one upon the
other. There are superior mines and inferior mines. There is a top and
a bottom in this obscure sub-soil, which sometimes gives way beneath
civilization, and which our indifference and heedlessness trample under
foot. The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine that was almost
open to the sky. The shades, those sombre hatchers of primitive
Christianity, only awaited an opportunity to bring about an explosion
under the Cæsars and to inundate the human race with light. For in the
sacred shadows there lies latent light. Volcanoes are full of a shadow
that is capable of flashing forth. Every form begins by being night.
The catacombs, in which the first mass was said, were not alone the
cellar of Rome, they were the vaults of the world.
Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a
structure, there are excavations of all sorts. There is the religious
mine, the philosophical mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary
mine. Such and such a pick-axe with the idea, such a pick with ciphers.
Such another with wrath. People hail and answer each other from one
catacomb to another. Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes.
There they branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and
fraternize there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends
him his lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes
Socinius by the hair. But nothing arrests nor 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.
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. At a certain depth, the excavations are no longer
penetrable by the spirit of civilization, the limit breathable by man
has been passed; a beginning of monsters is possible.
The descending scale is a strange one; and each one of the rungs of
this ladder corresponds to a stage where philosophy can find foothold,
and where one encounters one of these workmen, sometimes divine,
sometimes misshapen. Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther,
there is Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire,
there is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below
Robespierre, there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. And so it
goes on. Lower down, confusedly, at the limit which separates the
indistinct from the invisible, one perceives other gloomy men, who
perhaps do not exist as yet. The men of yesterday are spectres; those
of to-morrow are forms. The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but
obscurely. The embryonic work of the future is one of the visions of
philosophy.
A world in limbo, in the state of fœtus, what an unheard-of spectre!
Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there also, in lateral galleries.
Surely, although a divine and invisible chain unknown to themselves,
binds together all these subterranean pioneers who, almost always,
think themselves isolated, and who are not so, their works vary
greatly, and the light of some contrasts with the blaze of others. The
first are paradisiacal, the last are tragic. Nevertheless, whatever may
be the contrast, all these toilers, from the highest to the most
nocturnal, from the wisest to the most foolish, possess one likeness,
and this is it: disinterestedness. Marat forgets himself like Jesus.
They throw themselves on one side, they omit themselves, they think not
of themselves. They have a glance, and that glance seeks the absolute.
The first has the whole heavens in his eyes; the last, enigmatical
though he may be, has still, beneath his eyelids, the pale beam of the
infinite. Venerate the man, whoever he may be, who has this sign—the
starry eye.
The shadowy eye is the other sign.
With it, evil commences. Reflect and tremble in the presence of any one
who has no glance at all. The social order has its black miners.
There is a point where depth is tantamount to burial, and where light
becomes extinct.
Below all these mines which we have just mentioned, below all these
galleries, below this whole immense, subterranean, venous system of
progress and utopia, much further on in the earth, much lower than
Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much lower, and without any connection
with the upper levels, there lies the last mine. A formidable spot.
This is what we have designated as the _le troisième dessous_. It is
the grave of shadows. It is the cellar of the blind. _Inferi_.
This communicates with the abyss.
CHAPTER II—THE LOWEST DEPTHS
There disinterestedness vanishes. The demon is vaguely outlined; each
one is for himself. The _I_ in the eyes howls, seeks, fumbles, and
gnaws. The social Ugolino is in this gulf.
The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts, almost
phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; 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 step-mothers, 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; fatal
affiliation, dizzy creation, logic of darkness. That which crawls in
the social third lower level is no longer complaint stifled by the
absolute; it is the protest of matter. Man there becomes a dragon. To
be hungry, to be thirsty—that is the point of departure; to be
Satan—that is the point reached. From that vault Lacenaire emerges.
We have just seen, in Book Fourth, one of the compartments of the upper
mine, of the great political, revolutionary, and philosophical
excavation. There, as we have just said, all is pure, noble, dignified,
honest. There, assuredly, one might be misled; but error is worthy of
veneration there, so thoroughly does it imply heroism. The work there
effected, taken as a whole has a name: Progress.
The moment has now come when we must take a look at other depths,
hideous depths. There exists beneath society, we insist upon this
point, and there will exist, until that day when ignorance shall be
dissipated, the great cavern of evil.
This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all. It is hatred, without
exception. This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut
a pen. Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of
the inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath
this stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a
newspaper. Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat
to Schinderhannes. This cavern has for its object the destruction of
everything.
Of everything. Including the upper superior mines, which it execrates.
It not only undermines, in its hideous swarming, the actual social
order; it undermines philosophy, it undermines human thought, it
undermines civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines
progress. Its name is simply theft, prostitution, murder,
assassination. It is darkness, and it desires chaos. Its vault is
formed of ignorance.
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.
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. This incurable