Les Misérables
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?”
“She did not say.”
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.
Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long
trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This
destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the
tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the
definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living
perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by
the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe,
alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances!
Death will deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them
again.
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; it no longer rests on anything
that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more
germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul,
inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating 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 some one who loved, the sun would become
extinct.
CHAPTER V—COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER
As Cosette read, she gradually fell into thought. At the very moment
when she raised her eyes from the last line of the note-book, the
handsome officer passed triumphantly in front of the gate,—it was his
hour; Cosette thought him hideous.
She resumed her contemplation of the book. It was written in the most
charming of chirography, thought Cosette; in the same hand, but with
divers inks, sometimes very black, again whitish, as when ink has been
added to the inkstand, and consequently on different days. It was,
then, a mind which had unfolded itself there, sigh by sigh,
irregularly, without order, without choice, without object, hap-hazard.
Cosette had never read anything like it. This manuscript, in which she
already perceived more light than obscurity, produced upon her the
effect of a half-open sanctuary. Each one of these mysterious lines
shone before her eyes and inundated her heart with a strange radiance.
The education which she had received had always talked to her of the
soul, and never of love, very much as one might talk of the firebrand
and not of the flame. This manuscript of fifteen pages suddenly and
sweetly revealed to her all of love, sorrow, destiny, life, eternity,
the beginning, the end. It was as if a hand had opened and suddenly
flung upon her a handful of rays of light. In these few lines she felt
a passionate, ardent, generous, honest nature, a sacred will, an
immense sorrow, and an immense despair, a suffering heart, an ecstasy
fully expanded. What was this manuscript? A letter. A letter without
name, without address, without date, without signature, pressing and
disinterested, an enigma composed of truths, a message of love made to
be brought by an angel and read by a virgin, an appointment made beyond
the bounds of earth, the love-letter of a phantom to a shade. It was an
absent one, tranquil and dejected, who seemed ready to take refuge in
death and who sent to the absent love, his lady, the secret of fate,
the key of life, love. This had been written with one foot in the grave
and one finger in heaven. These lines, which had fallen one by one on
the paper, were what might be called drops of soul.
Now, from whom could these pages come? Who could have penned them?
Cosette did not hesitate a moment. One man only.
He!
Day had dawned once more in her spirit; all had reappeared. She felt an
unheard-of joy, and a profound anguish. It was he! he who had written!
he was there! it was he whose arm had been thrust through that railing!
While she was forgetful of him, he had found her again! But had she
forgotten him? No, never! She was foolish to have thought so for a
single moment. She had always loved him, always adored him. The fire
had been smothered, and had smouldered for a time, but she saw all
plainly now; it had but made headway, and now it had burst forth
afresh, and had inflamed her whole being. This note-book was like a
spark which had fallen from that other soul into hers. She felt the
conflagration starting up once more.
She imbued herself thoroughly with every word of the manuscript: “Oh
yes!” said she, “how perfectly I recognize all that! That is what I had
already read in his eyes.” As she was finishing it for the third time,
Lieutenant Théodule passed the gate once more, and rattled his spurs
upon the pavement. Cosette was forced to raise her eyes. She thought
him insipid, silly, stupid, useless, foppish, displeasing, impertinent,
and extremely ugly. The officer thought it his duty to smile at her.
She turned away as in shame and indignation. She would gladly have
thrown something at his head.
She fled, re-entered the house, and shut herself up in her chamber to
peruse the manuscript once more, to learn it by heart, and to dream.
When she had thoroughly mastered it she kissed it and put it in her
bosom.
All was over, Cosette had fallen back into deep, seraphic love. The
abyss of Eden had yawned once more.
All day long, Cosette remained in a sort of bewilderment. She scarcely
thought, her ideas were in the state of a tangled skein in her brain,
she could not manage to conjecture anything, she hoped through a
tremor, what? vague things. She dared make herself no promises, and she
did not wish to refuse herself anything. Flashes of pallor passed over
her countenance, and shivers ran through her frame. It seemed to her,
at intervals, that she was entering the land of chimæras; she said to
herself: “Is this reality?” Then she felt of the dear paper within her
bosom under her gown, she pressed it to her heart, she felt its angles
against her flesh; and if Jean Valjean had seen her at the moment, he
would have shuddered in the presence of that luminous and unknown joy,
which overflowed from beneath her eyelids.—“Oh yes!” she thought, “it
is certainly he! This comes from him, and is for me!”
And she told herself that an intervention of the angels, a celestial
chance, had given him back to her.
Oh transfiguration of love! Oh dreams! That celestial chance, that
intervention of the angels, was a pellet of bread tossed by one thief
to another thief, from the Charlemagne Courtyard to the Lion’s Ditch,
over the roofs of La Force.
CHAPTER VI—OLD PEOPLE ARE MADE TO GO OUT OPPORTUNELY
When evening came, Jean Valjean went out; Cosette dressed herself. She
arranged her hair in the most becoming manner, and she put on a dress
whose bodice had received one snip of the scissors too much, and which,
through this slope, permitted a view of the beginning of her throat,
and was, as young girls say, “a trifle indecent.” It was not in the
least indecent, but it was prettier than usual. She made her toilet
thus without knowing why she did so.
Did she mean to go out? No.
Was she expecting a visitor? No.
At dusk, she went down to the garden. Toussaint was busy in her
kitchen, which opened on the back yard.
She began to stroll about under the trees, thrusting aside the branches
from time to time with her hand, because there were some which hung
very low.
In this manner she reached the bench.
The stone was still there.
She sat down, and gently laid her white hand on this stone as though
she wished to caress and thank it.
All at once, she experienced that indefinable impression which one
undergoes when there is some one standing behind one, even when she
does not see the person.
She turned her head and rose to her feet.
It was he.
His head was bare. He appeared to have grown thin and pale. His black
clothes were hardly discernible. The twilight threw a wan light on his
fine brow, and covered his eyes in shadows. 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.
Cosette, though ready to swoon, uttered no cry. She retreated slowly,
for she felt herself attracted. He did not stir. By virtue of something
ineffable and melancholy which enveloped him, she felt the look in his
eyes which she could not see.
Cosette, in her retreat, encountered a tree and leaned against it. Had
it not been for this tree, she would have fallen.
Then she heard his voice, that voice which she had really never heard,
barely rising above the rustle of the leaves, and murmuring:—
“Pardon me, here I am. My heart is full. I could not live on as I was
living, and I have come. Have you read what I placed there on the
bench? Do you recognize me at all? Have no fear of me. It is a long
time, you remember the day, since you looked at me at the Luxembourg,
near the Gladiator. And the day when you passed before me? It was on
the 16th of June and the 2d of July. It is nearly a year ago. I have
not seen you for a long time. I inquired of the woman who let the
chairs, and she told me that she no longer saw you. You lived in the
Rue de l’Ouest, on the third floor, in the front apartments of a new
house,—you see that I know! I followed you. What else was there for me
to do? And then you disappeared. I thought I saw you pass once, while I
was reading the newspapers under the arcade of the Odéon. I ran after
you. But no. It was a person who had a bonnet like yours. At night I
came hither. Do not be afraid, no one sees me. I come to gaze upon your
windows near at hand. I walk very softly, so that you may not hear, for
you might be alarmed. The other evening I was behind you, you turned
round, I fled. Once, I heard you singing. I was happy. Did it affect
you because I heard you singing through the shutters? That could not
hurt you. No, it is not so? You see, you are my angel! Let me come