Victor Hugo

“ To find suddenly such a secret in the midst of his happiness is like discovering a scorpion in a turtle-dove's nest. Was the happiness of Marius and Cosette in future condensed to this proximity? Was it an accomplished fact? Did the acceptance of this man form part of the consummated marriage? Could nothing else be done? Had Marius also married the convict? Although a man may be crowned with light and joy, though he be enjoying the grand hour of life's purple, happy love, such shocks would compel even the archangel in his ecstasy, even the demi-god in his glory, to shudder. ”

“ Jean Valjean, suddenly growing great, issued from the cloud, and Marius could not restrain a cry of joy.
"What, then, this poor fellow is an admirable man! All this fortune is really his! He is Madeleine, the providence of an entire town! He is Jean Valjean, the savior of Javert! He is a hero! He is a saint!"
"He is not a saint, and he is not a hero," said Thénadier; "he is an assassin and a robber." And he added with the accent of a man beginning to feel himself possessed of some authority, "Let us calm ourselves." ”

“ You are going to live, and live with us, and live a long time. We will take you with us, and shall have henceforth but one thought, your happiness!"
"You hear," said Cosette, who was all in tears. "Marius says that you will not die."
Jean Valjean continued to smile.
"Even if you were to take me home with you, Monsieur Pontmercy, would that prevent me being what I am? No. God has thought the same as you and I, and he does not alter his opinion. It is better for me to be gone. Death is an excellent arrangement, and God knows better than we do what we want. ”

“ There is a human flesh-market, and you will not prevent them entering it with your shadowy hands trembling around them. Think of the street; think of the pavement covered with strollers; think of the shops before which women in low-necked dresses come and go in the mud. Those women, too, were pure. Think of your sisters, you who have any; misery, prostitution, the police. St Lazare, that is what these delicate maidens, these fragile marvels of chastity, modesty, and beauty, fresher than the lilies in May, will fall to. Ah, you have let yourselves be killed! ”

“ What is the sun? It is love; and when I say love, I mean woman. Ah, ah! woman is an omnipotence. Ask that demagogue, Marius, if he is not the slave of that little she-tyrant, Cosette, and willingly so, the coward? Woman! There is not a Robespierre who can stand; but woman reigns. I am now only a royalist of that royalty. What is Adam? The royalty of Eve. There is no '89 for Eve. There was the royal sceptre surmounted by the fleur-de-lys, there was the imperial sceptre surmounted by a globe, there was Charlemagne's sceptre of iron, and the sceptre of Louis the Great, which was of gold. ”

“ Then the forehead sinks, and a little hair waves above the sand; a hand emerges, digs up the sand, is waved, and disappears,—a sinister effacement of a man.
At times the rider is swallowed up with his horse, at times the carter with his cart. It is a shipwreck otherwhere than in the water; it is the land drowning man. The land penetrated by the ocean becomes a snare; it offers itself as a plain, and opens like a wave. The abyss has its acts of treachery.
Such a mournful adventure, always possible on some seashore, was also possible some thirty years ago in the sewer of Paris. ”

“ Jean Valjean had killed Javert, or at least that seemed evident. The last question of all admitted of no reply, and this question Marius felt like a pair of pincers. How was it that the existence of Jean Valjean had so long brushed against that of Cosette? What was this gloomy sport of Providence which had brought this man and this child in contact? Are there chains for two forged in heaven, and does God take pleasure in coupling the angel with the demon? A crime and an innocence can, then, be chamber companions in the mysterious hulks of misery? ”

“ All at once he rose; such return of strength is at times a sequel of the death-agony. He walked with a firm step to the wall, thrust aside Marius and the doctor, who wished to help him, detached from the wall the small copper crucifix hanging on it, returned to his seat with all the vigor of full health, and said, as he laid the crucifix on the table,—
"There is the great Martyr."
Then his chest sank in, his head vacillated, as if the intoxication of the tomb were seizing on him, and his hands, lying on his knees, began pulling at the cloth of his trousers. ”

“ I am a fool; why not remain simply? You offer me a bed-room in the house. Madame Pontmercy loves me dearly, she said to that fauteuil, 'Hold out your arms to him;' your grandfather asks nothing better than to have me. I suit him, we will live all together, have our meals in common, I will give my arm to Cosette,—to Madame Pontmercy, forgive me, but it is habit,—we will have only one roof, one table, one fire, the same chimney-corner in winter, the same walk in summer: that is joy, that is happiness, that is everything. We will live in one family."
At this word Jean Valjean became fierce. ”

“ The head which does not turn to effaced horizons contains neither thought nor love. At moments Marius buried his face in his hands, and the tumultuous and vague past traversed the fog which he had in his brain. He saw Mabœuf fall again, he heard Gavroche singing under the grape-shot, and he felt on his lips the coldness of Éponine's forehead; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose before him, and then disappeared. ”

“ A little after midnight the Gillenormand mansion became a temple. Here we stop, for an angel stands on the threshold of wedding-nights, smiling, and with finger on lip; the mind becomes contemplative before this sanctuary in which the celebration of love is held. There must be rays of light above such houses, and the joy which they contain must pass through the walls in brilliancy, and vaguely irradiate the darkness. It is impossible for this sacred and fatal festival not to send a celestial radiance to infinitude. Love is the sublime crucible in which the fusion of man and woman takes place ”

“ The mouth of the sewer in the Rue de la Mortellerie was celebrated for the pestilences which issued from it; with its iron-pointed grating that resembled a row of teeth it yawned in this fatal street like the throat of a dragon breathing hell on mankind. The popular imagination seasoned the gloomy Parisian sewer with some hideous mixture of infinitude: the sewer was bottomless, the sewer was a Barathrum, and the idea of exploring these leprous regions never even occurred to the police. Who would have dared to cast a sound into this darkness, and go on a journey of discovery in this abyss? ”

“ Father Gillenormand said to himself aside.
Cosette had never been more affectionate to Jean Valjean, and she was in unison with Father Gillenormand; while he built up joy in aphorisms and maxims, she exhaled love and beauty like a perfume. Happiness wishes everybody to be happy. She found again in speaking to Jean Valjean inflections of her voice of the time when she was a little girl, and caressed him with a smile. A banquet had been prepared in the dining-room; an illumination à giorno is the necessary seasoning of a great joy, and mist and darkness are not accepted by the happy. ”

“ The generation which at the present moment is passing over the earth is not forced to abridge it for the generations, its equals, after all, whose turn will come at a later date. "I exist," murmurs that some one, who is everybody. "I am young and in love, I am old and wish to rest, I am father of a family, I work, I prosper, I do a good business, I have houses to let, I have money in the funds, I am happy, I have wife and children, I like all that, I wish to live, and so leave us at peace." ”

“ Philosophy is the microscope of thought; everything strives to fly from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is useless, for what side of himself does a man show in tergiversating? His ashamed side. Philosophy pursues evil with its upright glance, and does not allow it to escape into nothingness. It recognizes everything in the effacement of disappearing things, and in the diminution of vanishing things. It reconstructs the purple after the rags, and the woman after the tatters. With the sewer it re-makes the town; with the mud it re-makes manners. ”

“ The bullets ran after him, but he was more active than they; he played a frightful game of hide-and-seek with death: and each time that the snub-nosed face of the spectre approached the gamin gave it a fillip. One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest, at length struck the will-o'-the-wisp lad; Gavroche was seen to totter and then sink. The whole barricade uttered a cry, but there was an Antæus in this pygmy: for a gamin to touch the pavement is like the giant touching the earth; and Gavroche had only fallen to rise again. ”

“ Through the words mingled with that lugubrious saliva which accompanies tears, such sentences as this could be distinguished: "Father, do not leave us. Is it possible that we have only found you again to lose you?" It might be said that the death-agony moves like a serpent; it comes, goes, advances toward the grave, and then turns back toward life; there is groping in the action of death. Jean Valjean, after this partial syncope, rallied, shook his forehead as if to make the darkness fall off it, and became again almost lucid. He caught hold of Cosette's sleeve and kissed it. ”

“ It happens sometimes that the canaille, that great despairing crowd, contrary to principles, even contrary to liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote, the government of all by all, protests, in the depths of its agony, its discouragement, its destitution, its fevers, its distresses, its miasmas, its ignorance, and its darkness, and the populace offers battle to the people. The beggars attack the common right, the ochlocracy rises in insurrection against the demos. ”

“ Cosette, let your fine weather be your husband's smiles. Marius, let your wife's tears be the rain, and mind that it never does rain in your household. You have drawn the good number in the lottery, love in the sacrament. You have the prize number, so keep it carefully under lock and key. Do not squander it. Adore each other, and a fig for the rest. Believe what I tell you, then, for it is good sense, and good sense cannot deceive. Be to one another a religion, for each man has his own way of adoring God. Saperlotte! the best way of adoring God is to love one's wife. ”

“ The soul may be cured, but not destiny. What a frightful thing,—an incurable destiny! The question which presented itself was this: In what way was Jean Valjean going to behave to the happiness of Cosette and Marius? That happiness he had willed, he had made; and at this hour, in gazing upon it, he could have the species of satisfaction which a cutler would have who recognized his trade-mark upon a knife when he drew it all smoking from his chest. Cosette had Marius, Marius possessed Cosette; they possessed everything, even wealth, and it was his doing. ”

“ We fellows have all, more or less, mistresses, who make us mad, that is to say brave, and when a man is as full of love as a tiger the least he can do is to fight like a lion. That is a way of avenging ourselves for the tricks which our grisettes play us. Roland lets himself be killed to vex Angelique, and all our heroism comes from our women. A man without a woman is like a pistol without a hammer, and it is the woman who makes the man go off. Well, Enjolras has no woman, he is not in love, and finds means to be intrepid. It is extraordinary that a man can be cold as ice and daring as fire. ”

“ Mud is the synonym of shame, and is little, ugly, and infamous. To die in a butt of Malmsey like Clarence,—very well; but in a sewer like d'Escoubleau is horrible. To struggle in it is hideous, for at the same time as a man is dying, he is dabbling. There is enough darkness for it to be Hell, and enough mud for it to be merely a slough, and the dying man does not know whether he is about to become a spectre or a frog. Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister, but here it is deformed.
The depth of the fontis varied, as did the length and density, according to the nature of the subsoil. ”

“ He had a difficulty in moving his fore-arm, his feet had lost all movement, and at the same time, as the helplessness of the limbs and the exhaustion of the body increased, all the majesty of the soul ascended and was displayed on his forehead. The light of the unknown world was already visible in his eyeballs. His face grew livid and at the same time smiling; life was no longer there, but there was something else. His breath stopped, but his glance expanded; he was a corpse on whom wings could be seen. He made Cosette a sign to approach, and then Marius ”

“ For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people. Where there is everything, there is ignominy by the side of sublimity; and if Paris contain Athens the city of light, Tyre the city of power, Sparta the city of virtue, Nineveh the city of prodigies, it also contains Lutetia the city of mud. Moreover, the stamp of its power is there too, and the Titanic sewer of Paris realizes among monuments the strange ideal realized in humanity by a few men like Machiavelli, Bacon, and Mirabeau,—the grand abject. ”

“ The Jondrette garret? The barricade? Javert? Who knew where the revelations might have stopped? Jean Valjean did not seem the man to recoil, and who knows whether Marius, after urging him on, might not have wished to check him? In certain supreme conjunctures has it not happened to all of us that after asking a question we have stopped our ears in order not to hear the answer? A man is specially guilty of such an act of cowardice when he is in love. It is not wise to drive sinister situations into a corner, especially when the indissoluble side of our own life is fatally mixed up with them. ”

“ Jean Valjean had left the city, and in a twinkling, the time required to lift a trap and let it fall again, he had passed from broad daylight to complete darkness, from midday to midnight, from noise to silence, from the uproar of thunder to the stagnation of the tomb, and, by an incident far more prodigious even than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the extremest peril to the most absolute security. A sudden fall into a cellar, disappearance in the oubliette of Paris, leaving this street where death was all around for this species of sepulchre in which was life,—it was a strange moment. ”

“ When there is really marriage, that is to say, when there is love, the ideal is mingled with it, and a nuptial couch forms in the darkness a corner of the dawn. If it was given to the mental eye to perceive the formidable and charming visions of higher life, it is probable that it would see the forms of night, the unknown winged beings, the blue wayfarers of the invisible, bending down round the luminous house, satisfied and blessing, pointing out to each other the virgin bride, who is gently startled, and having the reflection of human felicity on their divine countenances. ”

“ Cosette, I see it all. You told me that you never received the letter I sent you by Gavroche. It must have fallen into his hands, Cosette, and he came to the barricade to save me. As it is his sole duty to be an angel, in passing he saved others: he saved Javert. He drew me out of that gulf to give me to you; he carried me on his back through that frightful sewer. Ah! I am a monstrous ingrate! Cosette, after having been your providence, he was mine. Just imagine that there was a horrible pit, in which a man could be drowned a hundred times, drowned in mud, Cosette ”

“ It, the future, acts like the past; it, the pure idea, becomes an assault. It complicates its heroism with a violence for which it is but fair that it should answer,—a violence of opportunity and expediency, contrary to principles, and for which it is fatally punished. The Utopia, when in a state of insurrection, combats with the old military code in its hand; it shoots spies, executes traitors, suppresses living beings and hurls them into unknown darkness. It makes use of death, a serious thing. ”

“ Enjolras spoke like the true general of the riot that he was: insurrection and repression do not fight with equal arms; for the insurrection, which can be soon exhausted, has only a certain number of rounds to fire and of combatants to expend. An expended cartouche-box and a killed man cannot have their place filled up. Repression, on the other hand, having the army, does not count men, and having Vincennes, does not count rounds. Repression has as many regiments as the barricade has men, and as many arsenals as the barricade has cartouche-boxes. ”

“ Marius absent for three days, that was horrible on the part of le bon Dieu. Now this cruel suspense sent from on high was a trial passed through; Marius was about to come and bring good news. Thus is youth constituted: it wipes away its tears quickly, and finding sorrow useless, does not accept it. Youth is the smile of the future of an unknown thing, which is itself: it is natural for it to be happy, and it seems as if its breath were made of hope. ”

“ The maiden is only the flash of the dream, and is not yet a statue; her alcove is concealed in the dim part of the ideal, and the indiscreet touch of the eye brutalizes this vague twilight. In this case contemplation is profanation. We will therefore say nothing about the sweet awaking and rising of Cosette. An Eastern fable tells us that the rose was made white by God, but that Adam having looked at it for a moment when it opened, it felt ashamed, and turned pink. We are of those who feel themselves abashed in the presence of maidens and flowers, for we find them worthy of veneration. ”

“ Concealed, as he was, in a corner, and sheltered, so to speak, by the billiard-table, the soldiers, who had their eyes fixed on Enjolras, had not even perceived Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order to fire, when all at once they heard a powerful voice crying at their side,—
"Long live the Republic! I belong to it."
Grantaire had risen; and the immense gleam of all the combat which he had missed appeared in the flashing glance of the transfigured drunkard. He repeated, "Long live the Republic!" ”

“ Jean Valjean started.
"Cosette," Marius stammered, and he stopped. They looked like two culprits; Cosette, radiant, continued to look at them both, and there were in her eyes gleams of Paradise.
"I have caught you in the act," Cosette said; "I just heard through this, Father Fauchelevent saying, 'Conscience, doing one's duty.' That is politics, and I will have none of it. People must not talk politics on the very next day; it is not right."
"You are mistaken, Cosette;" Marius replied, "we are talking of business. We are talking about the best way of investing your six hundred thousand francs." ”

“ Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head, reserved and concealed himself. Three soldiers fell under his loop-hole without even seeing him, while Marius displayed himself openly, and made himself a mark. More than once half his body rose above the barricade. There is no more violent prodigal than a miser who takes the bit between his teeth, and no man more startling in action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive, and in the battle was like a dream. He looked like a ghost firing. The cartridges of the besieged were exhausted, but not their sarcasms ”

“ Marius's silence replied, and Jean Valjean continued:—
"You see very well that I did right in not holding my tongue. Be happy, be in heaven, be the angel of an angel, be in the sunshine and content yourself with it, and do not trouble yourself as to the way in which a poor condemned man opens his heart and does his duty; you have a wretched man before you, sir." ”

“ In this century men have a business, gamble on the Stock Exchange, win money, and are mean. They take care of and varnish their surface: they are carefully dressed, washed, soaped, shaved, combed, rubbed, brushed, and cleaned externally, irreproachable, as polished as a pebble, discreet, trim, and at the same time,—virtue of my soul!—they have at the bottom of their conscience dungheaps and cess-pools, at which a milkmaid who blows her nose with her fingers would recoil. I grant the present age this motto,—dirty cleanliness. Marius, do not be annoyed ”

“ I really wanted to see Cosette for a little while every now and then, for a heart requires a bone to gnaw. Still, I knew well that I was in the way. I said to myself, 'They do not want you, so stop in your corner; a man has no right to pay everlasting visits,' Ah, blessed be God! I see her again. Do you know, Cosette, that your husband is very handsome? What a pretty embroidered collar you are wearing; I like that pattern. Your husband chose it, did he not? And then, you will need cashmere shawls. Monsieur Pontmercy, let me call her Cosette, it will not be for long. ”

“ As for the six hundred thousand francs, you say nothing of them, but I will meet your thought half-way: they are a deposit. How was it placed in my hands? No matter. I give up the deposit, and there is nothing more to ask of me. I complete the restitution by stating my real name, and this too concerns myself, for I am anxious that you should know who I am."
And Jean Valjean looked Marius in the face. All that Marius experienced was tumultuous and incoherent, for certain blasts of the wind of destiny produce such waves in our soul. ”