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-cochere, 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 C?sars 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.