They sprung a leak, then they sank. We have nothing more to say; and it is with a sort of terror that we look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called the past, behind those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense vessels, Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful gusts which emerge from all the mouths of the shadows.
But shadows are there, and light is here.
We are not acquainted with the maladies of these ancient civilizations, we do not know the infirmities of our own.
Everywhere upon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its beauties, we lay bare its defects.
Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness once diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy.
Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its law and its prodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving.
It will be saved.
It is already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet another point.
All the labors of modern social philosophies must converge towards this point.
The thinker of to-day has a great duty—to auscultate civilization.
We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this persistence in encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, an austere interlude in a mournful drama.
Beneath the social mortality, we feel human imperishableness.
The globe does not perish, because it has these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, nor because of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people do not kill man.
And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his head at times.
The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have their hours of weakness.
Will the future arrive?
It seems as though we might almost put this question, when we behold so much terrible darkness.
Melancholy face-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched.
On the part of the selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education, appetite increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls, a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the suffering, an implacable satisfaction, the I so swollen that it bars the soul; on the side of the wretched covetousness, envy, hatred of seeing others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human beast towards assuaging its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality, impure and simple ignorance.
Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous point which we distinguish there one of those which vanish?
The ideal is frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated, imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces, monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the maw of the clouds.
BOOK EIGHTH.—ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS
CHAPTER I—FULL LIGHT
The reader has probably understood that Eponine, having recognized through the gate, the inhabitant of that Rue Plumet whither Magnon had sent her, had begun by keeping the ruffians away from the Rue Plumet, and had then conducted Marius thither, and that, after many days spent in ecstasy before that gate, Marius, drawn on by that force which draws the iron to the magnet and a lover towards the stones of which is built the house of her whom he loves, had finally entered Cosette’s garden as Romeo entered the garden of Juliet.
This had even proved easier for him than for Romeo; Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, Marius had only to use a little force on one of the bars of the decrepit gate which vacillated in its rusty recess, after the fashion of old people’s teeth.
Marius was slender and readily passed through.
As there was never any one in the street, and as Marius never entered the garden except at night, he ran no risk of being seen.
Beginning with that blessed and holy hour when a kiss betrothed these two souls, Marius was there every evening.
If, at that period of her existence, Cosette had fallen in love with a man in the least unscrupulous or debauched, she would have been lost; for there are generous natures which yield themselves, and Cosette was one of them.
One of woman’s magnanimities is to yield.
Love, at the height where it is absolute, is complicated with some indescribably celestial blindness of modesty.
But what dangers you run, O noble souls!
Often you give the heart, and we take the body.
Your heart remains with you, you gaze upon it in the gloom with a shudder.
Love has no middle course; it either ruins or it saves.
All human destiny lies in this dilemma.
This dilemma, ruin, or safety, is set forth no more inexorably by any fatality than by love.
Love is life, if it is not death.
Cradle; also coffin.
The same sentiment says “yes” and “no” in the human heart.
Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.
God willed that Cosette’s love should encounter one of the loves which save.
Throughout the whole of the month of May of that year 1832, there were there, in every night, in that poor, neglected garden, beneath that thicket which grew thicker and more fragrant day by day, two beings composed of all chastity, all innocence, overflowing with all the felicity of heaven, nearer to the archangels than to mankind, pure, honest, intoxicated, radiant, who shone for each other amid the shadows.
It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to Marius that Cosette had a nimbus.
They touched each other, they gazed at each other, they clasped each other’s hands, they pressed close to each other; but there was a distance which they did not pass.
Not that they respected it; they did not know of its existence.
Marius was conscious of a barrier, Cosette’s innocence; and Cosette of a support, Marius’ loyalty.
The first kiss had also been the last.
Marius, since that time, had not gone further than to touch Cosette’s hand, or her kerchief, or a lock of her hair, with his lips.
For him, Cosette was a perfume and not a woman.