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?