Marius set out at his accustomed hour for the Luxembourg. He met Courfeyrac on the way and pretended not to see him. Courfeyrac said later to his friends: ‘I’ve just seen Marius’s new hat and suit with Marius inside them. I suppose he was going to sit for an examination. He looked thoroughly silly.
Once she looked up from her work and was floored by the anxious way her father was looking at her.
Love is a fault; be it so. Fantine was innocence floating upon the surface of this fault.
He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil. He had that gloomy intersection beneath his eyes. On this occasion once more, as had happened to him already in other sad vicissitudes, two roads opened out before him, the one tempting, the other alarming. Which was he to take?
A person who is seated instead of standing erect – destinies hang upon such a thing as that.
All this is what men call genius, just as they call a painted face beauty and a richly attired figure majesty. They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.
I desire to forget life. Life is a hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time at all, and is worth nothing. One breaks one’s neck in living. Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances. Happiness is an antique reliquary painted on one side only. Ecclesiastes says: ‘All is vanity.’ I agree with that good man, who never existed, perhaps.
The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed with the sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement, closed the door of ill and opened the door of good.
It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past.
We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.
Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education?
Blind is he who will not see!
The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have vanished contains neither thought nor love.
To realize one’s dream. To whom is this accorded? There must be elections for this in heaven; we are all candidates, unknown to ourselves; the angels vote.
We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they fail.
Their own destiny is a far-off thing to them... One declines, descends, trickles away, even crumbles away, and yet is hardly conscious of it one’s self. It always ends, it is true, in an awakening, but the awakening is tardy. In the meantime, it seems as though we held ourselves neutral in the game which is going on between our happiness and our unhappiness. We are the stake, and we look on at the game with indifference.
A hundred francs,” thought Fantine. “But in what trade can one earn a hundred sous a day?” “Come!” said she, “let us sell what is left.” The unfortunate girl became a woman of the town.
Errors make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic;.
What is this history of Fantine? It is society purchasing a slave. From whom? From misery. From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain. A soul for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts.
The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does not, as yet, permeate it; it is said that slavery has disappeared from European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists; but it weighs only upon the woman, and it is called prostitution.