CHAPTER I – M. MYRIEL.
She had already suffered so much that she reflected with the lugubrious air of an old woman.
The Unknown sometimes holds surprises for the spirit of man. A sudden rent in the veil of darkness will momentarily reveal the invisible and then close up again. Such visions sometimes have a transfiguring effect, turning a camel driver into a Mohammed, a goat girl into a Joan of Arc. Solitude brings out a certain amount of sublime exaltation.
There are instincts for all the encounters of life.
There occurred, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. At times, that stomach of civilization digested badly, the cess-pool flowed back into the throat of the city, and Paris got an after-taste of her own filth. These resemblances of the sewer to remorse had their good points; they were warnings; very badly accepted, however; the city waxed indignant at the audacity of its mire, and did not admit that the filth should return. Drive it out better.
There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she had long suffered. He had no children.
I understand only love and liberty.
At the period of his most abject misery, he had observed that young girls turned round when he passed by, and he fled or hid, with death in his soul. He thought that they were staring at him because of his old clothes, and that they were laughing at them; the fact is, that they stared at him because of his grace, and that they dreamed of him.
We who die here will die in the radiance of the future. We go to a tomb flooded with the light of dawn.
We live in a squalid society. Success: this is the message seeping, drop by drop, down from the overriding corruption.
And whatever he did, he always fell back onto this paradox at the core of his thought. To remain in paradise and become a demon! To re-enter hell and become an angel!
This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as densely populated as a city, as tremulous as a nest, as tenebrous as a cathedral, as aromatic as a bouquet, as lonely as a tomb, as much a living thing as a crowd.
Shall we weep for all the innocent, all martyrs, all children, the lowly as well as the exalted? I agree to that. But in that case, as I have told you, we must go back further than ’93, and our tears must begin before Louis XVII. I will weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep with me over the children of the people.
Sire! do not break out into thunder over such a nonentity as myself. God’s great thunderbolts are not for bombarding lettuces.
Bewigged tragedy has a reason for its existence.
The towns make men ferocious because they make them corrupt. Mountains, sea, and forest make men reckless. They stir the wildness of men’s nature, but do not necessarily destroy what is human.
It is myself, always myself, myself alone. But, good God! All this egotism. Different forms of egotism, but still egotism! Suppose I should think a little of others? The highest duty is to think of others.
Cuando lo vieron ganar dinero, dijeron: es un comerciante. Cuando lo vieron repartir el dinero, dijeron: es un ambicioso. Cuando lo vieron rechazar los honores, dijeron: es un aventurero. Cuando lo vieron rechazar el trato social, dijeron: es un borrico.
We live in a sad society. Succeed – that is the advice which falls drop by drop from the overhanging corruption.
The solitary man is a modified savage, accepted by civilization. He who wanders most is most alone; hence his continual change of place. To remain anywhere long, suffocated him with the sense of being tamed. He spent his life in moving on.
I am thirsty. Mortals, I am dreaming: that the turn of Heidelberg has an attack of apoplecy, and that I am one of the dozen leeches which will be applied to it. I want a drink.