“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul”
The
reflection flickered as if it came from a fire rather than a candle,
while the shadow of the framework could not be traced, which proved
that the window was wide open, and this was a curious fact, considering
the cold. The cashier fell asleep and woke again some two hours after;
the same slow and regular footfall was still audible above his head.
The reflection was still cast on the wall, but was now pale and quiet,
as if it came from a lamp or a candle. The window was still open. This
is what was occurring in M. Madeleine's bed-room.
CHAPTER III.
A TEMPEST IN A BRAIN.
The reader has, of course, guessed that M. Madeleine is Jean Valjean.
We have already looked into the depths of this conscience, and the
moment has arrived to look into them again. We do not do this without
emotion or tremor, for there is nothing more terrifying than this
species of contemplation. The mental eye can nowhere find greater
brilliancy or greater darkness than within man; it cannot dwell
on anything which is more formidable, complicated, mysterious, or
infinite. There is a spectacle grander than the sea, and that is the
sky; there is a spectacle grander than the sky, and it is the interior
of the soul. To write the poem of the human conscience, were the
subject only one man, and he the lowest of men, would be to resolve
all epic poems into one supreme and final epic. Conscience is the
chaos of chimeras, envies, and attempts, the furnace of dreams, the
lurking-place of ideas we are ashamed of; it is the pandemonium of
sophistry, the battlefield of the passions. At certain hours look
through the livid face of a reflecting man, look into his soul, peer
into the darkness. Beneath the external silence, combats of giants are
going on there, such as we read of in Homer; _mêlées_ of dragons and
hydras and clouds of phantoms, such as we find in Milton; and visionary
spirals, as in Dante. A sombre thing is the infinitude which every man
bears within him, and by which he desperately measures the volitions
of his brain and the actions of his life. Alighieri one day came to a
gloomy gate, before which he hesitated; we have one before us, on the
threshold of which we also hesitate, but we will enter.
“The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love.”
Yet
the envelope, though unsealed, was not empty. Papers could be seen
inside.
Cosette examined it. It was no longer alarm, it was no longer
curiosity; it was a beginning of anxiety.
Cosette drew from the envelope its contents, a little notebook of
paper, each page of which was numbered and bore a few lines in a very
fine and rather pretty handwriting, as Cosette thought.
Cosette looked for a name; there was none. To whom was this addressed?
To her, probably, since a hand had deposited the packet on her bench.
From whom did it come? An irresistible fascination took possession of
her; she tried to turn away her eyes from the leaflets which were
trembling in her hand, she gazed at the sky, the street, the acacias
all bathed in light, the pigeons fluttering over a neighboring roof,
and then her glance suddenly fell upon the manuscript, and she said to
herself that she must know what it contained.
This is what she read.
CHAPTER IV—A HEART BENEATH A STONE
[Illustration: Cosette With Letter]
The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a
single being even to God, that is love.
Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.
How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!
What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills the
world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could
comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of
all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.
The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac
curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of
dreams.
God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black,
creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being
transparent.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the
attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.
Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which
possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from
seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a
multitude of mysterious means to correspond.
“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”
He addressed to him only this single
word: “Monsieur? . . .” But his manner of pronouncing it contained a
complete question.
The doctor replied to the question by an expressive glance.
“Because things are not agreeable,” said Jean Valjean, “that is no
reason for being unjust towards God.”
A silence ensued.
All breasts were oppressed.
Jean Valjean turned to Cosette. He began to gaze at her as though he
wished to retain her features for eternity.
In the depths of the shadow into which he had already descended,
ecstasy was still possible to him when gazing at Cosette. The
reflection of that sweet face lighted up his pale visage.
The doctor felt of his pulse.
“Ah! it was you that he wanted!” he murmured, looking at Cosette and
Marius.
And bending down to Marius’ ear, he added in a very low voice:
“Too late.”
Jean Valjean surveyed the doctor and Marius serenely, almost without
ceasing to gaze at Cosette.
These barely articulate words were heard to issue from his mouth:
“It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live.”
All at once he rose to his feet. These accesses of strength are
sometimes the sign of the death agony. He walked with a firm step to
the wall, thrusting aside Marius and the doctor who tried to help him,
detached from the wall a little copper crucifix which was suspended
there, and returned to his seat with all the freedom of movement of
perfect health, and said in a loud voice, as he laid the crucifix on
the table:
“Behold the great martyr.”
Then his chest sank in, his head wavered, as though the intoxication of
the tomb were seizing hold upon him.
His hands, which rested on his knees, began to press their nails into
the stuff of his trousers.
Cosette supported his shoulders, and sobbed, and tried to speak to him,
but could not.
Among the words mingled with that mournful saliva which accompanies
tears, they distinguished words like the following:
“Father, do not leave us. Is it possible that we have found you only to
lose you again?”
It might be said that agony writhes.
“England has two books, one which she has made and one which has made her: Shakespeare and the Bible.”
Proud and magnanimous, yet full of strange hypocrisies; great, yet
pedantic; haughty, albeit able; prudish, yet audacious; having
favourites but no masters; her own mistress, even in her bed;
all-powerful queen, inaccessible woman,--Elizabeth is a virgin as
England is an island. Like England, she calls herself Empress of the
Sea, _Basilea maris._ A fearful depth, in which are let loose the angry
passions which behead Essex and the tempests which destroy the Armada,
defends this virgin and defends this island from every approach.
The ocean is the guardian of this modesty. A certain celibacy, in
fact, constitutes all the genius of England. Alliances, be it so; no
marriage. The universe always kept at some distance. To live alone,
to go alone, to reign alone, to be alone,--such is Elizabeth, such is
England.
On the whole, a remarkable queen and an admirable nation.
Shakespeare, on the contrary, is a sympathetic genius. Insularism is
his ligature, not his strength. He would break it willingly. A little
more and Shakespeare would be European. He loves and praises France; he
calls her "the soldier of God." Besides, in that prudish nation he is
the free poet.
England has two books: one which she has made, the other which has made
her,--Shakespeare and the Bible. These two books do not agree together.
The Bible opposes Shakespeare.
Certainly, as a literary book, the Bible, a vast cup from the East,
more overflowing in poetry even than Shakespeare, might fraternize
with him; in a social and religious point of view, it abhors him.
Shakespeare thinks, Shakespeare dreams, Shakespeare doubts. There is in
him something of that Montaigne whom he loved. The "to be or not to be"
comes from the _que sais-je?_
Moreover, Shakespeare invents. A great objection. Faith excommunicates
imagination. In respect to fables, faith is a bad neighbour, and
fondles only its own. One recollects Solon's staff raised against
Thespis. One recollects the torch of Omar brandished over Alexandria.
The situation is always the same. Modern fanaticism has inherited
that staff and that torch. That is true in Spain, and is not false in
England. I have heard an Anglican bishop discuss the Iliad and condense
everything in this remark, with which he meant to annihilate Homer: "It
is not true.
Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead. --I shall feel it.She dropped her head again on Marius knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.
”
Marius made a movement.
“Oh! don’t go away,” said she, “it will not be long now.”
She was sitting almost upright, but her voice was very low and broken
by hiccoughs.
At intervals, the death rattle interrupted her. She put her face as
near that of Marius as possible. She added with a strange expression:—
“Listen, I do not wish to play you a trick. I have a letter in my
pocket for you. I was told to put it in the post. I kept it. I did not
want to have it reach you. But perhaps you will be angry with me for it
when we meet again presently? Take your letter.”
She grasped Marius’ hand convulsively with her pierced hand, but she no
longer seemed to feel her sufferings. She put Marius’ hand in the
pocket of her blouse. There, in fact, Marius felt a paper.
“Take it,” said she.
Marius took the letter.
She made a sign of satisfaction and contentment.
“Now, for my trouble, promise me—”
And she stopped.
“What?” asked Marius.
“Promise me!”
“I promise.”
“Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.—I shall feel it.”
She dropped her head again on Marius’ knees, and her eyelids closed. He
thought the poor soul had departed. Éponine remained motionless. All at
once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she
slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of
death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to
proceed from another world:—
“And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in
love with you.”
She tried to smile once more and expired.
CHAPTER VII—GAVROCHE AS A PROFOUND CALCULATOR OF DISTANCES
Marius kept his promise. He dropped a kiss on that livid brow, where
the icy perspiration stood in beads.
This was no infidelity to Cosette; it was a gentle and pensive farewell
to an unhappy soul.
It was not without a tremor that he had taken the letter which Éponine
had given him. He had immediately felt that it was an event of weight.
He was impatient to read it. The heart of man is so constituted that
the unhappy child had hardly closed her eyes when Marius began to think
of unfolding this paper.
He laid her gently on the ground, and went away. Something told him
that he could not peruse that letter in the presence of that body.
He drew near to a candle in the tap-room. It was a small note, folded
and sealed with a woman’s elegant care. The address was in a woman’s
hand and ran:—
“To Monsieur, Monsieur Marius Pontmercy, at M. Courfeyrac’s, Rue de la
Verrerie, No.
You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.
We have happiness, we desire paradise; we
possess paradise, we desire heaven.
Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand
how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and
more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.
“Does she still come to the Luxembourg?” “No, sir.” “This is the church
where she attends mass, is it not?” “She no longer comes here.” “Does
she still live in this house?” “She has moved away.” “Where has she
gone to dwell?”
“She did not say.”
What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one’s soul!
Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame
on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a
child of him!
There is one strange thing, do you know it? 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.
When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar.
voluptuousness of two minds which understand each
other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances
which penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss!
strolls by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I have
sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from
the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies
of men.
God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give
them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in
fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable
felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is
impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the
plenitude of man.
You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because
it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a
greater mystery, woman.
All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack air
and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible.
Suffocation of the soul.
When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic
unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are
concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of
the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the
same spirit. Love, soar.
On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she
walks, you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do: to
think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.
What love commences can be finished by God alone.
True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a
handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its
hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely
little.
If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive
plant; if you are a man, be love.
Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we
possess paradise, we desire heaven.
Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand
how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and
more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.
“Does she still come to the Luxembourg?” “No, sir.” “This is the church
where she attends mass, is it not?” “She no longer comes here.
If people did not love one another, I really dont see what use there would be in having any spring.
I don’t belong to the religion of that oath. Woman
is forgotten in it. This astonishes me on the part of Henri IV. My
friends, long live women! I am old, they say; it’s astonishing how much
I feel in the mood to be young. I should like to go and listen to the
bagpipes in the woods. Children who contrive to be beautiful and
contented,—that intoxicates me. I would like greatly to get married, if
any one would have me. It is impossible to imagine that God could have
made us for anything but this: to idolize, to coo, to preen ourselves,
to be dove-like, to be dainty, to bill and coo our loves from morn to
night, to gaze at one’s image in one’s little wife, to be proud, to be
triumphant, to plume oneself; that is the aim of life. There, let not
that displease you which we used to think in our day, when we were
young folks. Ah! vertu-bamboche! what charming women there were in
those days, and what pretty little faces and what lovely lasses! I
committed my ravages among them. Then love each other. If people did
not love each other, I really do not see what use there would be in
having any springtime; and for my own part, I should pray the good God
to shut up all the beautiful things that he shows us, and to take away
from us and put back in his box, the flowers, the birds, and the pretty
maidens. My children, receive an old man’s blessing.”
The evening was gay, lively and agreeable. The grandfather’s sovereign
good humor gave the key-note to the whole feast, and each person
regulated his conduct on that almost centenarian cordiality. They
danced a little, they laughed a great deal; it was an amiable wedding.
Goodman Days of Yore might have been invited to it. However, he was
present in the person of Father Gillenormand.
There was a tumult, then silence.
The married pair disappeared.
A little after midnight, the Gillenormand house became a temple.
Here we pause. On the threshold of wedding nights stands a smiling
angel with his finger on his lips.
The soul enters into contemplation before that sanctuary where the
celebration of love takes place.
There should be flashes of light athwart such houses.
The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.
The man entered, or rather, glided into, an open glade, at a
considerable distance, masked by large trees, but with which
Boulatruelle was perfectly familiar, on account of having noticed, near
a large pile of porous stones, an ailing chestnut-tree bandaged with a
sheet of zinc nailed directly upon the bark. This glade was the one
which was formerly called the Blaru-bottom. The heap of stones,
destined for no one knows what employment, which was visible there
thirty years ago, is doubtless still there. Nothing equals a heap of
stones in longevity, unless it is a board fence. They are temporary
expedients. What a reason for lasting!
Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, dropped rather than descended
from the tree. The lair was unearthed, the question now was to seize
the beast. That famous treasure of his dreams was probably there.
It was no small matter to reach that glade. By the beaten paths, which
indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good quarter of an
hour. In a bee-line, through the underbrush, which is peculiarly dense,
very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality, a full half hour was
necessary. Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this.
He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which
ruins many a man. The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the
best road.
“Let’s take to the wolves’ Rue de Rivoli,” said he.
Boulatruelle, accustomed to taking crooked courses, was on this
occasion guilty of the fault of going straight.
He flung himself resolutely into the tangle of undergrowth.
He had to deal with holly bushes, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines,
thistles, and very irascible brambles. He was much lacerated.
At the bottom of the ravine he found water which he was obliged to
traverse.
At last he reached the Blaru-bottom, after the lapse of forty minutes,
sweating, soaked, breathless, scratched, and ferocious.
There was no one in the glade. Boulatruelle rushed to the heap of
stones. It was in its place. It had not been carried off.
As for the man, he had vanished in the forest. He had made his escape.
Where? in what direction? into what thicket? Impossible to guess.
And, heartrending to say, there, behind the pile of stones, in front of
the tree with the sheet of zinc, was freshly turned earth, a pick-axe,
abandoned or forgotten, and a hole.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
An irresistible fascination took possession of
her; she tried to turn away her eyes from the leaflets which were
trembling in her hand, she gazed at the sky, the street, the acacias
all bathed in light, the pigeons fluttering over a neighboring roof,
and then her glance suddenly fell upon the manuscript, and she said to
herself that she must know what it contained.
This is what she read.
CHAPTER IV—A HEART BENEATH A STONE
[Illustration: Cosette With Letter]
The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a
single being even to God, that is love.
Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.
How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!
What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills the
world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could
comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of
all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.
The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac
curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of
dreams.
God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black,
creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being
transparent.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the
attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.
Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which
possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from
seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a
multitude of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the
song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children,
the light of the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars,
all creation. And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love.
Love is sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.
Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.
The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love,
that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the
infinite, the inexhaustible is requisite.
Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like
it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible,
imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is
immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can
extinguish.
When the heart is dry the eye is dry.
To sum up, in conclusion, that which can be summed up and translated
into positive results in all that we have just pointed out, we will
confine ourselves to the statement that, in the course of nineteen
years, Jean Valjean, the inoffensive tree-pruner of Faverolles, the
formidable convict of Toulon, had become capable, thanks to the manner
in which the galleys had moulded him, of two sorts of evil action:
firstly, of evil action which was rapid, unpremeditated, dashing,
entirely instinctive, in the nature of reprisals for the evil which he
had undergone; secondly, of evil action which was serious, grave,
consciously argued out and premeditated, with the false ideas which
such a misfortune can furnish. His deliberate deeds passed through
three successive phases, which natures of a certain stamp can alone
traverse,—reasoning, will, perseverance. He had for moving causes his
habitual wrath, bitterness of soul, a profound sense of indignities
suffered, the reaction even against the good, the innocent, and the
just, if there are any such. The point of departure, like the point of
arrival, for all his thoughts, was hatred of human law; that hatred
which, if it be not arrested in its development by some providential
incident, becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the
hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation, and which
manifests itself by a vague, incessant, and brutal desire to do harm to
some living being, no matter whom. It will be perceived that it was not
without reason that Jean Valjean’s passport described him as _a very
dangerous man_.
From year to year this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatal
sureness. When the heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure from
the galleys it had been nineteen years since he had shed a tear.
CHAPTER VIII—BILLOWS AND SHADOWS
A man overboard!
What matters it? The vessel does not halt. The wind blows. That sombre
ship has a path which it is forced to pursue. It passes on.
The man disappears, then reappears; he plunges, he rises again to the
surface; he calls, he stretches out his arms; he is not heard. The
vessel, trembling under the hurricane, is wholly absorbed in its own
workings; the passengers and sailors do not even see the drowning man;
his miserable head is but a speck amid the immensity of the waves. He
gives vent to desperate cries from out of the depths. What a spectre is
that retreating sail! He gazes and gazes at it frantically. It
retreats, it grows dim, it diminishes in size. He was there but just
now, he was one of the crew, he went and came along the deck with the
rest, he had his part of breath and of sunlight, he was a living man.
Now, what has taken place?
He condemned nothing in haste and without taking
circumstances into account. He said, “Examine the road over which the
fault has passed.”
Being, as he described himself with a smile, an _ex-sinner_, he had
none of the asperities of austerity, and he professed, with a good deal
of distinctness, and without the frown of the ferociously virtuous, a
doctrine which may be summed up as follows:—
“Man has upon him his flesh, which is at once his burden and his
temptation. He drags it with him and yields to it. He must watch it,
check it, repress it, and obey it only at the last extremity. There may
be some fault even in this obedience; but the fault thus committed is
venial; it is a fall, but a fall on the knees which may terminate in
prayer.
“To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err,
fall, sin if you will, but be upright.
“The least possible sin is the law of man. No sin at all is the dream
of the angel. All which is terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a
gravitation.”
When he saw everyone exclaiming very loudly, and growing angry very
quickly, “Oh! oh!” he said, with a smile; “to all appearance, this is a
great crime which all the world commits. These are hypocrisies which
have taken fright, and are in haste to make protest and to put
themselves under shelter.”
He was indulgent towards women and poor people, on whom the burden of
human society rest. He said, “The faults of women, of children, of the
feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands,
the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise.”
He said, moreover, “Teach those who are ignorant as many things as
possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction
gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul is
full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the
person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the
shadow.”
It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of
judging things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.
There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.
Let
us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of
creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We
have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against
the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, to
admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify
belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of
caterpillars.
CHAPTER VI—THE ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF PRAYER
With regard to the modes of prayer, all are good, provided that they
are sincere. Turn your book upside down and be in the infinite.
There is, as we know, a philosophy which denies the infinite. There is
also a philosophy, pathologically classified, which denies the sun;
this philosophy is called blindness.
To erect a sense which we lack into a source of truth, is a fine blind
man’s self-sufficiency.
The curious thing is the haughty, superior, and compassionate airs
which this groping philosophy assumes towards the philosophy which
beholds God. One fancies he hears a mole crying, “I pity them with
their sun!”
There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom,
led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure
that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition,
and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they
prove God.
We salute them as philosophers, while inexorably denouncing their
philosophy.
Let us go on.
The remarkable thing about it is, also, their facility in paying
themselves off with words. A metaphysical school of the North,
impregnated to some extent with fog, has fancied that it has worked a
revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the
word Will.
To say: “the plant wills,” instead of: “the plant grows”: this would be
fecund in results, indeed, if we were to add: “the universe wills.”
Why? Because it would come to this: the plant wills, therefore it has
an _I_; the universe wills, therefore it has a God.
As for us, who, however, in contradistinction to this school, reject
nothing _a priori_, a will in the plant, accepted by this school,
appears to us more difficult to admit than a will in the universe
denied by it.
To deny the will of the infinite, that is to say, God, is impossible on
any other conditions than a denial of the infinite.
Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.
Sir,
sir, I am sorry for Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen; but I am
also sorry for that poor Huguenot woman, who, in 1685, under Louis the
Great, sir, while with a nursing infant, was bound, naked to the waist,
to a stake, and the child kept at a distance; her breast swelled with
milk and her heart with anguish; the little one, hungry and pale,
beheld that breast and cried and agonized; the executioner said to the
woman, a mother and a nurse, ‘Abjure!’ giving her her choice between
the death of her infant and the death of her conscience. What say you
to that torture of Tantalus as applied to a mother? Bear this well in
mind sir: the French Revolution had its reasons for existence; its
wrath will be absolved by the future; its result is the world made
better. From its most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the
human race. I abridge, I stop, I have too much the advantage; moreover,
I am dying.”
And ceasing to gaze at the Bishop, the conventionary concluded his
thoughts in these tranquil words:—
“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are
over, this fact is recognized,—that the human race has been treated
harshly, but that it has progressed.”
The conventionary doubted not that he had successively conquered all
the inmost intrenchments of the Bishop. One remained, however, and from
this intrenchment, the last resource of Monseigneur Bienvenu’s
resistance, came forth this reply, wherein appeared nearly all the
harshness of the beginning:—
“Progress should believe in God. Good cannot have an impious servitor.
He who is an atheist is but a bad leader for the human race.”
The former representative of the people made no reply. He was seized
with a fit of trembling. He looked towards heaven, and in his glance a
tear gathered slowly. When the eyelid was full, the tear trickled down
his livid cheek, and he said, almost in a stammer, quite low, and to
himself, while his eyes were plunged in the depths:—
“O thou! O ideal! Thou alone existest!”
The Bishop experienced an indescribable shock.
After a pause, the old man raised a finger heavenward and said:—
“The infinite is. He is there. If the infinite had no person, person
would be without limit; it would not be infinite; in other words, it
would not exist.
“There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height”
“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.”
“It is by suffering that human beings become angels.”
“We may remark in passing that to be blind and beloved may, in this world where nothing is perfect, be among the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, ev”
“I like not only to be loved, but to be told I am loved.”
“Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals love them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more.”
