Les Misérables

by Victor Hugo

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 at your side a softer radiance and a greater mystery, woman.

What love begins can only be finished by God.

It is composed at the same time of the infinitely great and the infinitely small.

If you are stone, be lodestone, if you are plant, be sensitive, if you are man, be love.

Love has its childishness, the other passions have their pettiness. Shame on the passions that make man little!

Honor to what makes him a child!

Woe, alas, to the one who shall have loved bodies, forms, appearances only. Death will take everything from him. Try to love souls, you shall find them again.

What a great thing, to be loved! What a greater thing still, to love! The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything but what is elevated

and great. An unworthy thought can no more

If no one loved, the sun would go out.

letter with no address, no name, no date, no signature, intense and disinterested, an enigma composed of truths, a message of love made to be brought by an angel and read by a virgin, a rendezvous given beyond the earth, a love letter from a phantom to a shade.

It had been written with one foot in the grave and one finger in Heaven. These lines, fallen one by one onto the paper, were what might be called drops of a living soul.

was done. Cosette had fallen back into profound seraphic love.

The abyss of Eden had reopened.

All that day Cosette was in a sort of daze. She could hardly think, her ideas were like a ...

seemed to her at times that she was entering the chimeric; she asked herself, “Is it real?” Then she felt the precious letter under her dress, she pressed it against her heart, she felt its corners against

her flesh, and if Jean Valjean had seen her at that moment, he would have shuddered before the luminous unknown joy that flashed from her eyes. “Oh, yes!” she thought, “It certainly is he! This came from him for me!”

Strange to say, in the sort of symphony Marius had been living since he had seen Cosette, the past, even the most recent past, had become so confused and distant to him that what Cosette told him satisfied him completely. He did not even think to speak to her of the nocturnal adventure at the Gorbeau house, the Thénardiers, the wound burning, and the strange attitude and singular flight of her father.

Marius had temporarily forgotten all that; he did not even know at night what he had done in the morning, nor where he had had lunch, nor who had spoken to him; he had songs in his ear that made him deaf to every other thought; he existed only during the hours in which he saw Cosette. Then, since he was in Heaven, it was quite natural he should forget the earth. They were both languidly supporting the indefinable burden of immaterial pleasures. Thus live these sleepwalkers called lovers. Alas! Who

has not experienced all these things? Why does there come an hour when we leave this azure, and why ...

They lived in a golden moment.

As we have seen, of the flowers, the swallows, the setting sun, the rising moon, of everything important. They had said everything, except everything. The everything of lovers is nothing. But

Sometimes, because Cosette was so beautiful, Marius closed his eyes before

her. With eyes closed is the best way to look at the soul.

Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask th...

When we are at the end of life, to die means to go away; when we are at the beginning, to go away means to die.

It was the single word, “father,” dropped by Marius, that had caused this turnabout.

“Father,” Marius resumed.

The old man’s whole face shone

with an ineffable radiance. “Yes! That is it! Call me father,...

Now there was something so kind, so sweet, so open, so paternal, in this abruptness, that in this sudden passage from discouragement to hope, Marius was as though intoxicated, stupefied. He was sitting near the tables, the light of the candle made the shabbiness of his clothing apparen...

“Father,” pursued Marius, “my good father, if you knew. I love her. You don’t realize; the first time I saw her

was at the Luxembourg, she used to come there; in the beginning I didn’t pay much attention to her, and then I don’t know how it happened, I fell in love with her.

The nonagenarian raised his hands to his temples two or three times, with an expression of anguish, drew back tottering, and sank into an armchair,

pulseless, voiceless, tearless, shaking his head, and moving his lips, stunned, with no more left in his eyes or heart than something deep and mournful, resembling night.

Joly deposited a kiss on Ma’am Hucheloup’s coarse, red, wrinkled neck, and said to Grantaire, “My dear fellow, I’ve always considered a woman’s neck an infinitely delicate thing.”

Cosette, so be it; love, so be it; I ask nothing better. Monsieur, be so kind as to get married. Be happy, my dear child.”

So saying, the old man burst into sobs. And he took Marius’s head, and he hugged it in both arms against his old breast, and they both began to weep. That is one of the forms of supreme happiness. “Father!” exclaimed Marius. “Ah! You love me then!” said the old man.

There was an ineffable moment. They choked and could not speak. At last the old man stammered, “Come, come! The ice is broken. He has called me ‘Father.’” Marius released his head from his grandfather’s arms and said softly, “But, Father, now that I am well, it seems to me that I could see her.” “Foreseen again, you will see her tomorrow.” “Father!” “What?” “Why not today?” “Well, today. Here goes for today. You have called me ‘Father,’ three times, it is well worth that. I will see to it. She will be brought to you. Foreseen, I tell you. This has already been put in...

We are pitiless toward happy lovers; we stay there when they have the greatest desire to be alone. Yet they have no need at all of society.

He exclaimed with a vivacity that had almost the vibration of anger, “Yes, that man, whoever he may be, was sublime. Do you know what he did, monsieur? He intervened like the archangel. He must have thrown himself into the midst of the fighting, snatched me out of it, opened the sewer, dragged me into it, carried me through it! He must have made his way for more than four miles through hideous subterranean galleries, bent, stooping, in the darkness, in the cloaca,

more than four miles, monsieur, with a corpse on his back! And with what aim? With the single aim of saving that corpse. And that corpse was I. He said to himself: ‘Perhaps there is a glimmer of life still there; I’ll risk my own life for that miserable spark!’ And he did not risk his own life once but twenty times! And each step was a danger. The proof is that on coming out of the sewer he was arrested. Do you know, monsieur, that that man did all that? And he could be expecting a recompense. What was I? An insurgent. What was I? A defeated man. Oh! If Cosette’s six hundred thousand francs were mine—” “They are yours,” interrupted Jean Valjean. “Well,” resumed Marius, “I would give them to find that man!” Jean Valjean kept silent.

Here we stop. On the threshold of wedding nights stands an angel smiling, a finger to his lips.

There must be glowing light above such houses. The joy they contain must escape in light through the stones of the walls and shine dimly into the darkness. It is impossible that this sacred festival of destiny should not send a celestial radiation to the infinite. Love is the sublime crucible in which is consummated the fusion of man and woman; the one being, the triple being, the final being—the human trinity springs from it. This birth of two souls into one must be an emotion for space.

lover is priest; the apprehensive maiden submits. Something of this joy goes to God. Where there really is marriage, that is to say where there is love, the ideal is mingled with it.

at that supreme hour, the wedded pair, bewildered with pleasure, and believing themselves alone, were to listen, they would hear in their room a rustling of confused wings. Perfect happiness implies the solidarity of the angels.

To love or to have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.

“To live, I once stole a loaf of bread; today, to live, I will not steal a name.”

Unconsciously, artlessness sometimes penetrates very deep. This question, simple to Cosette, was profound to Jean Valjean. Cosette wished to scratch; she tore.