Madi’s Reviews > Les Misérables > Status Update

He sleeps. Though fate dealt with him strangely,
He lived. Bereft of his angel, he died.
It came about simply, of itself,
As bight follows when the day is ended.

These are the true joys. No other joy, save these. Love is the only ecstasy. All the rest is weeping.

To love, or to have loved, is enough. Ask for nothing more. There is no other pearl to be found in life’s shadowy convolutions. To love is an achievement.

Book seven: slang.
Origins of slang in language.
Worth a reread

Since the notion of being Jean Valjean’s daughter and of his being her father was not very clear to her, when in the evening before falling asleep her thoughts ran on, she imagined that her mother’s soul had entered the old man and come to stay close to her.

Remember, Monsieur Madeleine used to read a great deal. Jean Valjean continued to do so. He had come to be a good conversationalist. He had the hidden riches and the eloquence of a truthful and humble mind that has improved itself. He retained just enough abrasive was to season his kindness. He was tough-spirited and soft-hearted.

They seemed very depraved, very corrupt, very debased - heinous, even - but rare are those who fall without sinking into vice. In any case, there is a point where the poor and the wicked become mixed up and lumped together into one fateful word: les miserables - the wretched.

Humanity is of one kind. All men are of the same clay. With no difference, here below at least, in their predetermined fate. The same obscurity before, the same flesh during, the same dust afterwards. But ignorance mingled with the stuff of humankind blackens it. This incurable blackness spreads inside man and there becomes Evil.

“It wrung her heart, but she made her decision. Fantine, as we shall see, had the fierce bravery of life itself.”