Marius had lived for five years in poverty, in destitution, even in
distress, but he now perceived that he had not known real misery. True
misery he had but just had a view of. It was its spectre which had just
passed before his eyes. In fact, he who has only beheld the misery of
man has seen nothing; the misery of woman is what he must see; he who
has seen only the misery of woman has seen nothing; he must see the
misery of the child.
When a man has reached his last extremity, he has reached his last
resources at the same time. Woe to the defenceless beings who surround
him! Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, good will, all fail him
simultaneously. The light of day seems extinguished without, the moral
light within; in these shadows man encounters the feebleness of the
woman and the child, and bends them violently to ignominy.
Then all horrors become possible. Despair is surrounded with fragile
partitions which all open on either vice or crime.
Health, youth, honor, all the shy delicacies of the young body, the
heart, virginity, modesty, that epidermis of the soul, are manipulated
in sinister wise by that fumbling which seeks resources, which
encounters opprobrium, and which accommodates itself to it. Fathers,
mothers, children, brothers, sisters, men, women, daughters, adhere and
become incorporated, almost like a mineral formation, in that dusky
promiscuousness of sexes, relationships, ages, infamies, and
innocences. They crouch, back to back, in a sort of hut of fate. They
exchange woe-begone glances. Oh, the unfortunate wretches! How pale
they are! How cold they are! It seems as though they dwelt in a planet
much further from the sun than ours.
This young girl was to Marius a sort of messenger from the realm of sad
shadows. She revealed to him a hideous side of the night.
Marius almost reproached himself for the preoccupations of reverie and
passion which had prevented his bestowing a glance on his neighbors up
to that day. The payment of their rent had been a mechanical movement,
which any one would have yielded to; but he, Marius, should have done
better than that. What! only a wall separated him from those abandoned
beings who lived gropingly in the dark outside the pale of the rest of
the world, he was elbow to elbow with them, he was, in some sort, the
last link of the human race which they touched, he heard them live, or
rather, rattle in the death agony beside him, and he paid no heed to
them! Every day, every instant, he heard them walking on the other side
of the wall, he heard them go, and come, and speak, and he did not even
lend an ear! And groans lay in those words, and he did not even listen
to them, his thoughts were elsewhere, given up to dreams, to impossible
radiances, to loves in the air, to follies; and all the while, human
creatures, his brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the people,
were agonizing in vain beside him! He even formed a part of their
misfortune, and he aggravated it. For if they had had another neighbor
who was less chimerical and more attentive, any ordinary and charitable
man, evidently their indigence would have been noticed, their signals
of distress would have been perceived, and they would have been taken
hold of and rescued! They appeared very corrupt and very depraved, no
doubt, very vile, very odious even; but those who fall without becoming
degraded are rare; besides, there is a point where the unfortunate and
the infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, a fatal word,
_the miserable_; whose fault is this? And then should not the charity
be all the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great?
While reading himself this moral lesson, for there were occasions on
which Marius, like all truly honest hearts, was his own pedagogue and
scolded himself more than he deserved, he stared at the wall which
separated him from the Jondrettes, as though he were able to make his
gaze, full of pity, penetrate that partition and warm these wretched
people. The wall was a thin layer of plaster upheld by lathes and
beams, and, as the reader had just learned, it allowed the sound of
voices and words to be clearly distinguished. Only a man as dreamy as
Marius could have failed to perceive this long before. There was no
paper pasted on the wall, either on the side of the Jondrettes or on
that of Marius; the coarse construction was visible in its nakedness.
Marius examined the partition, almost unconsciously; sometimes reverie
examines, observes, and scrutinizes as thought would. All at once he
sprang up; he had just perceived, near the top, close to the ceiling, a
triangular hole, which resulted from the space between three lathes.
The plaster which should have filled this cavity was missing, and by
mounting on the commode, a view could be had through this aperture into
the Jondrettes’ attic. Commiseration has, and should have, its
curiosity. This aperture formed a sort of peep-hole. It is permissible
to gaze at misfortune like a traitor in order to succor it.27
“Let us get some little idea of what these people are like,” thought
Marius, “and in what condition they are.”
He climbed upon the commode, put his eye to the crevice, and looked.