A PROVIDENTIAL PEEP-HOLE.
Marius had lived for the past five years in poverty, want, and even distress, but he now saw that he had never known what real misery was, and he had just witnessed it; it was the phantom which bad just passed before him. For, in truth, he who has only seen man's misery has seen nothing, he must see woman's misery; while he who has seen woman's misery has seen nothing, for he must see the misery of the child. When man has reached the last extremity he has also reached the limit of his resources; and then, woe to the defenceless beings that surround him! Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, and food will all fail him at once; the light of day seems extinguished outside, the moral light is extinguished within him. In these shadows man comes across the weakness of the wife and the child, and violently bends them to ignominy.
In such a case every horror is possible, and despair is surrounded by thin partitions which all open upon vice and crime. Health, youth, honor, the sacred and retiring delicacy of the still innocent flesh, the heart-virginity and modesty, that epidermis of the soul, are foully clutched by this groping hand, which seeks resources, finds opprobrium, and puts up with it.
Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, men, women, and girls, adhere and are aggregated almost like a mineral formation in this misty promiscuity of sexes, relations, ages, infamies, and innocencies. Leaning against each other, they crouch in a species of den of destiny, and look at each other lamentably. Oh, the unfortunates! how pale they are! how cold they are! It seems as if they belong to a planet much farther from the sun than our own.
This girl was to Marius a sort of emissary from the darkness, and she revealed to him a hideous side of night. Marius almost reproached himself for the preoccupations of reverie and passion which, up to this day, had prevented him from taking a glance at his neighbors. To have paid their rent was a mechanical impulse, which any one might have had; but he, Marius, ought to have done better. What, only a wall separated himself from these abandoned creatures, who lived groping in night, beyond the pale of other living beings! He elbowed them, he was to some extent the last link of the human race which they could touch; he heard them living, or rather dying, by his side, and he paid no attention to them! Every moment of the day he heard them, through the wall, coming, going, and talking—and he did not listen! and in their words were groans, and he did not hear them! His thoughts were elsewhere,—engaged with dreams, impossible sun-beams, loves in the air, and follies; and yet, human creatures, his brethren in Christ, his brethren in the people, were slowly dying by his side, dying unnecessarily! He even formed part of their misfortune, and he aggravated it. For, if they had had another neighbor, a neighbor more attentive, less chimerical, an ordinary and charitable man, their indigence would evidently have been noticed, their signals of distress perceived, and they might perhaps have been picked up and saved long before. They doubtless seemed very depraved, very corrupt, very vile, and indeed very odious; but persons who fall without being degraded are rare; besides, there is a stage where the unfortunate and the infamous are mingled and confounded in one word,—a fatal word, "Les Misérables," and with whom lies the fault? And then, again, should not the charity be the greater the deeper the fall is?
While reading himself this lecture,—for there were occasions on which Marius was his own pedagogue, and reproached himself more than he deserved,—he looked at the wall which separated him from the Jondrettes, as if his pitying glance could pass through the partition and warm the unhappy beings. The wall was a thin coating of plaster supported by laths and beams, and which, as we have stated, allowed the murmurs of words and voices to be distinctly heard. A man must be a dreamer like Marius not to have noticed the fact before. No paper was hung on either side of the wall, and its clumsy construction was plainly visible. Almost unconsciously Marius examined this partition; for at times reverie examines, scrutinizes, and observes much as thought does. All at once he rose, for he had just noticed near the ceiling a triangular hole produced by the gap between three laths. The plaster which once covered this hole had fallen off, and by getting on his chest of drawers he could see through this aperture into the room of the Jondrettes. Commiseration has, and should have, its curiosity, and it is permissible to regard misfortune traitorously when we wish to relieve it. "Let me see," thought Marius, "what these people are like, and what state they are in." He clambered on the drawers, put his eye to the hole, and looked.