Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [207]
On certain days, each one of these beings, in her turn, had to remain twelve hours in succession kneeling upon the flagstones, or prostrate on her face, with her arms crossed.
The others were men, these were women. What had these men done? They had robbed, raped, plundered, killed, assassinated. They were high waymen, forgers, poisoners, arsonists, murderers, parricides. What had these women done? They had done nothing.
On one side, robbery, fraud, chicanery, violence, lust, homicide, every species of sacrilege, every kind of offence; on the other, one thing only,—innocence.
A perfect innocence almost borne upwards in a mysterious Assumption, clinging still to Earth through virtue, already touching Heaven through holiness.ca
On the one hand, the mutual avowal of crimes detailed with bated breath; on the other, faults confessed aloud. And oh! what crimes! and oh! what faults!
On one side foul miasma, on the other, ineffable perfume. On the one side, a moral pestilence, watched day and night, held in subjection at the cannon’s mouth, and slowly consuming its infected victims; on the other, chaste kindling of every soul together on the same hearthstone. There, utter gloom; here, the shadow, but a shadow full of light, and the light full of glowing rays.
Two places of slavery; but, in the former, rescue possible, a legal limit always in view, and, then, escape. In the second, perpetuity, the only hope at the most distant boundary of the future, that gleam of liberty which men call death.
In the former, the captives were enchained by chains only; in the other, they were enchained by faith alone.
What resulted from the first? One vast curse, the gnashing of teeth, hatred, desperate depravity, a cry of rage against human society, sarcasm against heaven.
What issued from the second? Benediction and love.
And, in these two places, so alike and yet so different, these two species of beings so dissimilar were performing the same work of expiation.
Jean Valjean thoroughly comprehended the expiation of the first; personal expiation, expiation for oneself. But, he did not understand that of the others, of these blameless, spotless creatures, and he asked himself with a tremor: “Expiation of what? What expiation?”
A voice responded in his conscience: the most divine of all human generosity, expiation for others.
Here we withhold all theories of our own: we are but the narrator; we adopt Jean Valjean’s point of view and we merely reproduce his impressions. cb
He had before his eyes the sublime summit of self-denial, the loftiest possible height of virtue; innocence forgiving men their sins and expiating them in their stead; servitude endured, torture accepted, chastisement and misery invoked by souls that had not sinned in order that these might not fall upon souls which had; the love of humanity losing itself in the love of God, but remaining there, distinct and suppliant; sweet, feeble beings supporting all the torments of those who are punished, yet retaining the smile of those who are rewarded. And then he remembered that he had dared to complain.
When he thought of these things, all that was in him gave way before this mystery of sublimity. In these meditations, pride vanished. He reverted, again and again, to himself; he felt his own pitiful unworthiness, and often wept. All that had occurred in his existence, for the last six months, led him back towards the holy injunctions of the bishop; Cosette through love, the convent through humility.
Sometimes, in the evening, about dusk, at the hour when the garden was solitary, he was seen kneeling, in the middle of the walk that ran along the chapel, before the window through which he had looked, on the night of his first arrival, turned towards the spot where he knew that the sister who was performing the reparation was prostrate in prayer. Thus he prayed kneeling before this sister.
It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God.
Everything around him, this quiet garden, these balmy flowers, these children, shouting with joy, these