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A PROVIDENTIAL PEEP-HOLE
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 accomodates
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
revery 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
revery 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]
[27] The peep-hole is a Judas in French.
Hence the half-punning allusion.
"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.
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