Les Misérables, page 256
CHAPTER IV--A HEART BENEATH A STONE
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The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of asingle being even to God, that is love.
Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.
How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!
What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills theworld! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One couldcomprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father ofall evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.
The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac curtainis sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of dreams.
God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things areblack, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that beingtransparent.
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever theattitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.
Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, whichpossess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeingeach other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitudeof mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the song of thebirds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light ofthe sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation.And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love issufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.
Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.
The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, thatis the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite,the inexhaustible is requisite.
Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Likeit, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible,imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which isimmortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing canextinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, andwe see it beaming in the very depths of heaven.
Oh Love! Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand eachother, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glanceswhich penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss!strolls by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I havesometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves fromthe lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies ofmen.
God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to givethem endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, infact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffablefelicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, isimpossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is theplenitude of man.
You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and becauseit is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greatermystery, woman.
All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lackair and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible.Suffocation of the soul.
When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelicunity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they areconcerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries ofthe same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of thesame spirit. Love, soar.
On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as shewalks, you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do: tothink of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.
What love commences can be finished by God alone.
True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or ahandkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and itshopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitelylittle.
If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitiveplant; if you are a man, be love.
Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; wepossess paradise, we desire heaven.
Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understandhow to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and morethan heaven, it has voluptuousness.
"Does she still come to the Luxembourg?" "No, sir." "This is the churchwhere she attends mass, is it not?" "She no longer comes here." "Doesshe still live in this house?" "She has moved away." "Where has she goneto dwell?"
"She did not say."
What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!
Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shameon the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a childof him!
There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. Thereis a being who carried off my sky when she went away.
Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, handin hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing afinger,--that would suffice for my eternity!
Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to livein it.
Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture.There is ecstasy in agony.
Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing.
Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.
Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a longtrial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. Thisdestiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside thetomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish thedefinitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceivethe infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead.In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! tohim who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death willdeprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again.
I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. Hishat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickledthrough his shoes, and the stars through his soul.
What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it isto love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longercomposed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anythingthat is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no moregerminate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul,inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the cloudsand the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, itsvanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feelsanything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crestsof mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.
If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.
