CHAPTER V

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.