Kabanata Kabanata 206 · 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 accommodates 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 reverie 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 reverie

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

“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.