Bab Bab 247 · A HEART BENEATH A STONE

[Illustration: Cosette With Letter]

The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a

single 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 the

world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could

comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of

all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.

The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac

curtain is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of

dreams.

God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black,

creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being

transparent.

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the

attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.

Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which

possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from

seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a

multitude of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the

song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children,

the light of the 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 is sufficiently 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,

that is 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. Like

it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible,

imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is

immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can

extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones,

and we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven.

Oh Love! Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each

other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances

which penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss!

strolls by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I have

sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from

the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies

of men.

God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give

them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in

fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable

felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is

impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the

plenitude of man.

You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because

it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a

greater mystery, woman.

All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack air

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 angelic

unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are

concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of

the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the

same spirit. Love, soar.

On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she

walks, you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do: to

think 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 a

handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its

hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely

little.

If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive

plant; if you are a man, be love.

Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we

possess paradise, we desire heaven.

Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand

how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and

more than heaven, it has voluptuousness.

“Does she still come to the Luxembourg?” “No, sir.” “This is the church

where she attends mass, is it not?” “She no longer comes here.” “Does

she still live in this house?” “She has moved away.” “Where has she

gone to 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. Shame

on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a

child of him!

There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. There

is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.

Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand in

hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a

finger,—that would suffice for my eternity!

Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to

live in 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 long

trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This

destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the

tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the

definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living

perceive the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by

the dead. In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe,

alas! to him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances!

Death will deprive 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. His

hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water

trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.

What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is to

love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer

composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything

that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more

germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul,

inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds and

the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its

vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer

feels anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the

crests of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.

If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become

extinct.