Oh! if they could, the unhappy creatures, if they could put from them
their hearts, their dreams, harden themselves with a hardness that
could not be softened, be forever cold and passionless, tear out their
entrails, and, since they are filth, become monsters! If they could no
longer think! If they could ignore the flower, efface the star, stop
up the mouth of the pit, close heaven! They would at least no longer
suffer. But no. They have a right to marriage, they have a right to the
heart, they have a right to torture, they have a right to the ideal.
No chilling of their hearts can put out the internal fire. However cold
they may be they burn. This, we have said, is at once their misery and
their crown. This sublimeness combines with their abjection to overwhelm
them and raise them up. Whether they will or not, the inextinguishable
does not become extinguished. Illusion is untamable. Nothing is more
invincible than dreams, and man is almost made up of dreams. Nature will
not agree to be insolvable. One must contemplate, aspire, love. If need
be marble will set the example. The statue becomes a woman rather than
the woman a statue.
The sewer is a sanctuary in spite of itself. It is unhealthy, there is
vitiated air in it, but the irresistible phenomenon is none the less
accomplished; all the holy generosities bloom livid in this cave.
Cynicism and the secret despair of pity are driven back by ecstasy, the
magnificences of kindness shine through infamy; this orphan creature
feels herself to be wife, sister, mother; and this fraternity which has
no family, and this maternity which has no children, and this adoration
which has no altar, she casts into the outer darkness. Some one marries
her. Who? The man in the gloom. She sees on her finger the ring made of
the mysterious gold of dreams. And she sobs. Torrents of tears well from
her eyes. Sombre delights!
And at the same time, let us repeat it, she suffers unheard-of tortures.
She does not belong to him to whom she has given herself. Everybody
takes her away again. The brutal public hand holds the wretched creature
and will not let her go. She fain would flee. Flee whither? From whom?
From you, herself, above all from him whom she loves, the funereal ideal
man. She cannot.
Thus, and these are extreme afflictions, this hapless wight expiates,
and her expiation is brought upon her by her grandeur. Whatever she may
do, she has to love. She is condemned to the light. She has to condole,
she has to succour, she has to devote herself, she has to be kind.
A woman who has lost her modesty, fain would know love no more;
impossible. The refluxes of the heart are as inevitable as those of the
sea; the lights of the heart are as fixed as those of the night.
There is within us that which we can never lose. Abnegation, sacrifice,
tenderness, enthusiasm, all these rays turn against the woman within her
inmost self and attack and burn her. All these virtues remain to avenge
themselves upon her. When she would have been a wife, she is a slave.
Hers is the hopeless, thankless task of lulling a brigand in the blue
nebulousness of her illusions and of decking Mandrin with a starry rag.
She is the sister of charity of crime. She loves, alas! She endures her
inadmissible divinity; she is magnanimous and thrills at so being. She
is happy with a horrible happiness. She enters backwards into indignant
Eden.
We do not sufficiently reflect upon this that is within us and cannot be
lost.
Prostitution, vice, crime, what matters!
Night may become as black as it likes, the spark is still there.
However low you go there is light. Light in the vagabond, light in the
mendicant, light in the thief, light in the street-walker. The deeper
you go the more the miraculous light persists in showing itself.
Every heart has its pearl, which is the same for the heart gutter and
the heart ocean--love.
No mire can dissolve this particle of God.
Wherefore, there, at the extreme of gloom, of despondency, of
chill-heartedness and abandonment; in this obscurity, in this
putrefaction, in these gaols, in these dark paths, in this shipwreck;
beneath the lowest layer of the heap of miseries, under the bog of
public disdain which is ice and night; behind the eddying of those
frightful snowflakes the judges, the gendarmes, the warders and the
executioners for the bandit, the passers-by for the prostitute, which
cross each other, innumerable, in the dull grey mist that for these
wretches replace the sun; beneath these pitiless fatalities; beneath
this bewildering maze of vaults, some of granite, the others of hatred;
at the deepest depths of horror; in the midst of asphyxiation; at the
bottom of the chaos of all possible blacknesses; under the frightful
thickness of a deluge composed of expectorations, there where all is
extinct, where all is dead, something moves and shines. What is it? A
flame.
And what flame?
The soul.
O adorable prodigy!
Love, the ideal, is found even in the Pit.