Page 103 - les-miserables

soul should shut itself up in it, as the pearl in the oyster.’
Thus he shut himself up, he lived there, he was absolutely
satisfied with it, leaving on one side the prodigious ques-
tions which attract and terrify, the fathomless perspectives
of abstraction, the precipices of metaphysics—all those pro-
fundities which converge, for the apostle in God, for the
atheist in nothingness; destiny, good and evil, the way of
being against being, the conscience of man, the thought-
ful somnambulism of the animal, the transformation in
death, the recapitulation of existences which the tomb con-
tains, the incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on
the persistent I, the essence, the substance, the Nile, and
the Ens, the soul, nature, liberty, necessity; perpendicu-
lar problems, sinister obscurities, where lean the gigantic
archangels of the human mind; formidable abysses, which
Lucretius, Manou, Saint Paul, Dante, contemplate with eyes
flashing lightning, which seems by its steady gaze on the in-
finite to cause stars to blaze forth there.
Monseigneur Bienvenu was simply a man who took note
of the exterior of mysterious questions without scrutinizing
them, and without troubling his own mind with them, and
who cherished in his own soul a grave respect for darkness.

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