Page 155 - les-miserables

one is hungry?’ That, in the first place, it is very rare for any
one to die of hunger, literally; and next, that, fortunately or
unfortunately, man is so constituted that he can suffer long
and much, both morally and physically, without dying; that
it is therefore necessary to have patience; that that would
even have been better for those poor little children; that it
had been an act of madness for him, a miserable, unfortu-
nate wretch, to take society at large violently by the collar,
and to imagine that one can escape from misery through
theft; that that is in any case a poor door through which to
escape from misery through which infamy enters; in short,
that he was in the wrong.
Then he asked himself—
Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal
history. Whether it was not a serious thing, that he, a la-
borer, out of work, that he, an industrious man, should have
lacked bread. And whether, the fault once committed and
confessed, the chastisement had not been ferocious and dis-
proportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse on
the part of the law, in respect to the penalty, than there had
been on the part of the culprit in respect to his fault. Wheth-
er there had not been an excess of weights in one balance
of the scale, in the one which contains expiation. Whether
the over-weight of the penalty was not equivalent to the an-
nihilation of the crime, and did not result in reversing the
situation, of replacing the fault of the delinquent by the fault
of the repression, of converting the guilty man into the vic-
tim, and the debtor into the creditor, and of ranging the law
definitely on the side of the man who had violated it.

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