Page 1677 - les-miserables

Mirliton ribonribo.

This was sung in a cellar or in a nook of the forest while
cutting a man’s throat.
A serious symptom. In the eighteenth century, the an-
cient melancholy of the dejected classes vanishes. They
began to laugh. They rally the grand meg and the grand
dab. Given Louis XV. they call the King of France ‘le Mar-
quis de Pantin.’ And behold, they are almost gay. A sort of
gleam proceeds from these miserable wretches, as though
their consciences were not heavy within them any more.
These lamentable tribes of darkness have no longer merely
the desperate audacity of actions, they possess the heedless
audacity of mind. A sign that they are losing the sense of
their criminality, and that they feel, even among thinkers
and dreamers, some indefinable support which the latter
themselves know not of. A sign that theft and pillage are be-
ginning to filter into doctrines and sophisms, in such a way
as to lose somewhat of their ugliness, while communicating
much of it to sophisms and doctrines. A sign, in short, of
some outbreak which is prodigious and near unless some
diversion shall arise.
Let us pause a moment. Whom are we accusing here? Is
it the eighteenth century? Is it philosophy? Certainly not.
The work of the eighteenth century is healthy and good
and wholesome. The encyclopedists, Diderot at their head;
the physiocrates, Turgot at their head; the philosophers,
Voltaire at their head; the Utopians, Rousseau at their
head,—these are four sacred legions. Humanity’s immense

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