Page 1678 - les-miserables

advance towards the light is due to them. They are the four
vanguards of the human race, marching towards the four
cardinal points of progress. Diderot towards the beauti-
ful, Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire towards the true,
Rousseau towards the just. But by the side of and above the
philosophers, there were the sophists, a venomous vegeta-
tion mingled with a healthy growth, hemlock in the virgin
forest. While the executioner was burning the great books
of the liberators of the century on the grand staircase of the
court-house, writers now forgotten were publishing, with
the King’s sanction, no one knows what strangely disorga-
nizing writings, which were eagerly read by the unfortunate.
Some of these publications, odd to say, which were patron-
ized by a prince, are to be found in the Secret Library. These
facts, significant but unknown, were imperceptible on the
surface. Sometimes, in the very obscurity of a fact lurks its
danger. It is obscure because it is underhand. Of all these
writers, the one who probably then excavated in the masses
the most unhealthy gallery was Restif de La Bretonne.
This work, peculiar to the whole of Europe, effected more
ravages in Germany than anywhere else. In Germany, dur-
ing a given period, summed up by Schiller in his famous
drama The Robbers, theft and pillage rose up in protest
against property and labor, assimilated certain specious
and false elementary ideas, which, though just in appear-
ance, were absurd in reality, enveloped themselves in these
ideas, disappeared within them, after a fashion, assumed an
abstract name, passed into the state of theory, and in that
shape circulated among the laborious, suffering, and honest

1678 Les Miserables