Page 1696 - les-miserables

about anything, and she saw things justly. The woman feels
and speaks with the tender instinct of the heart, which is
infallible.
No one understands so well as a woman, how to say
things that are, at once, both sweet and deep. Sweetness and
depth, they are the whole of woman; in them lies the whole
of heaven.
In this full felicity, tears welled up to their eyes every
instant. A crushed lady-bug, a feather fallen from a nest,
a branch of hawthorn broken, aroused their pity, and their
ecstasy, sweetly mingled with melancholy, seemed to ask
nothing better than to weep. The most sovereign symptom
of love is a tenderness that is, at times, almost unbearable.
And, in addition to this,—all these contradictions are
the lightning play of love,—they were fond of laughing, they
laughed readily and with a delicious freedom, and so famil-
iarly that they sometimes presented the air of two boys.
Still, though unknown to hearts intoxicated with purity,
nature is always present and will not be forgotten. She is
there with her brutal and sublime object; and however great
may be the innocence of souls, one feels in the most modest
private interview, the adorable and mysterious shade which
separates a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.
They idolized each other.
The permanent and the immutable are persistent. People
live, they smile, they laugh, they make little grimaces with
the tips of their lips, they interlace their fingers, they call
each other thou, and that does not prevent eternity.
Two lovers hide themselves in the evening, in the twi-

1696 Les Miserables