Page 386 - les-miserables

would, he resumed the gloomy dialogue in which it was
he who spoke and he who listened, saying that which he
would have preferred to ignore, and listened to that which
he would have preferred not to hear, yielding to that myste-
rious power which said to him: ‘Think!’ as it said to another
condemned man, two thousand years ago, ‘March on!’
Before proceeding further, and in order to make our-
selves fully understood, let us insist upon one necessary
observation.
It is certain that people do talk to themselves; there is no
living being who has not done it. It may even be said that
the word is never a more magnificent mystery than when it
goes from thought to conscience within a man, and when it
returns from conscience to thought; it is in this sense only
that the words so often employed in this chapter, he said,
he exclaimed, must be understood; one speaks to one’s self,
talks to one’s self, exclaims to one’s self without breaking the
external silence; there is a great tumult; everything about us
talks except the mouth. The realities of the soul are none the
less realities because they are not visible and palpable.
So he asked himself where he stood. He interrogated
himself upon that ‘settled resolve.’ He confessed to himself
that all that he had just arranged in his mind was mon-
strous, that ‘to let things take their course, to let the good
God do as he liked,’ was simply horrible; to allow this error
of fate and of men to be carried out, not to hinder it, to lend
himself to it through his silence, to do nothing, in short,
was to do everything! that this was hypocritical baseness in
the last degree! that it was a base, cowardly, sneaking, ab-

386 Les Miserables