Page 1110 - les-miserables

salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought,
education, penal servitude, poverty, association, property,
production and sharing, the enigma of this lower world
which covers the human ant-hill with darkness; and at
night, he gazed upon the planets, those enormous beings.
Like Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He spoke
softly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embar-
rassment, dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a
mere nothing, and was very timid. Yet he was intrepid.
Feuilly was a workingman, a fan-maker, orphaned both
of father and mother, who earned with difficulty three
francs a day, and had but one thought, to deliver the world.
He had one other preoccupation, to educate himself; he
called this also, delivering himself. He had taught himself to
read and write; everything that he knew, he had learned by
himself. Feuilly had a generous heart. The range of his em-
brace was immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples.
As his mother had failed him, he meditated on his country.
He brooded with the profound divination of the man of the
people, over what we now call the idea of the nationality,
had learned history with the express object of raging with
full knowledge of the case. In this club of young Utopians,
occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside
world. He had for his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary,
Roumania, Italy. He uttered these names incessantly, ap-
propriately and inappropriately, with the tenacity of right.
The violations of Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of Rus-
sia on Warsaw, of Austria on Venice, enraged him. Above
all things, the great violence of 1772 aroused him. There is

1110 Les Miserables