Page 1265 - les-miserables

crime.
Health, youth, honor, all the shy delicacies of the young
body, the heart, virginity, modesty, that epidermis of the
soul, are manipulated in sinister wise by that fumbling
which seeks resources, which encounters opprobrium, and
which accomodates itself to it. Fathers, mothers, children,
brothers, sisters, men, women, daughters, adhere and be-
come incorporated, almost like a mineral formation, in that
dusky promiscuousness of sexes, relationships, ages, infa-
mies, and innocences. They crouch, back to back, in a sort
of hut of fate. They exchange woe-begone glances. Oh, the
unfortunate wretches! How pale they are! How cold they
are! It seems as though they dwelt in a planet much further
from the sun than ours.
This young girl was to Marius a sort of messenger from
the realm of sad shadows. She revealed to him a hideous
side of the night.
Marius almost reproached himself for the preoccupations
of revery and passion which had prevented his bestowing
a glance on his neighbors up to that day. The payment of
their rent had been a mechanical movement, which any one
would have yielded to; but he, Marius, should have done bet-
ter than that. What! only a wall separated him from those
abandoned beings who lived gropingly in the dark outside
the pale of the rest of the world, he was elbow to elbow with
them, he was, in some sort, the last link of the human race
which they touched, he heard them live, or rather, rattle in
the death agony beside him, and he paid no heed to them!
Every day, every instant, he heard them walking on the other

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