Page 1499 - les-miserables

etors, the revolution which had passed over it, the crumbling
away of ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness, forty years
of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed to restore to
this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall
weeds, great crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green
cloth, lizards, beetles, uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to
spring forth from the depths of the earth and to reappear
between those four walls a certain indescribable and sav-
age grandeur; and for nature, which disconcerts the petty
arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thor-
oughly where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as
in the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden
with as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest of
the New World.
Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the
profound and penetrating influence of nature knows this.
Although no absolute satisfaction is given to philosophy,
either to circumscribe the cause or to limit the effect, the
contemplator falls into those unfathomable ecstasies caused
by these decompositions of force terminating in unity. Ev-
erything toils at everything.
Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star
profits the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the
perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations.
Who, then, can calculate the course of a molecule? How
do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined
by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal
ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely lit-
tle, the reverberations of causes in the precipices of being,

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