Page 162 - les-miserables

terrible.
He was absorbed, in fact.
Athwart the unhealthy perceptions of an incomplete
nature and a crushed intelligence, he was confusedly con-
scious that some monstrous thing was resting on him. In
that obscure and wan shadow within which he crawled,
each time that he turned his neck and essayed to raise his
glance, he perceived with terror, mingled with rage, a sort of
frightful accumulation of things, collecting and mounting
above him, beyond the range of his vision,— laws, prejudic-
es, men, and deeds,—whose outlines escaped him, whose
mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than that
prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distin-
guished, here and there in that swarming and formless
mass, now near him, now afar off and on inaccessible table-
lands, some group, some detail, vividly illuminated; here the
galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there the gendarme and his
sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top, like a
sort of sun, the Emperor, crowned and dazzling. It seemed
to him that these distant splendors, far from dissipating his
night, rendered it more funereal and more black. All this—
laws, prejudices, deeds, men, things—went and came above
him, over his head, in accordance with the complicated and
mysterious movement which God imparts to civilization,
walking over him and crushing him with I know not what
peacefulness in its cruelty and inexorability in its indiffer-
ence. Souls which have fallen to the bottom of all possible
misfortune, unhappy men lost in the lowest of those limbos
at which no one any longer looks, the reproved of the law,

162 Les Miserables