Page 2087 - les-miserables

tastes the ideal, then it bites the mire, and finds it good; and
if it be asked how it happens that it has abandoned Socrates
for Falstaff, it replies: ‘Because I love statesmen.’
One word more before returning to our subject, the con-
flict.
A battle like the one which we are engaged in describ-
ing is nothing else than a convulsion towards the ideal.
Progress trammelled is sickly, and is subject to these tragic
epilepsies. With that malady of progress, civil war, we have
been obliged to come in contact in our passage. This is one
of the fatal phases, at once act and entr’acte of that drama
whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable
title is Progress.
Progress!
The cry to which we frequently give utterance is our
whole thought; and, at the point of this drama which we
have now reached, the idea which it contains having still
more than one trial to undergo, it is, perhaps, permitted to
us, if not to lift the veil from it, to at least allow its light to
shine through.
The book which the reader has under his eye at this mo-
ment is, from one end to the other, as a whole and in detail,
whatever may be its intermittences, exceptions and faults,
the march from evil to good, from the unjust to the just,
from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rotten-
ness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.
Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul. The
hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.

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