Page 970 - les-miserables

What had those men done? They had stolen, violated,
pillaged, murdered, assassinated. They were bandits, coun-
terfeiters, poisoners, incendiaries, murderers, parricides.
What had these women done? They had done nothing what-
ever.
On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, vio-
lence, sensuality, homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every
variety of crime; on the other, one thing only, innocence.
Perfect innocence, almost caught up into heaven in a
mysterious assumption, attached to the earth by virtue, al-
ready possessing something of heaven through holiness.
On the one hand, confidences over crimes, which are ex-
changed in whispers; on the other, the confession of faults
made aloud. And what crimes! And what faults!
On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable per-
fume. On the one hand, a moral pest, guarded from sight,
penned up under the range of cannon, and literally devour-
ing its plague-stricken victims; on the other, the chaste
flame of all souls on the same hearth. There, darkness; here,
the shadow; but a shadow filled with gleams of light, and of
gleams full of radiance.
Two strongholds of slavery; but in the first, deliverance
possible, a legal limit always in sight, and then, escape. In
the second, perpetuity; the sole hope, at the distant extrem-
ity of the future, that faint light of liberty which men call
death.
In the first, men are bound only with chains; in the other,
chained by faith.
What flowed from the first? An immense curse, the

970 Les Miserables