I FINISHED IT. I really did it. JUST WOW.
Some of the passages I tagged in this months reading……
Jean Valjean realized right away that Thénadier did not recognise him.
To the expert eye Maruis looks dead.
Jean Valjean had exchanged one plight for another.
Deal with me as you will, but help me first to take him home. That’s all I ask of you.
Javert kept Marius notecase.
The return of the suicidally prodigal son.
“Driver,” he said ‘Rue de l’Homme-Armé, number 7’.
Suicide that mysterious assault of the unknown that may to a certain extent comprise the death of the soul, was impossible to Jean Valjean.
There was no one there. Javert had gone.
THE GRANDFATHER…..Just as the doctor was wiping Marius’s face and lightly touching with his finger his still-closed eyes, a door opened at the end of the drawing room and a tall, pale figure appeared. It was the grandfather.
“Marius, my darling boy, you’re opening your eyes, you’re looking at me, you’re alice, thank you!” And he fainted……
Javert Derailed.
For the first time in his life he walked with his head bowed, and also for the first time in his life he walked with his hands behind his back.
An uncertainty had come about.
A change, a revolution, a catastrophe had occurred deep down inside him, and there was cause for self-examination. Javert was suffering horribly. Several hours ago Javert had ceased to be a simple man. He felt troubled. That mind, so limpid in its blindness, had lost it’s transparency. There was a cloudiness in that crystal. Javert was aware in his conscience of a division of duty and he could not conceal it from himself. When he had so unexpectedly encountered Jean Valjean on the banks of the Seine, there had been inside him something of the wolf recapturing its prey and of the dog finding it’s master again. He saw ahead of him two paths, both equally straight, but he saw two of them and that terrified him, having never in his life known but one straight line…….
……to betray society in order to remain true to his conscience; that all these absurdities, should come about and be heaped on top of him-it was that that defeated him.
What had happened to him? He searched and could not find himself.
In thinking there is always a degree of inner conflict, and it angered him to have that inside of him.
He, Javert………………..had seen fit to rule in favour of a release.
Jean Valjean, that was the load he had on his mind. Jean Valjean confounded him. A beneficent wrong-doer, a compassionate, gentle, forbearing convict, ready to help, returning good for evil, returning forgiveness for hatred, choosing pity rather than vengeance, preferring to doom himself rather than to doom his enemy, saving one who had struck-out against him, kneeling on the heights of virtue. more akin to the angels than to man. Javert was forced to admit this monster existed.
“That’s right! Deliver up your Saviour! Then have Pontious Pilot’s basin brought to you, and wash your filthy paws.”
A whole new world of order of unexpected factors was emerging, and getting the better of him. A whole new world was revealing itself to his soul: kindness accepted and repaid, self-sacrifice, mercy, leniency, severity constrained by pity, considerations for individuals, no more outright condemnation, no more damnation, the possibility of a tear in the law’s eye, some sort of justice as laid down by God running contrary to justice as laid down by man.
He was forced to acknowledge that kindness existed.
The terrible state of affairs! To be emotional!
God, always within man and, being the true conscience, defying the false, forbidding the spark to die out, commanding the ray to remember the sun, directing the soul to recognize the real absolute when confronted with the fictitious absolute, inalienable humility, unallowable human feeling, that splendid phenomenon, perhaps the finest of all our inner marvels——
There was a HEAVY SPLASH. And the shadows alone were privy to the convulsions of that mysterious figure after it has disappeared under the water.
Emerging from Civil War Marius prepares for Domestic War
The old man was delirious. He sang the following:
Jeanne was born at Fougére,
A true shepherd=maid’s haunt.
I so adore her taunting
Petticoat.
Love, you dwell within her;
By a cunning device, lies
Buried deep in her eyes
Your quiver
I sing of the one I love
More Diane herself
My Breton Jeanne, and her
Firm bosom.
I did not know what had become of Cosette.
His wounds were his ammunition. To have Cosette or to die.
Cosette and Marius saw each other again. How that meeting went it is not for us to say. there are some things we should not attempt to describe, the sun being one of them.
People have no pity for happy lovers, staying when the lovers most wish to be alone. Yet lovers have no need at all of other people.
“Permission to adore each other.”
Then, as there were others present, they fell silent and said not another word, confining themselves to very gently touching hands.
Love each other. Be fools in love. Love is the foolishness of men and the wit of God.
‘No,’ replied Cosette, ‘but I think the good Lord is looking after us.’
Love’s all very well, but you must have this too. You must have the unnecessary as well as happiness. Happiness is just the essential. Season it generously with the superfluous. A palace and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the great water features of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess, and have her be a duchess.
‘Well,’ Maruis went on, ‘ I would give them away to find that man.’ Jean Valjean remained silent.
Strange to say, people still had the idea in those days that a wedding was an intimate and social celebration, that a patriarchal banquet did not spoil a domestic ceremony…………
Also, people had the audacity to marry in their own homes.
Paris had disguised itself as Venice.
Jean Valjean still has his arm in a sling. Cosette had never been more affectionate towards Jean Valjean.
‘You can’t escape two sermons!’
“Adore each other. ……………
‘I say give free reign to your joys.
Be fiendishly smitten.
Be frantically in love.”
You’ve won the big prize, look after it well, keep it under lock and key, don’t squander it, adore each other, and never mind the rest. Believe what I’m telling you. It’s good sense. Good sense cannot lie. Be a religion to each other.
Every man has his own way of adoring God. Heavens above the best way to adore God is to love your wife. “I love you!” That is my catechism. Whoever loves is orthodox.
Then his venerable white head fell forward on to the bed, that social old heart broke’ his face buried itself, so to speak, in Cosette’s clothes, and anyone who had passed by on the stairs at that moment would have heard tremendous sobs.
Alas! How many times have we seen Jean Valjean forced to grapple with his conscience in the dark, and struggling frantically against it!
He had reached the ultimate parting of the ways between good and evil.
Cosette had Marius and she was his. They had everything, even wealth, this was Jean Valjean’s doing.
But the beginning was ferocious. A storm driven him to Arras. The past came back to him, seen from the present. He compared and he sobbed.
He pondered, he reflected, he considered the alternatives in the mysterious balance of light and dark.
That vicious nettle had loved and protected this lily.
Last Flickering of the Lamp without Oil.
The proof that God is good is that she is here.
He sleeps. Though fate dealt with him strangely,
He lived. Bereft of his angel, he died.
It came about simple, of itself,
As Night follows when the day is ended.
