15 4 Les Miserables
CHAPTER VII
THE INTERIOR OF DESPAIR
Let us try to say it.
It is necessary that society should look at these things,
because it is itself which creates them.
He was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not
a fool. The light of nature was ignited in him. Unhappiness,
which also possesses a clearness of vision of its own, aug-
mented the small amount of daylight which existed in this
mind. Beneath the cudgel, beneath the chain, in the cell, in
hardship, beneath the burning sun of the galleys, upon the
plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into his own con-
sciousness and meditated.
He constituted himself the tribunal.
He began by putting himself on trial.
He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man
unjustly punished. He admitted that he had committed an
extreme and blameworthy act; that that loaf of bread would
probably not have been refused to him had he asked for it;
that, in any case, it would have been better to wait until he
could get it through compassion or through work; that it is
not an unanswerable argument to say, ‘Can one wait when