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despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread,
wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should
instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the
book of Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: ‘Open
to me, I come for you.’
At the hour of civilization through which we are now
passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable’s name
is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in
all languages.
Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our
France. Your admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of
it. Does not banditism, that raging form of pauperism, in-
habit your mountains? Few nations are more deeply eaten by
that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to fathom.
In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo,
Turin, Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara,
Genoa, Venice, a heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent
ruins, and superb cities, you are, like ourselves, poor. You
are covered with marvels and vermin. Assuredly, the sun of
Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky does not prevent
rags on man.
Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies,
fanaticisms, blind laws lending assistance to ignorant cus-
toms. You taste nothing of the present nor of the future
without a flavor of the past being mingled with it. You have
a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone. The so-
cial question is the same for you as for us. There are a few
less deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from
fever; your social hygiene is not much better than ours;