1266 Les Miserables
side of the wall, he heard them go, and come, and speak, and
he did not even lend an ear! And groans lay in those words,
and he did not even listen to them, his thoughts were else-
where, given up to dreams, to impossible radiances, to loves
in the air, to follies; and all the while, human creatures, his
brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the people, were ag-
onizing in vain beside him! He even formed a part of their
misfortune, and he aggravated it. For if they had had an-
other neighbor who was less chimerical and more attentive,
any ordinary and charitable man, evidently their indigence
would have been noticed, their signals of distress would
have been perceived, and they would have been taken hold
of and rescued! They appeared very corrupt and very de-
praved, no doubt, very vile, very odious even; but those who
fall without becoming degraded are rare; besides, there is
a point where the unfortunate and the infamous unite and
are confounded in a single word, a fatal word, the miserable;
whose fault is this? And then should not the charity be all
the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great?
While reading himself this moral lesson, for there were
occasions on which Marius, like all truly honest hearts, was
his own pedagogue and scolded himself more than he de-
served, he stared at the wall which separated him from the
Jondrettes, as though he were able to make his gaze, full of
pity, penetrate that partition and warm these wretched peo-
ple. The wall was a thin layer of plaster upheld by lathes and
beams, and, as the reader had just learned, it allowed the
sound of voices and words to be clearly distinguished. Only
a man as dreamy as Marius could have failed to perceive this