2052 Les Miserables
not behold Nero if the weather be fair, for whom the sun
conceals the funeral pile, who would look on at an execu-
tion by the guillotine in the search for an effect of light, who
hear neither the cry nor the sob, nor the death rattle, nor
the alarm peal, for whom everything is well, since there is
a month of May, who, so long as there are clouds of purple
and gold above their heads, declare themselves content, and
who are determined to be happy until the radiance of the
stars and the songs of the birds are exhausted.
These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that
they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not
weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one
would both pity and admire a being at once night and day,
without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.
The indifference of these thinkers, is, according to some,
a superior philosophy. That may be; but in this superiority
there is some infirmity. One may be immortal and yet limp:
witness Vulcan. One may be more than man and less than
man. There is incomplete immensity in nature. Who knows
whether the sun is not a blind man?
But then, what? In whom can we trust? Solem quis dicere
falsum audeat? Who shall dare to say that the sun is false?
Thus certain geniuses, themselves, certain Very-Lofty mor-
tals, man-stars, may be mistaken? That which is on high
at the summit, at the crest, at the zenith, that which sends
down so much light on the earth, sees but little, sees badly,
sees not at all? Is not this a desperate state of things? No. But
what is there, then, above the sun? The god.
On the 6th of June, 1832, about eleven o’clock in the