A Providential Peep-Hole — Les Misérables

Marius had lived for five years in poverty, in destitution, even in distress, but he now perceived that he had not known real misery. True misery he had but just had a view of. It was its spectre which had just passed before his eyes. He who has only beheld the misery of man has seen nothing. The misery of woman is what he must see. He who has seen only the misery of woman has seen nothing. He must see the misery of the child. When a man has reached his last extremity, he has reached his last resources at the same time. Woe to the defenceless beings who surround him. Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, good will, all fail him simultaneously. Then all horrors become possible. Despair is surrounded with fragile partitions which all open on either vice or crime. This young girl was to Marius a sort of messenger from the realm of sad shadows. She revealed to him a hideous side of the night.

Marius almost reproached himself for the preoccupations of reverie and passion which had prevented his bestowing a glance on his neighbours up to that day. The payment of their rent had been a mechanical movement. He should have done better than that. Only a wall separated him from those abandoned beings who lived gropingly in the dark. He was elbow to elbow with them. He was, in some sort, the last link of the human race which they touched. He heard them live, or rather rattle in the death agony beside him, and he paid no heed. Every day, every instant, he heard them walking on the other side of the wall, and he did not even lend an ear. Groans lay in those words, and he did not listen. His thoughts were elsewhere, given up to dreams, to loves in the air, and all the while human creatures, his brothers, were agonizing in vain beside him. He even formed a part of their misfortune, and he aggravated it. If they had had another neighbour, less chimerical and more attentive, their signals of distress would have been perceived, and they would have been taken hold of and rescued. They appeared very corrupt, very vile, very odious even. But those who fall without becoming degraded are rare. 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 deserved, 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 people. The wall was a thin layer of plaster upheld by lathes and beams, and it allowed the sound of voices to be clearly distinguished. Only a man as dreamy as Marius could have failed to perceive this long before. There was no paper pasted on the wall. The coarse construction was visible in its nakedness. All at once he sprang up. He had just perceived, near the top, close to the ceiling, a triangular hole, which resulted from the space between three lathes. The plaster which should have filled this cavity was missing, and by mounting on the commode, a view could be had through this aperture into the Jondrettes' attic. Commiseration has, and should have, its curiosity. This aperture formed a sort of peep-hole. It is permissible to gaze at misfortune like a traitor in order to succour it. Let us get some little idea of what these people are like, thought Marius, and in what condition they are. He climbed upon the commode, put his eye to the crevice, and looked.