o one at the
Luxembourg; he had expected this. At dusk, he went to the house.

No light in the windows; the shades were drawn; the third floor was
totally dark.

Marius rapped at the porte cochere, entered, and said to the porter:--

"The gentleman on the third floor?"

"Has moved away," replied the porter.

Marius reeled and said feebly:--

"How long ago?"

"Yesterday."

"Where is he living now?"

"I don't know anything about it."

"So he has not left his new address?"

"No."

And the porter, raising his eyes, recognized Marius.

"Come! So it's you!" said he; "but you are decidedly a spy then?"

BOOK SEVENTH.--PATRON MINETTE

CHAPTER I--MINES AND MINERS

Human societies all have what is called in theatrical parlance, a third
lower floor. The social soil is everywhere undermined, sometimes for
good, sometimes for evil. These works are superposed one upon the other.
There are superior mines and inferior mines. There is a top and a
bottom in this obscure sub-soil, which sometimes gives way beneath
civilization, and which our indifference and heedlessness trample under
foot. The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine that was
almost open to the sky. The shades, those sombre hatchers of primitive
Christianity, only awaited an opportunity to bring about an explosion
under the Caesars and to inundate the human race with light. For in the
sacred shadows there lies latent light. Volcanoes are full of a shadow
that is capable of flashing forth. Every form begins by being night. The
catacombs, in which the first mass was said, were not alone the cellar
of Rome, they were the vaults of the world.

Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a structure,
there are excavations of all sorts. There is the religious mine, the
philosophical mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. Such and
such a pick-axe with the idea, such a pick with ciphers. Such another
with wrath. People hail and answer each other from one catacomb to
another. Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes. There they
branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and fraternize
there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his
lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes Socinius
by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of all these
energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which
goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mou