lt that icy breath close to
him, on his heels. In the midst of his torments, and long before
this, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is more dangerous than
discontinued work; it is a habit which vanishes. A habit which is easy
to get rid of, and difficult to take up again.

A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses.
It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are sometimes
severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh vapor which corrects
the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps here and there,
binds together and rounds off the angles of the ideas. But too much
dreaming sinks and drowns. Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to
fall entirely from thought into revery! He thinks that he can re-ascend
with equal ease, and he tells himself that, after all, it is the same
thing. Error!

Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. To
replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.

Marius had begun in that way, as the reader will remember. Passion had
supervened and had finished the work of precipitating him into chimaeras
without object or bottom. One no longer emerges from one's self except
for the purpose of going off to dream. Idle production. Tumultuous and
stagnant gulf. And, in proportion as labor diminishes, needs increase.
This is a law. Man, in a state of revery, is generally prodigal and
slack; the unstrung mind cannot hold life within close bounds.

There is, in that mode of life, good mingled with evil, for if
enervation is baleful, generosity is good and healthful. But the poor
man who is generous and noble, and who does not work, is lost. Resources
are exhausted, needs crop up.

Fatal declivity down which the most honest and the firmest as well as
the most feeble and most vicious are drawn, and which ends in one of two
holds, suicide or crime.

By dint of going outdoors to think, the day comes when one goes out to
throw one's self in the water.

Excess of revery breeds men like Escousse and Lebras.

Marius was descending this declivity at a slow pace, with his eyes
fixed on the girl whom he no longer saw. What we have just written seems
strange, and yet it is true. The memory of an absent being kindles in
the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared, the more it
beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light on its horizon;
the star of the inner night. She--that was Mari