Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long
trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This
destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the
tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the
definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive
the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead.
In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to
him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will
deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again.

I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His
hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled
through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.

What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is
to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer
composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything
that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more
germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul,
inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds
and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its
vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels
anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests
of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.

If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.

CHAPTER V--COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER

As Cosette read, she gradually fell into thought. At the very moment
when she raised her eyes from the last line of the note-book, the
handsome officer passed triumphantly in front of the gate,--it was his
hour; Cosette thought him hideous.

She resumed her contemplation of the book. It was written in the most
charming of chirography, thought Cosette; in the same hand, but with
divers inks, sometimes very black, again whitish, as when ink has been
added to the inkstand, and consequently on different days. It was,
then, a mind which had unfolded itself there, sigh by sigh, irregularly,
without order, without choice, without object, hap-hazard. Cosette
had never read anything like it. This manuscript, in which she already
perceived more light than obscurity, produced upon her the effect of a
half-open sanctuary. Each one