in with a starry rag.
She is the sister of charity of crime. She loves, alas! She endures her
inadmissible divinity; she is magnanimous and thrills at so being. She
is happy with a horrible happiness. She enters backwards into indignant
Eden.

We do not sufficiently reflect upon this that is within us and cannot be
lost.

Prostitution, vice, crime, what matters!

Night may become as black as it likes, the spark is still there.
However low you go there is light. Light in the vagabond, light in the
mendicant, light in the thief, light in the street-walker. The deeper
you go the more the miraculous light persists in showing itself.

Every heart has its pearl, which is the same for the heart gutter and
the heart ocean--love.

No mire can dissolve this particle of God.

Wherefore, there, at the extreme of gloom, of despondency, of
chill-heartedness and abandonment; in this obscurity, in this
putrefaction, in these gaols, in these dark paths, in this shipwreck;
beneath the lowest layer of the heap of miseries, under the bog of
public disdain which is ice and night; behind the eddying of those
frightful snowflakes the judges, the gendarmes, the warders and the
executioners for the bandit, the passers-by for the prostitute, which
cross each other, innumerable, in the dull grey mist that for these
wretches replace the sun; beneath these pitiless fatalities; beneath
this bewildering maze of vaults, some of granite, the others of hatred;
at the deepest depths of horror; in the midst of asphyxiation; at the
bottom of the chaos of all possible blacknesses; under the frightful
thickness of a deluge composed of expectorations, there where all is
extinct, where all is dead, something moves and shines. What is it? A
flame.

And what flame?

The soul.

O adorable prodigy!

Love, the ideal, is found even in the Pit.

AT THE TUILERIES. 1844-1848.

I. THE KING.
II. THE DUCHESS D'ORLEANS.
III. THE PRINCES.

I. THE KING. * June, 28, 1844.

* Louis Philippe.

The King told me that Talleyrand said to him one day:

"You will never be able to do anything with Thiers, although he would
make an excellent tool. He is one of those men one cannot make use of
unless one is able to satisfy them. Now, he never will be satisfied. It
is unfortunate for him, as for you, that in our times, he cannot be made
a cardinal."

A propos of the fortifications of Paris, the King told me how the
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