Les Misérables, v. 4/5: The Idyll and the Epic

  CHAPTER III.

  FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS.

  This garden, left to itself for more than half a century, had becomeextraordinary and charming: passers-by forty years ago stopped inthe street to gaze at it, without suspecting the secrets which ithid behind its fresh green screen. More than one dreamer at that dayallowed his eyes and thoughts indiscreetly to penetrate the bars ofthe old locked, twisted, shaky gate, which hung from two mould-coveredpillars and was surmounted by a pediment covered with undecipherablearabesques. There was a stone bank in a corner, there were one ortwo mouldering statues, and some trellis-work, unnailed by time,was rotting against the walls; there was no turf or walk left, butthere was dog's-grass everywhere. The artificiality of gardeninghad departed, and nature had returned; weeds were abundant, and thefestival of the gilly-flowers was splendid there. Nothing in thisgarden impeded the sacred efforts of things toward life, and growthwas at home there and held high holiday. The trees had bent down tothe briars, the briars had mounted toward the trees; the plants hadclambered up, the branches had bent down. What crawls on the groundbad gone to meet what expands in the air, and what floats in the windstooped down to what drags along the moss; brambles, branches, leaves,fibres, tufts, twigs, tendrils, and thorns were mixed together, weddedand confounded; vegetation had celebrated and accomplished here, ina close and profound embrace, and beneath the satisfied eye of theCreator, the holy mystery of its fraternity, which is a symbol of humanpaternity. This garden was no longer a garden, but a colossal thicket;that is to say, something which is as impenetrable as a forest, aspopulous as a city, as rustling as a nest, as dark as a cathedral, asfragrant as a bouquet, as solitary as a tomb, and as lively as a crowd.

  In spring this enormous thicket, at liberty within its four walls,played its part in the dull task of universal germination, and quiveredin the rising sun almost like an animal that inhales the effluviaof cosmic love and feels the sap of April ascending and boiling inits veins, and shaking in the wind its prodigious green foliage,scattered over the damp ground, over the weather-beaten statues,over the crumbling steps of the pavilion, and even over the pavementof the deserted street, constellations of flowers, pearls of dew,fecundity, beauty, life, joy, and perfumes. At midday thousands ofwhite butterflies took refuge in it, and it was a divine sight to watchthis living snow of summer falling in flakes through the shadows. Inthe pleasant gloom of the foliage a multitude of soft voices gentlyaddressed the soul, and what the twittering forgot to say, the buzzingcompleted. At night a dreamy vapor rose from the garden and envelopedit; a cere-cloth of mist, a celestial and calm melancholy, covered it;the intoxicating smell of the honeysuckle and the bind-weed ascendedfrom all sides like an exquisite and subtle poison; the last appealsof the woodpeckers and the goldfinches could be heard, ere they fellasleep under the branches, and the sacred intimacy between the birdand the trees was felt, for by day, wings gladden the leaves, and atnight the leaves protect the wings. In winter, the thicket was black,dank, bristling, and shivering, and allowed a glimpse at the house tobe taken. Instead of flowers among the stalks and dew upon the flowers,the long silvery trail of the snails could be seen on the cold thickbed of yellow leaves; but in any case, under any aspect, and at allseasons, spring, summer, autumn, and winter, this little enclosureexhaled melancholy contemplation, solitude, liberty, the absence ofman and the presence of God, and the old rusty railings had an air ofsaying, "This garden is mine."

  Although the pavement of Paris was all around, the classical andsplendid mansions of the Rue de Varennes two yards off, the dome of theInvalides close by, and the Chamber of Deputies at no great distance,although the carriages from the Rues de Bourgogne and St. Dominiquerolled along luxuriously in the vicinity, and yellow, brown, white,and red omnibuses crossed the adjoining square,--the Rue Plumet was adesert; and the death of the old proprietors, a revolution which hadpassed, the overthrow of old fortunes, absence, forgetfulness, andforty years of desertion and widowhood, had sufficed to bring backto this privileged spot ferns, torch-weeds, hemlock, ragwort, tallgrass, dock-leaves, lizards, beetles, and restless and rapid insects.A savage and stern grandeur had re-appeared between these four walls,and nature, who disconcerts all the paltry arrangements of man, andis as perfect in the ant as in the man, had displayed herself in apoor little Parisian garden with as much roughness and majesty as ina virgin forest of the New World. Nothing, in fact, is small, and anyone who is affected by the profound penetrations of nature is aware ofthis fact. Although no absolute satisfaction is granted to philosophy,and though it can no more circumscribe the cause than limit the effect,the contemplator falls into unfathomable ecstasy when he watches allthose decompositions of force which result in unity. Everything laborsfor everything; algebra is applied to the clouds, the irradiation ofthe planet benefits the rose, and no thinker would dare to say thatthe perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who cancalculate the passage of a molecule? Who among us knows whether thecreations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?Who is acquainted with the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitelygreat and the infinitely little? A maggot is of importance, the littleis great and the great little, all is in a state of equilibrium innature. This is a terrific vision for the mind. There are prodigiousrelations between beings and things; and in this inexhaustible total,from the flea to the sun, nothing despises the other, for all haveneed of each other. Light does not bear into the sky terrestrialperfumes without knowing what to do with them, and night distributesthe planetary essence to the sleepy flowers. Every bird that flies hasround its foot the thread of infinity; germination is equally displayedin the outburst of a meteor and the peck of the swallow breaking theegg, and it places the birth of a worm and the advent of Socrates inthe same parallel. Where the telescope ends the microscope begins,and which of the two has the grandest sight? you can choose. A patchof green mould is a pleiad of flowers, and a nebula is an ant-hill ofstars. There is the same and even a more extraordinary promiscuity ofthe things of the intellect and the facts of the substance; elementsand principles are mingled, combined, wedded together, and multiplyeach other till they lead both the moral and the material world intothe same light. In the vast cosmic exchanges universal life comes andgoes in unknown quantities, revolving everything in the invisiblemystery of effluvia, employing everything, losing not a single dreamof a sleep, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling away a star there,oscillating and winding, making of light a force, and of thought anelement, disseminated and invisible, and dissolving everything savethat geometrical point, the _Ego_; bringing back everything to theatom soul, expanding everything in God; entangling all activities fromthe highest to the lowest in the obscurity of a vertiginous mechanism;attaching the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, andsubordinating, perhaps, if only through the identity of the law, theevolution of the comet in the firmament to the rotary movement of theInfusoria in the drop of water,--a machine made of soul; an enormousgearing of which the prime mover is the gnat, and the last wheel is theZodiac.