PREFACE
So long as
there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced
by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and
adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great
problems of the century-- the degradation of man through pauperism, the
corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of
light-- are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the
world;--in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as
ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables
cannot fail to be of use.
HAUTEVILLE
HOUSE, 1862.
Victor Hugo
BOOK FIRST--A JUST MAN
CHAPTER I
M. MYRIEL
In 1815, M.
Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D---- He was an old man of about
seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D---- since 1806.
Although
this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are
about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of
exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which
had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the
diocese.
True or
false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their
lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was
the son of a councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the
nobility of the bar.
It was said
that his father, destining him to be the heir of his own post, had married him
at a very early age, eighteen or twenty, in accordance with a custom which is
rather widely prevalent in parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however,
it was said that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk.
He was well
formed, though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the
whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and to
gallantry.
The Revolution
came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the parliamentary
families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were dispersed.
M. Charles
Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the Revolution.
There his
wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she had long suffered.
He had no
children. What took place next in the fate of M. Myriel?
The ruin of
the French society of the olden days, the fall of his own family, the tragic
spectacles of '93, which were, perhaps, even more alarming to the emigrants who
viewed them from a distance, with the magnifying powers of terror,--did these
cause the ideas of renunciation and solitude to germinate in him?
Was he, in
the midst of these distractions, these affections which absorbed his life,
suddenly smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which
sometimes overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public catastrophes
would not shake, by striking at his existence and his fortune?
No one could
have told:
没有评论:
发表评论