3 (4)
A HEART UNDER A STONE
THE REDUCTION of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love
Love is the angels’ greeting.
How sad is the soul when it is sad from love!
What a void is the absence of the being who alone fills the world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God! One would conceive that God would be jealous if the Father of all had not evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love!
A glimpse of a smile under a white crape hat with a lilac coronet is enough, for the soul to enter into the palace of dreams.
God is behind all things, but all things hide God. Things are black, creatures are opaque. To love a being, is to render her transparent.
eiCertain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Separated lovers deceive absence by a thousand chimerical things which still have their reality. They are prevented from seeing each other, they cannot write to each other; they find a multitude of mysterious means of correspondence. They commission the song of the birds, the perfume of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighs of the wind, the beams of the stars, the whole creation. And why not? All the works of God were made to serve love. Love is powerful enough to charge all nature with its messages.
O Spring! thou art a letter which I write to her.
The future belongs still more to the heart than to the mind. To love is the only thing which can occupy and fill up eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible.
Love partakes of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like it, it is a divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire which is within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and which nothing can extinguish. We feel it burn even in the marrow of our bones, and we see it radiate even to the depths of the sky.
Becoming increasingly religious and mystical, but also alluding increasingly to his brief encounters with Cosette, Marius’s effusions continue for another four pages.
