"No."
And the porter, raising his eyes, recognized Marius.
"Come!
So it''s you!" said he; "but you are decidedly a spy then?"
BOOK SEVENTH.--PATRON MINETTE
CHAPTER I
MINES AND MINERS
Human societies all have what is called in theatrical parlance, a third lower floor.
The social soil is everywhere undermined, sometimes for good, sometimes for evil.
These works are superposed one upon the other.
There are superior mines and inferior mines. There is a top and a bottom in this obscure sub-soil, which sometimes gives way beneath civilization, and which our indifference and heedlessness trample under foot.
The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine that was almost open to the sky.
The shades, those sombre hatchers of primitive Christianity, only awaited an opportunity to bring about an explosion under the Caesars and to inundate the human race with light.
For in the sacred shadows there lies latent light. Volcanoes are full of a shadow that is capable of flashing forth. Every form begins by being night.
The catacombs, in which the first mass was said, were not alone the cellar of Rome, they were the vaults of the world.
Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a structure, there are excavations of all sorts.
There is the religious mine, the philosophical mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. Such and such a pick-axe with the idea, such a pick with ciphers. Such another with wrath.