hat springs from your laws, and what amount of justice springs from your tribunals?
Do you chance to be so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words:
public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the death penalty?
Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and Farinace is alive.
And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons.
Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and politics?
You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes!
Something very similar has been done in France.
Stay, let us pass miseries in review, let each one contribute his pile, you are as rich as we.
Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed by the judge?
Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great nation of France!
Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves, Miserables.
From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden.
Only, the priests are mistaken.
These holy portals are before and not behind us.
I resume.
This book, Les Miserables, is no less your mirror than ours.
Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book,-- I understand that.
Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.
As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other nation.
In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.
This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance of the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French, Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say more, human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.