And yet some of those who follow the social clinics shake their heads at times, and the strongest, the most tender, and the most logical, have their hours of dependency. Will the future arrive? It seems as if we may almost ask this question on seeing so much terrible shadow. There is a sombre, face-to-face meeting of the egotists and the wretched. In the egotist we trace prejudices, the cloudiness of a caste education, appetite growing with intoxication, and prosperity that stuns, a fear of suffering which in some goes so far as an aversion from the sufferers, an implacable satisfaction, and the feeling of self so swollen that it closes the soul. In the wretched we find covetousness, envy, the hatred of seeing others successful, the great bounds of the human beast toward gorging, hearts full of mist, sorrow, want, fatality, and foul and common ignorance. Must we still raise our eyes to heaven? Is the luminous point which we notice there one of those which die out? The ideal is frightful to look on thus lost in the depths, small, isolated, imperceptible, and brilliant, but surrounded by all those great black menaces monstrously collected around it; for all that, though, it is in no more danger than a star in the yawning throat of the clouds. BOOK VIII. ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS. CHAPTER I. BRIGHT LIGHT. The reader has of course understood that Éponine, on recognizing through the railings the inhabitant of the house in the Rue Plumet, to which Magnon sent her, began by keeping the bandits aloof from the house, then led Marius to it; and that after several days of ecstasy before the railings, Marius, impelled by that force which attracts iron to the loadstone, and the lover toward the stones of the house in which she whom he loves resides, had eventually entered Cosette's garden, as Romeo did Juliet's. This had even been an easier task for him than for Romeo; for Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, while Marius had merely to move one of the bars of the decrepit railing loose in its rusty setting, after the fashion of the teeth of old people. As Marius was thin, he easily passed. As there never was anybody in the street, and as Marius never entered the garden save at night, he ran no risk of being seen. From that blessed and holy hour when a kiss affianced these two souls, Marius went to the garden every night. If, at this moment of her life, Cosette had fallen in love with an unscrupulous libertine, she would have been lost; for there are generous natures that surrender themselves, and Cosette was one of them. One of the magnanimities of a woman is to yield; and love, at that elevation where it is absolute, is complicated by a certain celestial blindness of modesty. But what dangers you incur, ye noble souls! You often give the heart and we take the body; your heart is left you, and you look at it in the darkness with a shudder. Love has no middle term: it either saves or destroys, and this dilemma is the whole of human destiny.