“By the way, do you have any political opinions?” “What do you mean?” said Marius, almost offended at the question. “What are you?” “Bonapartist democrat.” “Gray shade of quiet mouse color,” said Courfeyrac. The next day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius to the Café Musain. Then he whispered in his ear with a smile, “I must see you into the

A skeptic adhering to a believer is as simple as the law of complementary colors. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man.

Joly was a young hypochondriac. What he had learned from medicine was to be a patient rather than a physician. At twenty-three, he thought himself in poor health and spent his time looking at his tongue in a mirror.

Bahorel, a capricious man, was very partial to several cafés; the others had habits, he had none. He loafed. To err is human, to loaf is Parisian. Ultimately, a penetrating turn of mind and more of a thinker than he seemed.

He was Antinoüs, wild. You would have said, seeing the thoughtful reflection of his eye, that he had already, in some preceding existence, been through the revolutionary apocalypse. He knew its tradition like an eyewitness. He knew every little detail of that great thing. A pontifical and warrior nature, strange in a youth. He was officiating and

He accepted everything. There is a way of falling into error while on the road of truth. He had a sort of willful implicit faith that swallowed everything whole. On entering his new path, he neglected the attenuating circumstances both in judging the crimes of the ancient régime and in measuring Napoleon’s glory.

The churchwarden, Mabeuf, whom he had gone to see again, gave him an account of the life in Vernon, the colonel’s retreat, his flowers and his solitude. Marius came to fully understand this rare, sublime, and gentle man, this lion-lamb who was his father.

To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the scepter in the name of the throne, and the miter in the name of the altar; it is to mistreat the thing you support; it is to kick in the traces; it is to cavil at the stake for undercooking heretics; it is to reproach the idol for a lack of idolatry; it is to insult through an excess of respect; it

They ridiculed the century, which did away with the need to understand it. They supported one another in astonishment. Each communicated to the rest the quantity of light he possessed. Methuselah instructed Epimenides. The deaf kept the blind informed.