Camille | Page 9

or in affection? The second interpretation seemed the more probable,
for the first would have been an impertinent piece of plain speaking
which Marguerite, whatever her opinion of herself, would never have
accepted.
I went out again, and thought no more of the book until at night, when I
was going to bed.
Manon Lescaut is a touching story. I know every detail of it, and yet

whenever I come across the volume the same sympathy always draws
me to it; I open it, and for the hundredth time I live over again with the
heroine of the Abbe Prevost. Now this heroine is so true to life that I
feel as if I had known her; and thus the sort of comparison between her
and Marguerite gave me an unusual inclination to read it, and my
indulgence passed into pity, almost into a kind of love for the poor girl
to whom I owed the volume. Manon died in the desert, it is true, but in
the arms of the man who loved her with the whole energy of his soul;
who, when she was dead, dug a grave for her, and watered it with his
tears, and buried his heart in it; while Marguerite, a sinner like Manon,
and perhaps converted like her, had died in a sumptuous bed (it seemed,
after what I had seen, the bed of her past), but in that desert of the heart,
a more barren, a vaster, a more pitiless desert than that in which Manon
had found her last resting-place.
Marguerite, in fact, as I had found from some friends who knew of the
last circumstances of her life, had not a single real friend by her bedside
during the two months of her long and painful agony.
Then from Manon and Marguerite my mind wandered to those whom I
knew, and whom I saw singing along the way which led to just such
another death. Poor souls! if it is not right to love them, is it not well to
pity them? You pity the blind man who has never seen the daylight, the
deaf who has never heard the harmonies of nature, the dumb who has
never found a voice for his soul, and, under a false cloak of shame, you
will not pity this blindness of heart, this deafness of soul, this dumbness
of conscience, which sets the poor afflicted creature beside herself and
makes her, in spite of herself, incapable of seeing what is good, of
bearing the Lord, and of speaking the pure language of love and faith.
Hugo has written Marion Delorme, Musset has written Bernerette,
Alexandre Dumas has written Fernande, the thinkers and poets of all
time have brought to the courtesan the offering of their pity, and at
times a great man has rehabilitated them with his love and even with
his name. If I insist on this point, it is because many among those who
have begun to read me will be ready to throw down a book in which
they will fear to find an apology for vice and prostitution; and the

author's age will do something, no doubt, to increase this fear. Let me
undeceive those who think thus, and let them go on reading, if nothing
but such a fear hinders them.
I am quite simply convinced of a certain principle, which is: For the
woman whose education has not taught her what is right, God almost
always opens two ways which lead thither the ways of sorrow and of
love. They are hard; those who walk in them walk with bleeding feet
and torn hands, but they also leave the trappings of vice upon the thorns
of the wayside, and reach the journey's end in a nakedness which is not
shameful in the sight of the Lord.
Those who meet these bold travellers ought to succour them, and to tell
all that they have met them, for in so doing they point out the way. It is
not a question of setting at the outset of life two sign-posts, one bearing
the inscription "The Right Way," the other the inscription "The Wrong
Way," and of saying to those who come there, "Choose." One must
needs, like Christ, point out the ways which lead from the second road
to the first, to those who have been easily led astray; and it is needful
that the beginning of these ways should not be too painful nor appear
too impenetrable.
Here is Christianity with its marvellous parable of the Prodigal Son to
teach us indulgence and pardon. Jesus was full of love for souls
wounded by the passions of men; he loved to bind up their wounds and
to find in those very wounds the balm which should heal them. Thus he
said