there. However low you go there is light. Light in the
vagabond, light in the mendicant, light in the thief, light
in the street-walker. The deeper you go the more the
miraculous light persists in showing itself.

Every heart has its pearl, which is the same for the heart
gutter and the heart ocean--love.

No mire can dissolve this particle of God.

Wherefore, there, at the extreme of gloom, of despondency,
of chill-heartedness and abandonment; in this obscurity,
in this putrefaction, in these gaols, in these dark
paths, in this shipwreck; beneath the lowest layer of the
heap of miseries, under the bog of public disdain which
is ice and night; behind the eddying of those frightful
snowflakes the judges, the gendarmes, the warders and the
executioners for the bandit, the passers-by for the
prostitute, which cross each other, innumerable, in the dull grey
mist that for these wretches replace the sun; beneath these
pitiless fatalities; beneath this bewildering maze of vaults,
some of granite, the others of hatred; at the deepest depths
of horror; in the midst of asphyxiation; at the bottom of
the chaos of all possible blacknesses; under the frightful
thickness of a deluge composed of expectorations, there
where all is extinct, where all is dead, something moves
and shines. What is it? A flame.

And what flame?