The Lumpen, evoked so stridently by Stirner, lurked in every crevice of society. They were the shadow of history, numberless downtrodden and silent existence, “the immense renegade of Yesterday,” glimpsed behind the weight of the “past that will not go away,” that snatches away scraps of the present “with its black claws” and “spews up its old night.”⁶⁶⁸ But this was just the beginning. Stirner was not particularly familiar with nature, beyond Charlottenburg. When the Lumpen crept in, passing from underground to impregnate the soft earth, he could no longer follow them. He fell silent. Victor Hugo, the poet of matter, who had become so through the practice of spiritualism, took his place. The epos of paupers flowed from his “mouth of shadow.”⁶⁶⁹ Tipping tables had given Hugo a metaphysical narrow-mindedness, but one full of images that pervaded everything and jumbled his good intentions with the bad intentions of Maldoror, until it reached a point of coruscating neutrality. In the whirl of transformation every object, every plant, every dish turned out to be a place of expiation, every landscape a place of reclusion, a reliquary. Replying to Marquis Coriolis d’Espinouse, who was shocked to see that he had fallen “into total Jacobinism,” Hugo mocked “that old rheumatism called royalty.”^{670, 671} But his was a dark, tormented humor, and presupposed some apparition: “The whole dread jail of outcasts rises up.”⁶⁷² While strolling in Jersey, among rocks and heather, he would see this jail of outcasts as the cosmos itself. “Oui, ton fauve univers est le forçat de Dieu.⁶⁷³ / Les constellations, sombres lettres de feu, / Sont les marques du bagne à l’épaule du monde—Yes, your wild universe is God’s prisoner / The constellations, grim letters of fire, / They are the brand of prison at the shoulder of the world.” The cosmos drained by crude mechanists came back to life, to bathe itself with souls. They inhabited every blade of grass, like a boundless jail of ghosts. “L’archipel ténébreux des bagnes s’illumine—The dark archipelago of prisons is lit.”⁶⁷⁴ Those beings cast out of communal life, Lumpen, gueux, paupers, welcomed the grandees and kings of the earth as guests in a vaster dwelling place. Caiaphas is a bramble, Pilate a reed, Alaric a “scarlet-throated” volcano. “Grains of sand are kings, blades of grass emperors,” all fixed into a tangible form that groans—and could just as well be a chair or a window frame.⁶⁷⁵ Hugo proclaims “the outcast universe.”⁶⁷⁶ Out of the poet’s hundred and fifty thousand lines and more, Hofmannsthal, with his perfect ear, marked out certain words: fauve, hagard. Fauve is the universe as “God’s prisoner.” And, after a brief cataract of words, Hugo writes: “L’univers est hagard.”⁶⁷⁷ A word from falconry, hagard comes from Hagerfalk, the wild falcon that is too ferocious to be tamed. Time has led the word to new meanings: “bewildered,” “afflicted by a sinister presence,” like Lumpen, these wild falcons that circle the streets of the city. But those streets are now drawn across the celestial vault.