“The prosperity of Crime is but an ordeal”
Justine“The prosperity of Crime is but an ordeal” names Madame de Lorsange’s final interpretation of the novel’s starkest reversal: Therese, who has endured repeated calamities while observing her duties, is killed by lightning, while the apparent prosperity of those who harmed her is recast as a test of virtue rather than proof that crime prevails. The phrase turns a violent death into the occasion for Madame de Lorsange’s conversion and departure from the life she shared with Monsieur de Corville.
Meaning and Context
Madame de Lorsange speaks the phrase after a storm prevents an outing at Monsieur de Corville’s country estate. The oppressive heat has left the windows open; when the storm breaks, lightning flashes, hail falls, and the winds batter the house. At Madame de Lorsange’s urgent request, Therese hurries to close the shutters. She struggles briefly against the wind, is driven back, and is struck by a thunderbolt in the middle of the room.
The lightning enters Therese’s right breast and reaches her heart; the account describes it consuming her chest and face before bursting out through her belly. Monsieur de Corville orders that her body be carried away. Madame de Lorsange instead asks that it remain before her eyes, because she wants to contemplate it and hold fast to the decision she is about to make. The phrase thus arises not as an abstract maxim but in the immediate presence of a death that appears to contradict any easy belief that virtue is protected from suffering.
The Lightning as an Image of False Prosperity
Madame de Lorsange acknowledges that villains have seemed happy throughout Therese’s adventures. She calls the apparent felicity a deceptive gleam: like lightning, it briefly illuminates the atmosphere before hurling the person it dazzles into death. The comparison makes the storm’s flash a figure for the temporary brilliance of criminal success. What looked like lasting advantage becomes, in her reading, a momentary radiance that precedes catastrophe.
Her statement that prosperity in crime is an ordeal supplies a religious interpretation of that contrast. The wicked may flourish for a time, but their apparent success is not a reliable guide to the moral order. Therese’s calamities, terrible and uninterrupted, are presented as a warning to Madame de Lorsange from the Eternal. The phrase therefore does not deny the visible suffering of the virtuous; it recasts that suffering as a test and admonition rather than evidence that crime has triumphed in the deepest sense.
Conversion and Consequence
The death also prompts Madame de Lorsange to judge her own past. She contrasts Therese, who had no sin to repent of, with herself, whose life she describes as marked by libertinism, irreligion, and abandonment of principle. She interprets the thunderbolt as the shock necessary to her conversion in this life and as the beginning of a hope for happiness in another.
Madame de Lorsange tells Monsieur de Corville that their relationship must end and asks him not to search for her. She leaves immediately for Paris, taking some money and entrusting the rest of her property to him for a pious legacy. There she takes the Carmelite veil and, in time, becomes an example to her order through her piety, wisdom, and regular conduct. The phrase’s final force lies in this reversal: the spectacle of Therese’s death, which might seem only to confirm the injustice of her fate, becomes the event that turns Madame de Lorsange away from her former life and toward penance.
