Page 159 - les-miserables

remediable misery; he would, perchance, have pitied this
sick man, of the law’s making; but he would not have even
essayed any treatment; he would have turned aside his gaze
from the caverns of which he would have caught a glimpse
within this soul, and, like Dante at the portals of hell, he
would have effaced from this existence the word which the
finger of God has, nevertheless, inscribed upon the brow of
every man,—hope.
Was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to
analyze, as perfectly clear to Jean Valjean as we have tried
to render it for those who read us? Did Jean Valjean dis-
tinctly perceive, after their formation, and had he seen
distinctly during the process of their formation, all the ele-
ments of which his moral misery was composed? Had this
rough and unlettered man gathered a perfectly clear per-
ception of the succession of ideas through which he had, by
degrees, mounted and descended to the lugubrious aspects
which had, for so many years, formed the inner horizon of
his spirit? Was he conscious of all that passed within him,
and of all that was working there? That is something which
we do not presume to state; it is something which we do
not even believe. There was too much ignorance in Jean
Valjean, even after his misfortune, to prevent much vague-
ness from still lingering there. At times he did not rightly
know himself what he felt. Jean Valjean was in the shad-
ows; he suffered in the shadows; he hated in the shadows;
one might have said that he hated in advance of himself. He
dwelt habitually in this shadow, feeling his way like a blind
man and a dreamer. Only, at intervals, there suddenly came

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