Page 451 - les-miserables

M. sur M., whither the duties of his office had called him
more than once, recognized him and saluted him also: he
had hardly perceived it; he was the victim of a sort of hallu-
cination; he was watching.
Judges, clerks, gendarmes, a throng of cruelly curious
heads, all these he had already beheld once, in days gone by,
twenty-seven years before; he had encountered those fatal
things once more; there they were; they moved; they exist-
ed; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirage of his
thought; they were real gendarmes and real judges, a real
crowd, and real men of flesh and blood: it was all over; he
beheld the monstrous aspects of his past reappear and live
once more around him, with all that there is formidable in
reality.
All this was yawning before him.
He was horrified by it; he shut his eyes, and exclaimed in
the deepest recesses of his soul, ‘Never!’
And by a tragic play of destiny which made all his ideas
tremble, and rendered him nearly mad, it was another self
of his that was there! all called that man who was being
tried Jean Valjean.
Under his very eyes, unheard-of vision, he had a sort of
representation of the most horrible moment of his life, en-
acted by his spectre.
Everything was there; the apparatus was the same, the
hour of the night, the faces of the judges, of soldiers, and
of spectators; all were the same, only above the President’s
head there hung a crucifix, something which the courts had
lacked at the time of his condemnation: God had been ab-

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