Page 1513 - les-miserables

any moment and brought back from the obscurity of his
virtue to the broad daylight of public opprobrium, this man
accepted all, excused all, pardoned all, and merely asked of
Providence, of man, of the law, of society, of nature, of the
world, one thing, that Cosette might love him!
That Cosette might continue to love him! That God
would not prevent the heart of the child from coming to
him, and from remaining with him! Beloved by Cosette, he
felt that he was healed, rested, appeased, loaded with bene-
fits, recompensed, crowned. Beloved by Cosette, it was well
with him! He asked nothing more! Had any one said to him:
‘Do you want anything better?’ he would have answered:
‘No.’ God might have said to him: ‘Do you desire heaven?’
and he would have replied: ‘I should lose by it.’
Everything which could affect this situation, if only on
the surface, made him shudder like the beginning of some-
thing new. He had never known very distinctly himself
what the beauty of a woman means; but he understood in-
stinctively, that it was something terrible.
He gazed with terror on this beauty, which was blos-
soming out ever more triumphant and superb beside him,
beneath his very eyes, on the innocent and formidable brow
of that child, from the depths of her homeliness, of his old
age, of his misery, of his reprobation.
He said to himself: ‘How beautiful she is! What is to be-
come of me?’
There, moreover, lay the difference between his tender-
ness and the tenderness of a mother. What he beheld with
anguish, a mother would have gazed upon with joy.

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