Page 1584 - les-miserables

dared make herself no promises, and she did not wish to
refuse herself anything. Flashes of pallor passed over her
countenance, and shivers ran through her frame. It seemed
to her, at intervals, that she was entering the land of chimae-
ras; she said to herself: ‘Is this reality?’ Then she felt of the
dear paper within her bosom under her gown, she pressed it
to her heart, she felt its angles against her flesh; and if Jean
Valjean had seen her at the moment, he would have shud-
dered in the presence of that luminous and unknown joy,
which overflowed from beneath her eyelids.—‘Oh yes!’ she
thought, ‘it is certainly he! This comes from him, and is for
me!’
And she told herself that an intervention of the angels, a
celestial chance, had given him back to her.
Oh transfiguration of love! Oh dreams! That celestial
chance, that intervention of the angels, was a pellet of bread
tossed by one thief to another thief, from the Charlemagne
Courtyard to the Lion’s Ditch, over the roofs of La Force.

1584 Les Miserables