Page 972 - les-miserables

grateful song of those innocent creatures weighed down
with severities, and the blood ran cold in his veins at the
thought that those who were justly chastised raised their
voices heavenward only in blasphemy, and that he, wretch
that he was, had shaken his fist at God.
There was one striking thing which caused him to medi-
tate deeply, like a warning whisper from Providence itself:
the scaling of that wall, the passing of those barriers, the ad-
venture accepted even at the risk of death, the painful and
difficult ascent, all those efforts even, which he had made
to escape from that other place of expiation, he had made
in order to gain entrance into this one. Was this a symbol
of his destiny? This house was a prison likewise and bore a
melancholy resemblance to that other one whence he had
fled, and yet he had never conceived an idea of anything
similar.
Again he beheld gratings, bolts, iron bars—to guard
whom? Angels.
These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he
now beheld once more around lambs.
This was a place of expiation, and not of punishment;
and yet, it was still more austere, more gloomy, and more
pitiless than the other.
These virgins were even more heavily burdened than the
convicts. A cold, harsh wind, that wind which had chilled
his youth, traversed the barred and padlocked grating of the
vultures; a still harsher and more biting breeze blew in the
cage of these doves.
Why?

972 Les Miserables