Jean Valjean blossomed out and felt his happiness increase with the happiness which he afforded Cosette.
The joy which we inspire has this charming property, that, far from growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us more radiant than ever.
At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her running and playing in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh from that of the rest.
For Cosette laughed now.
Cosette’s face had even undergone a change, to a certain extent.
The gloom had disappeared from it.
A smile is the same as sunshine; it banishes winter from the human countenance.
Recreation over, when Cosette went into the house again, Jean Valjean gazed at the windows of her class-room, and at night he rose to look at the windows of her dormitory.
God has his own ways, moreover; the convent contributed, like Cosette, to uphold and complete the Bishop’s work in Jean Valjean.
It is certain that virtue adjoins pride on one side.
A bridge built by the devil exists there.
Jean Valjean had been, unconsciously, perhaps, tolerably near that side and that bridge, when Providence cast his lot in the convent of the Petit-Picpus; so long as he had compared himself only to the Bishop, he had regarded himself as unworthy and had remained humble; but for some time past he had been comparing himself to men in general, and pride was beginning to spring up.
Who knows?
He might have ended by returning very gradually to hatred.
The convent stopped him on that downward path.
This was the second place of captivity which he had seen.
In his youth, in what had been for him the beginning of his life, and later on, quite recently again, he had beheld another,—a frightful place, a terrible place, whose severities had always appeared to him the iniquity of justice, and the crime of the law.
Now, after the galleys, he saw the cloister; and when he meditated how he had formed a part of the galleys, and that he now, so to speak, was a spectator of the cloister, he confronted the two in his own mind with anxiety.
Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe, and slowly descended the endless spirals of reverie.
He recalled his former companions: how wretched they were; they rose at dawn, and toiled until night; hardly were they permitted to sleep; they lay on camp beds, where nothing was tolerated but mattresses two inches thick, in rooms which were heated only in the very harshest months of the year; they were clothed in frightful red blouses; they were allowed, as a great favor, linen trousers in the hottest weather, and a woollen carter’s blouse on their backs when it was very cold; they drank no wine, and ate no meat, except when they went on “fatigue duty.”
They lived nameless, designated only by numbers, and converted, after a manner, into ciphers themselves, with downcast eyes, with lowered voices, with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.
Then his mind reverted to the beings whom he had under his eyes.
These beings also lived with shorn heads, with downcast eyes, with lowered voices, not in disgrace, but amid the scoffs of the world, not with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but with their shoulders lacerated with their discipline.
Their names, also, had vanished from among men; they no longer existed except under austere appellations.
They never ate meat and they never drank wine; they often remained until evening without food; they were attired, not in a red blouse, but in a black shroud, of woollen, which was heavy in summer and thin in winter, without the power to add or subtract anything from it; without having even, according to the season, the resource of the linen garment or the woollen cloak; and for six months in the year they wore serge chemises which gave them fever.
They dwelt, not in rooms warmed only during rigorous cold, but in cells where no fire was ever lighted; they slept, not on mattresses two inches thick, but on straw.
And finally, they were not even allowed their sleep; every night, after a day of toil, they were obliged, in the weariness of their first slumber, at the moment when they were falling sound asleep and beginning to get warm, to rouse themselves, to rise and to go and pray in an ice-cold and gloomy chapel, with their knees on the stones.
On certain days each of these beings in turn had to remain for twelve successive hours in a kneeling posture, or prostrate, with face upon the pavement, and arms outstretched in the form of a cross.
The others were men; these were women.
What had those men done?
They had stolen, violated, pillaged, murdered, assassinated.
They were bandits, counterfeiters, poisoners, incendiaries, murderers, parricides.
What had these women done?
They had done nothing whatever.
On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, violence, sensuality, homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every variety of crime; on the other, one thing only, innocence.
Perfect innocence, almost caught up into heaven in a mysterious assumption, attached to the earth by virtue, already possessing something of heaven through holiness.
On the one hand, confidences over crimes, which are exchanged in whispers; on the other, the confession of faults made aloud.
And what crimes!
And what faults!
On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable perfume.
On the one hand, a moral pest, guarded from sight, penned up under the range of cannon, and literally devouring its plague-stricken victims; on the other, the chaste flame of all souls on the same hearth.
There, darkness; here, the shadow; but a shadow filled with gleams of light, and of gleams full of radiance.
Two strongholds of slavery; but in the first, deliverance possible, a legal limit always in sight, and then, escape.
In the second, perpetuity; the sole hope, at the distant extremity of the future, that faint light of liberty which men call death.
In the first, men are bound only with chains; in the other, chained by faith.
What flowed from the first?
An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth, hatred, desperate viciousness, a cry of rage against human society, a sarcasm against heaven.
What results flowed from the second?
Blessings and love.
And in these two places, so similar yet so unlike, these two species of beings who were so very unlike, were undergoing the same work, expiation.