He lent an ear.
Nothing was moving in the house.
The noise made by the rusty hinge had not awakened any one.
This first danger was past; but there still reigned a frightful tumult within him.
Nevertheless, he did not retreat.
Even when he had thought himself lost, he had not drawn back.
His only thought now was to finish as soon as possible.
He took a step and entered the room.
This room was in a state of perfect calm.
Here and there vague and confused forms were distinguishable, which in the daylight were papers scattered on a table, open folios, volumes piled upon a stool, an armchair heaped with clothing, a prie-Dieu, and which at that hour were only shadowy corners and whitish spots.
Jean Valjean advanced with precaution, taking care not to knock against the furniture.
He could hear, at the extremity of the room, the even and tranquil breathing of the sleeping Bishop.
He suddenly came to a halt.
He was near the bed.
He had arrived there sooner than he had thought for.
Nature sometimes mingles her effects and her spectacles with our actions with sombre and intelligent appropriateness, as though she desired to make us reflect.
For the last half-hour a large cloud had covered the heavens.
At the moment when Jean Valjean paused in front of the bed, this cloud parted, as though on purpose, and a ray of light, traversing the long window, suddenly illuminated the Bishop’s pale face.
He was sleeping peacefully.
He lay in his bed almost completely dressed, on account of the cold of the Basses-Alps, in a garment of brown wool, which covered his arms to the wrists.
His head was thrown back on the pillow, in the careless attitude of repose; his hand, adorned with the pastoral ring, and whence had fallen so many good deeds and so many holy actions, was hanging over the edge of the bed.
His whole face was illumined with a vague expression of satisfaction, of hope, and of felicity.
It was more than a smile, and almost a radiance.
He bore upon his brow the indescribable reflection of a light which was invisible.
The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.
A reflection of that heaven rested on the Bishop.
It was, at the same time, a luminous transparency, for that heaven was within him.
That heaven was his conscience.
At the moment when the ray of moonlight superposed itself, so to speak, upon that inward radiance, the sleeping Bishop seemed as in a glory.
It remained, however, gentle and veiled in an ineffable half-light.
That moon in the sky, that slumbering nature, that garden without a quiver, that house which was so calm, the hour, the moment, the silence, added some solemn and unspeakable quality to the venerable repose of this man, and enveloped in a sort of serene and majestic aureole that white hair, those closed eyes, that face in which all was hope and all was confidence, that head of an old man, and that slumber of an infant.
There was something almost divine in this man, who was thus august, without being himself aware of it.
Jean Valjean was in the shadow, and stood motionless, with his iron candlestick in his hand, frightened by this luminous old man.
Never had he beheld anything like this.
This confidence terrified him.
The moral world has no grander spectacle than this: a troubled and uneasy conscience, which has arrived on the brink of an evil action, contemplating the slumber of the just.
That slumber in that isolation, and with a neighbor like himself, had about it something sublime, of which he was vaguely but imperiously conscious.
No one could have told what was passing within him, not even himself.
In order to attempt to form an idea of it, it is necessary to think of the most violent of things in the presence of the most gentle.
Even on his visage it would have been impossible to distinguish anything with certainty.
It was a sort of haggard astonishment.
He gazed at it, and that was all.
But what was his thought?
It would have been impossible to divine it.
What was evident was, that he was touched and astounded.
But what was the nature of this emotion?
His eye never quitted the old man.
The only thing which was clearly to be inferred from his attitude and his physiognomy was a strange indecision.
One would have said that he was hesitating between the two abysses,—the one in which one loses one’s self and that in which one saves one’s self.
He seemed prepared to crush that skull or to kiss that hand.