“She is going away from me!” the grief which he felt surpassed the bounds of possibility.
To have done all that he had done for the purpose of ending like this!
And the very idea of being nothing!
Then, as we have just said, a quiver of revolt ran through him from head to foot.
He felt, even in the very roots of his hair, the immense reawakening of egotism, and the I in this man’s abyss howled.
There is such a thing as the sudden giving way of the inward subsoil.
A despairing certainty does not make its way into a man without thrusting aside and breaking certain profound elements which, in some cases, are the very man himself.
Grief, when it attains this shape, is a headlong flight of all the forces of the conscience.
These are fatal crises.
Few among us emerge from them still like ourselves and firm in duty.
When the limit of endurance is overstepped, the most imperturbable virtue is disconcerted.
Jean Valjean took the blotter again, and convinced himself afresh; he remained bowed and as though petrified and with staring eyes, over those four unobjectionable lines; and there arose within him such a cloud that one might have thought that everything in this soul was crumbling away.
He examined this revelation, athwart the exaggerations of reverie, with an apparent and terrifying calmness, for it is a fearful thing when a man’s calmness reaches the coldness of the statue.
He measured the terrible step which his destiny had taken without his having a suspicion of the fact; he recalled his fears of the preceding summer, so foolishly dissipated; he recognized the precipice, it was still the same; only, Jean Valjean was no longer on the brink, he was at the bottom of it.
The unprecedented and heart-rending thing about it was that he had fallen without perceiving it.
All the light of his life had departed, while he still fancied that he beheld the sun.
His instinct did not hesitate.
He put together certain circumstances, certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette’s part, and he said to himself:
“It is he.”
The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never misses its aim.
He struck Marius with his first conjecture. He did not know the name, but he found the man instantly.
He distinctly perceived, in the background of the implacable conjuration of his memories, the unknown prowler of the Luxembourg, that wretched seeker of love adventures, that idler of romance, that idiot, that coward, for it is cowardly to come and make eyes at young girls who have beside them a father who loves them.
After he had thoroughly verified the fact that this young man was at the bottom of this situation, and that everything proceeded from that quarter, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had so labored over his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all unhappiness into love, looked into his own breast and there beheld a spectre, Hate.
Great griefs contain something of dejection.
They discourage one with existence.
The man into whom they enter feels something within him withdraw from him.
In his youth, their visits are lugubrious; later on they are sinister.
Alas, if despair is a fearful thing when the blood is hot, when the hair is black, when the head is erect on the body like the flame on the torch, when the roll of destiny still retains its full thickness, when the heart, full of desirable love, still possesses beats which can be returned to it, when one has time for redress, when all women and all smiles and all the future and all the horizon are before one, when the force of life is complete, what is it in old age, when the years hasten on, growing ever paler, to that twilight hour when one begins to behold the stars of the tomb?
While he was meditating, Toussaint entered.
Jean Valjean rose and asked her:—
“In what quarter is it?
Do you know?”
Toussaint was struck dumb, and could only answer him:—
“What is it, sir?”
Jean Valjean began again: “Did you not tell me that just now that there is fighting going on?”
“Ah! yes, sir,” replied Toussaint. “It is in the direction of Saint-Merry.”
There is a mechanical movement which comes to us, unconsciously, from the most profound depths of our thought.
It was, no doubt, under the impulse of a movement of this sort, and of which he was hardly conscious, that Jean Valjean, five minutes later, found himself in the street.
Bareheaded, he sat upon the stone post at the door of his house.
He seemed to be listening.
Night had come.
CHAPTER II—THE STREET URCHIN AN ENEMY OF LIGHT
How long did he remain thus?
What was the ebb and flow of this tragic meditation?
Did he straighten up?
Did he remain bowed?
Had he been bent to breaking?
Could he still rise and regain his footing in his conscience upon something solid?
He probably would not have been able to tell himself.
The street was deserted.