Les Miserables

the other.
At first, even before self-examination and reflection, distractedly,
like one who seeks to escape, he endeavoured to find the boy to give
him back his money; then, when he found that that was useless and
impossible, he stopped in despair. At the very moment when he
exclaimed: "What a wretch I am!" he saw himself as he was, and was
already so far separated from himself that it seemed to him that he
was only a phantom, and that he had there before him, in flesh and
bone, with his stick in his hand, his blouse on his back, his knapsack
filled with stolen articles on his shoulders, with his stern and
gloomy face, and his thoughts full of abominable projects, the hideous
galley slave, Jean Valjean.
Excess of misfortune, we have remarked, had made him, in some
sort, a visionary. This then was like a vision. He veritably saw
this Jean Valjean, this ominous face, before him. He was on the
point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horror-stricken
by it.
His brain was in one of those violent, and yet frightfully calm,
conditions where reverie is so profound that it swallows up reality.
We no longer see the objects that are before us, but we see, as if
outside of ourselves, the forms that we have in our minds.
He beheld himself then, so to speak, face to face, and at the same
time, across that hallucination, he saw, at a mysterious distance, a
sort of light which he took at first to be a torch. Examining more
attentively this light which dawned upon his conscience, he recognised
that it had a human form, and that this torch was the bishop.
{FANTINE|BOOK_2ND|XIII ^paragraph 75}
His conscience weighed in turn these two men thus placed before
it, the bishop and Jean Valjean. Anything less than the first would
have failed to soften the second. By one of those singular effects
which are peculiar to this kind of ecstasy, as his reverie
continued, the bishop grew grander and more resplendent in his eyes;
Jean Valjean shrank and faded away. At one moment he was but a shadow.
Suddenly he disappeared. The bishop alone remained.
He filled the whole soul of this wretched man with a magnificent
radiance.
Jean Valjean wept long. He shed hot tears, he wept bitterly, with
more weakness than a woman, with more terror than a child.
While he wept, the light grew brighter and brighter in his mind-
an extraordinary light, a light at once transporting and terrible. His
past life, his first offence, his long expiation, his brutal exterior,
his hardened interior, his release made glad by so many schemes of
vengeance, what had happened to him at the bishop's, his last
action, this theft of forty sous from a child, a crime meaner and
the more monstrous that it came after the bishop's pardon, all this
returned and appeared to him, clearly, but in a light that he