Les Miserables

to reflect for a moment here.
Can human nature be so entirely transformed from top to bottom?
Can man, created good by God, be made wicked by man? Can the soul be
changed to keep pace with its destiny, and become evil when its
destiny is evil? Can the heart become distorted and contract
deformities and infirmities that are incurable, under the pressure
of disproportionate woe, like the vertebral column under a too heavy
brain? Is there not in every human soul; was there not in the
particular soul of Jean Valjean, a primitive spark, a divine
element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the next, which
can be developed by good, kindled, lit up, and made resplendently
radiant, and which evil can never entirely extinguish.
Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which every physiologist
would probably, without hesitation, have answered no, had he seen at
Toulon, during the hours of rest, which to lean Valjean were hours
of thought, this gloomy galley-slave, seated, with folded arms, upon
the bar of some windlass, the end of his chain stuck into his pocket
that it might not drag, serious, silent, and thoughtful, a pariah of
the law which views man with wrath, condemned by civilisation which
views heaven with severity.
Certainly, we will not conceal it, such a physiologist would have
seen in Jean Valjean an irremediable misery; he would perhaps have
lamented the disease occasioned by the law; but he would not even have
attempted a cure; he would have turned from the sight of the caverns
which he would have beheld in that soul; and, like Dante at the gate
of Hell, he would have wiped out from that existence the word which
the finger of God has nevertheless written upon the brow of every man-
Hope!
Was that state of mind which we have attempted to analyse as
perfectly clear to Jean Valjean as we have tried to render it to our
readers? Did Jean Valjean distinctly see, after their formation, and
had he distinctly seen, while they were forming, all the elements of
which his moral misery was made up? Had this rude and unlettered man
taken accurate account of the succession of ideas by which he had,
step by step, risen and fallen, till he had reached that mournful
plane which for so many years already had marked the internal
horizon of his mind? Had he a clear consciousness of all that was
passing within him, and of all that was moving him? This we dare not
affirm; we do not, in fact, believe it. Jean Valjean was too ignorant,
even after so much ill fortune, for nice discrimination in these
matters. At times he did not even know exactly what were his feelings.
Jean Valjean was in the dark; he suffered in the dark; he hated in the
dark; we might say that he hated in his own sight. He lived constantly
in the darkness, groping blindly and as in a dream. Only,