Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [106]
“Well,” said he, “let us take this course! let us do our duty! Let us save this man!”
He pronounced these words in a loud voice, without perceiving that he was speaking aloud.
He took his books, verified them, and put them in order. He threw into the fire a package of notes which he held against needy small traders. He wrote a letter, which he sealed, and upon the envelope of which might have been read, if there had been any one in the room at the time: Monsieur Laffitte, banker, Rue d‘Artois, Paris.
He drew from a writing-desk a pocket-book containing some banknotes and the passport that he had used that same year in going to the elections.
Had any one seen him while he was doing these various acts with such serious meditation, he would not have suspected what was passing within him. Still at intervals his lips quivered; at other times he raised his head and fixed his eye on some point of the wall, as if he saw just there something that he wished to clear up or to examine.
The letter to Monsieur Laffitte finished, he put it in his pocket as well as the pocket-book, and began to pace back and forth again.
The current of his thought had not changed. He still saw his duty clearly written in luminous letters which flared out before his eyes, and moved with his gaze: “Go! avow thy name! denounce thyself!”
He saw also, and as if they were laid bare before him with sensible forms, the two ideas which had been hitherto the double rule of his life, to conceal his name, and to sanctify his soul. For the first time, they appeared to him absolutely distinct, and he saw the difference which separated them. He recognised that one of these ideas was necessarily good, while the other might become evil; that the former was devotion, and that the latter was selfishness; that the one said: “the neighbour,” and that the other said: “me;” that the one came from the light, and the other from the night.
They were fighting with each other. He saw them fighting. While he was looking, they had expanded before his mind’s eye; they were now colossal; and it seemed to him that he saw struggling within him, in that infinite of which we spoke just now, in the midst of darkness and gloom, a goddess and a giantess.
He was full of dismay, but it seemed to him that the good thought was gaining the victory.
He felt that he had reached the second decisive movement of his conscience, and his destiny; that the bishop had marked the first phase of his new life, and that this Champmathieu marked the second. After a great crisis, a great trial.
At another moment the idea occurred to him that, if he should denounce himself, perhaps the heroism of his action, and his honest life for the past seven years, and what he had done for the country, would be considered, and he would be pardoned.
But this supposition quickly vanished, and he smiled bitterly at the thought, that the robbery of the forty sous from Petit Gervais made him a second offender, that that matter would certainly reappear, and by the precise terms of the law he would be condemned to hard labour for life.
He turned away from all illusion, disengaged himself more and more from the earth, and sought consolation and strength elsewhere. He said to himself that he must do his duty; that perhaps even he should not be more unhappy after having done his duty than after having evaded it; that if he let matters alone, if he remained at M—sur M—, his reputation, his good name, his good works, the deference, the veneration he commanded, his charity, his riches, his popularity,