Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [369]
Jean Valjean till this day had never been vanquished when put to the test. He had been subjected to fearful trials; no violence of ill fortune had been spared him; the ferocity of fate, armed with every vengeance and with every scorn of society, had taken him for a subject and had greedily pursued him. He had neither recoiled nor flinched before anything. He had accepted, when he must, every extremity; he had sacrificed his reconquered inviolability, sacrificed his liberty, risked his head, lost all, suffered all, and he had remained so disinterested and stoical that at times one might have believed him selfless, like a martyr. His conscience, inured to all possible assaults of adversity, might seem for ever impregnable. Well, whoever could have seen his inner soul would have been compelled to admit that at this hour it was growing weak.
For, of all the tortures which he had undergone in that prolonged inquisition of destiny, this was the most fearsome. Never had such pincers seized him. He felt the mysterious quiver of every latent sensibility. Alas, the supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being.
Poor old Jean Valjean did not, certainly, love Cosette otherwise than as a father; but, as we have already mentioned, into this paternity the very bereavement of his life had introduced every love; he loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either sweetheart or wife, as nature is a creditor who accepts no bounced checks, that sentiment, also, the most indestructible of all, was mingled with the others, vague, ignorant, pure with the purity of blindness, unconscious, celestial, angelic, divine; less like a sentiment than like an instinct, less like an instinct than like an attraction, imperceptible and invisible, but real; and love, properly speaking, existed in his enormous tenderness for Cosette as does the vein of gold in the mountain, dark and virgin.
So, when he saw that it was positively ended, that she escaped him, that she glided from his hands, that she eluded him, that it was cloud, that it was water, when he had before his eyes this crushing evidence; another is the aim of her heart, another is the desire of her life, there is a beloved; I am only the father; I no longer exist; when he could no more doubt when he said to himself: “She is going away out of me!” the grief which he felt surpassed the possible. To have done all that he had done to come to this! and, what! to be nothing! Then, as we have just said, he felt from head to foot a shudder of revolt. He felt even to the roots of his hair the immense awakening of selfishness, and the Me howled in the abyss of his soul.
His instinct did not hesitate. He put together certain circumstances, certain dates, certain blushes, and certain pallors of Cosette, and he said to himself: “It is he.” The intuition of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never misses its aim. With his first conjecture, he hit Marius. He did not know the name, but he found the man at once. He perceived distinctly, at the bottom of the implacable evocation of memory, the unknown prowler of the Luxembourg Gardens, that wretched seeker of amours, that romantic idler, that imbecile, that coward, for it is cowardice to come and make sweet eyes at girls who are beside their father who loves them.
After he had fully determined that that young man was at the bottom of this state of affairs, and that it all came from him, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had laboured so much upon his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve all life, all misery, and all misfortune into love; he looked within himself, and there he saw a spectre, Hatred.
While he was thinking, Toussaint entered. Jean Valjean arose, and asked her:
“In what direction is it? Do you know?”
Toussaint, astonished, could only answer:
“If you please?”
Jean Valjean resumed:
“Didn’t you tell me just now that they were fighting?