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Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
page 144 of 2331 (06%)
not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a first spark,
a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the other,
which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow with splendor,
and which evil can never wholly extinguish?

Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which every physiologist
would probably have responded no, and that without hesitation,
had he beheld at Toulon, during the hours of repose, which were
for Jean Valjean hours of revery, this gloomy galley-slave, seated
with folded arms upon the bar of some capstan, with the end of his
chain thrust into his pocket to prevent its dragging, serious, silent,
and thoughtful, a pariah of the laws which regarded the man with wrath,
condemned by civilization, and regarding heaven with severity.

Certainly,--and we make no attempt to dissimulate the fact,--
the observing physiologist would have beheld an irremediable misery;
he would, perchance, have pitied this sick man, of the law's making;
but he would not have even essayed any treatment; he would have
turned aside his gaze from the caverns of which he would have caught
a glimpse within this soul, and, like Dante at the portals of hell,
he would have effaced from this existence the word which the finger
of God has, nevertheless, inscribed upon the brow of every man,--hope.

Was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to analyze,
as perfectly clear to Jean Valjean as we have tried to render it
for those who read us? Did Jean Valjean distinctly perceive,
after their formation, and had he seen distinctly during the process
of their formation, all the elements of which his moral misery
was composed? Had this rough and unlettered man gathered a perfectly
clear perception of the succession of ideas through which he had,
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