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Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
page 145 of 2331 (06%)
by degrees, mounted and descended to the lugubrious aspects which had,
for so many years, formed the inner horizon of his spirit?
Was he conscious of all that passed within him, and of all that was
working there? That is something which we do not presume to state;
it is something which we do not even believe. There was too much
ignorance in Jean Valjean, even after his misfortune, to prevent much
vagueness from still lingering there. At times he did not rightly know
himself what he felt. Jean Valjean was in the shadows; he suffered
in the shadows; he hated in the shadows; one might have said that he
hated in advance of himself. He dwelt habitually in this shadow,
feeling his way like a blind man and a dreamer. Only, at intervals,
there suddenly came to him, from without and from within, an access
of wrath, a surcharge of suffering, a livid and rapid flash which
illuminated his whole soul, and caused to appear abruptly all
around him, in front, behind, amid the gleams of a frightful light,
the hideous precipices and the sombre perspective of his destiny.

The flash passed, the night closed in again; and where was he?
He no longer knew. The peculiarity of pains of this nature,
in which that which is pitiless--that is to say, that which
is brutalizing--predominates, is to transform a man, little by
little, by a sort of stupid transfiguration, into a wild beast;
sometimes into a ferocious beast.

Jean Valjean's successive and obstinate attempts at escape would
alone suffice to prove this strange working of the law upon
the human soul. Jean Valjean would have renewed these attempts,
utterly useless and foolish as they were, as often as the opportunity
had presented itself, without reflecting for an instant on the result,
nor on the experiences which he had already gone through.
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