over his head, in accordance with the complicated and mysterious movement
which God imparts to civilization, walking over him and crushing him
with I know not what peacefulness in its cruelty and inexorability
in its indifference. Souls which have fallen to the bottom of all
possible misfortune, unhappy men lost in the lowest of those limbos at
which no one any longer looks, the reproved of the law, feel the whole
weight of this human society, so formidable for him who is without,
so frightful for him who is beneath, resting upon their heads.

In this situation Jean Valjean meditated; and what could
be the nature of his meditation?

If the grain of millet beneath the millstone had thoughts,
it would, doubtless, think that same thing which Jean Valjean thought.

All these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagories full
of realities, had eventually created for him a sort of interior
state which is almost indescribable.

At times, amid his convict toil, he paused. He fell to thinking.
His reason, at one and the same time riper and more troubled
than of yore, rose in revolt. Everything which had happened
to him seemed to him absurd; everything that surrounded him
seemed to him impossible. He said to himself, "It is a dream."
He gazed at the galley-sergeant standing a few paces from him;
the galley-sergeant seemed a phantom to him. All of a sudden the
phantom dealt him a blow with his cudgel.

Visible nature hardly existed for him. It would almost be
true to say that there existed for Jean Valjean neither sun,