Little Gervais!" His shout died away in the mist, without even
awakening an echo. He murmured yet once more, "Little Gervais!"
but in a feeble and almost inarticulate voice. It was his last effort;
his legs gave way abruptly under him, as though an invisible power
had suddenly overwhelmed him with the weight of his evil conscience;
he fell exhausted, on a large stone, his fists clenched in his hair
and his face on his knees, and he cried, "I am a wretch!"

Then his heart burst, and he began to cry. It was the first time
that he had wept in nineteen years.

When Jean Valjean left the Bishop's house, he was, as we have seen,
quite thrown out of everything that had been his thought hitherto.
He could not yield to the evidence of what was going on within him.
He hardened himself against the angelic action and the gentle words
of the old man. "You have promised me to become an honest man.
I buy your soul. I take it away from the spirit of perversity;
I give it to the good God."

This recurred to his mind unceasingly. To this celestial kindness
he opposed pride, which is the fortress of evil within us.
He was indistinctly conscious that the pardon of this priest
was the greatest assault and the most formidable attack which
had moved him yet; that his obduracy was finally settled if he
resisted this clemency; that if he yielded, he should be obliged
to renounce that hatred with which the actions of other men had
filled his soul through so many years, and which pleased him;
that this time it was necessary to conquer or to be conquered;
and that a struggle, a colossal and final struggle, had been begun
between his viciousness and the goodness of that man.