by precipitating one element and clarifying the other.

First of all, even before examining himself and reflecting,
all bewildered, like one who seeks to save himself, he tried to
find the child in order to return his money to him; then, when he
recognized the fact that this was impossible, he halted in despair.
At the moment when he exclaimed "I am a wretch!" he had just
perceived what he was, and he was already separated from himself
to such a degree, that he seemed to himself to be no longer
anything more than a phantom, and as if he had, there before him,
in flesh and blood, the hideous galley-convict, Jean Valjean,
cudgel in hand, his blouse on his hips, his knapsack filled with
stolen objects on his back, with his resolute and gloomy visage,
with his thoughts filled with abominable projects.

Excess of unhappiness had, as we have remarked, made him in some
sort a visionary. This, then, was in the nature of a vision.
He actually saw that Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him.
He had almost reached the point of asking himself who that man was,
and he was horrified by him.

His brain was going through one of those violent and yet perfectly
calm moments in which revery is so profound that it absorbs reality.
One no longer beholds the object which one has before one, and one sees,
as though apart from one's self, the figures which one has in one's
own mind.

Thus he contemplated himself, so to speak, face to face,
and at the same time, athwart this hallucination, he perceived
in a mysterious depth a sort of light which he at first took