for a torch. On scrutinizing this light which appeared
to his conscience with more attention, he recognized the
fact that it possessed a human form and that this torch was the Bishop.

His conscience weighed in turn these two men thus placed before it,--
the Bishop and Jean Valjean. Nothing less than the first was
required to soften the second. By one of those singular effects,
which are peculiar to this sort of ecstasies, in proportion as his
revery continued, as the Bishop grew great and resplendent in his eyes,
so did Jean Valjean grow less and vanish. After a certain time he
was no longer anything more than a shade. All at once he disappeared.
The Bishop alone remained; he filled the whole soul of this wretched
man with a magnificent radiance.

Jean Valjean wept for a long time. He wept burning tears, he sobbed
with more weakness than a woman, with more fright than a child.

As he wept, daylight penetrated more and more clearly into his soul;
an extraordinary light; a light at once ravishing and terrible.
His past life, his first fault, his long expiation, his external
brutishness, his internal hardness, his dismissal to liberty,
rejoicing in manifold plans of vengeance, what had happened to him
at the Bishop's, the last thing that he had done, that theft of forty
sous from a child, a crime all the more cowardly, and all the more
monstrous since it had come after the Bishop's pardon,--all this
recurred to his mind and appeared clearly to him, but with a clearness
which he had never hitherto witnessed. He examined his life, and it
seemed horrible to him; his soul, and it seemed frightful to him.
In the meantime a gentle light rested over this life and this soul.
It seemed to him that he beheld Satan by the light of Paradise.