Jean Valjean
before delivering it to Marius. Up to that day, Jean Valjean had not
been vanquished by trial. He had been subjected to fearful proofs; no
violence of bad fortune had been spared him; the ferocity of fate, armed
with all vindictiveness and all social scorn, had taken him for her prey
and had raged against him. He had accepted every extremity when it had
been necessary; he had sacrificed his inviolability as a reformed man,
had yielded up his liberty, risked his head, lost everything, suffered
everything, and he had remained disinterested and stoical to such a
point that he might have been thought to be absent from himself like a
martyr. His conscience inured to every assault of destiny, might have
appeared to be forever impregnable. Well, any one who had beheld his
spiritual self would have been obliged to concede that it weakened at
that moment. It was because, of all the tortures which he had undergone
in the course of this long inquisition to which destiny had doomed him,
this was the most terrible. Never had such pincers seized him hitherto.
He felt the mysterious stirring of all his latent sensibilities. He felt
the plucking at the strange chord. Alas! the supreme trial, let us say
rather, the only trial, is the loss of the beloved being.

Poor old Jean Valjean certainly did not love Cosette otherwise than as
a father; but we have already remarked, above, that into this paternity
the widowhood of his life had introduced all the shades of love; he
loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he
loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either a woman to
love or a wife, as nature is a creditor who accepts no protest, that
sentiment also, the most impossible to lose, was mingled with the
rest, vague, ignorant, pure with the purity of blindness, unconscious,
celestial, angelic, divine; less like a sentiment than like an instinct,
less like an instinct than like an imperceptible and invisible but real
attraction; and love, properly speaking, was, in his immense tenderness
for Cosette, like the thread of gold in the mountain, concealed and
virgin.

Let the reader recall the situation of heart which we have already
indicated. No marriage was possible between them; not even that of
souls; and yet, it is certain that their destinies were wedded. With the
exception of Cosette, that is to say, with the exception of a childhood,
Jean Valjean had never, in the whole of his long life,