an apparent and terrifying calmness, for it is a fearful thing when a
man's calmness reaches the coldness of the statue.

He measured the terrible step which his destiny had taken without his
having a suspicion of the fact; he recalled his fears of the preceding
summer, so foolishly dissipated; he recognized the precipice, it was
still the same; only, Jean Valjean was no longer on the brink, he was at
the bottom of it.

The unprecedented and heart-rending thing about it was that he had
fallen without perceiving it. All the light of his life had departed,
while he still fancied that he beheld the sun.

His instinct did not hesitate. He put together certain circumstances,
certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette's part,
and he said to himself: "It is he."

The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never misses
its aim. He struck Marius with his first conjecture. He did not know the
name, but he found the man instantly. He distinctly perceived, in the
background of the implacable conjuration of his memories, the unknown
prowler of the Luxembourg, that wretched seeker of love adventures, that
idler of romance, that idiot, that coward, for it is cowardly to come
and make eyes at young girls who have beside them a father who loves
them.

After he had thoroughly verified the fact that this young man was at
the bottom of this situation, and that everything proceeded from that
quarter, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had so
labored over his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve
all life, all misery, and all unhappiness into love, looked into his own
breast and there beheld a spectre, Hate.

Great griefs contain something of dejection. They discourage one with
existence. The man into whom they enter feels something within him
withdraw from him. In his youth, their visits are lugubrious; later on
they are sinister. Alas, if despair is a fearful thing when the blood is
hot, when the hair is black, when the head is erect on the body like
the flame on the torch, when the roll of destiny still retains its full
thickness, when the heart, full of desirable love, still possesses beats
which can be returned to it, when one has time for redress, when all
women and all smiles and all the future and all the horizon are before
one, when the force of life is complete, what is it in old age, when
the years hasten on, growing ever paler, to that twilight hour when