reagents act upon a troubled mixture 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 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