taken my place in your house, I am one of
you, I am in my chamber, I come to breakfast in the morning in slippers,
in the evening all three of us go to the play, I accompany Madame
Pontmercy to the Tuileries, and to the Place Royale, we are together,
you think me your equal; one fine day you are there, and I am there, we
are conversing, we are laughing; all at once, you hear a voice shouting
this name: 'Jean Valjean!' and behold, that terrible hand, the police,
darts from the darkness, and abruptly tears off my mask!"

Again he paused; Marius had sprung to his feet with a shudder. Jean
Valjean resumed:

"What do you say to that?"

Marius' silence answered for him.

Jean Valjean continued:

"You see that I am right in not holding my peace. Be happy, be
in heaven, be the angel of an angel, exist in the sun, be content
therewith, and do not trouble yourself about the means which a poor
damned wretch takes to open his breast and force his duty to come forth;
you have before you, sir, a wretched man."

Marius slowly crossed the room, and, when he was quite close to Jean
Valjean, he offered the latter his hand.

But Marius was obliged to step up and take that hand which was not
offered, Jean Valjean let him have his own way, and it seemed to Marius
that he pressed a hand of marble.

"My grandfather has friends," said Marius; "I will procure your pardon."

"It is useless," replied Jean Valjean. "I am believed to be dead, and
that suffices. The dead are not subjected to surveillance. They are
supposed to rot in peace. Death is the same thing as pardon."

And, disengaging the hand which Marius held, he added, with a sort of
inexorable dignity:

"Moreover, the friend to whom I have recourse is the doing of my duty;
and I need but one pardon, that of my conscience."

At that moment, a door at the other end of the drawing-room opened
gently half way, and in the opening Cosette's head appeared. They saw
only her sweet face, her hair was in charming disorder, her eyelids were
still swollen with sleep. She made the movement of a bird, which thrusts
its head out of its nest, glanced first at her husband, then at Jean
Valjean, and cried to them with a smile, so that they seemed to behold a
smile at the heart of a rose:

"I will wager that you are talking politics. How stupid that is, instead
of being with me!"

Jean Valjean shuddered.

"Cosette! . . ." stammered Marius.

And he paused. One would have said that they