2344 Les Miserables
peace with himself.’
And, with a poignant accent, he added:
‘Monsieur Pontmercy, this is not common sense, I am
an honest man. It is by degrading myself in your eyes that
I elevate myself in my own. This has happened to me once
before, but it was less painful then; it was a mere nothing.
Yes, an honest man. I should not be so if, through my fault,
you had continued to esteem me; now that you despise me,
I am so. I have that fatality hanging over me that, not be-
ing able to ever have anything but stolen consideration, that
consideration humiliates me, and crushes me inwardly,
and, in order that I may respect myself, it is necessary that I
should be despised. Then I straighten up again. I am a gal-
ley-slave who obeys his conscience. I know well that that is
most improbable. But what would you have me do about it?
it is the fact. I have entered into engagements with myself;
I keep them. There are encounters which bind us, there are
chances which involve us in duties. You see, Monsieur Pont-
mercy, various things have happened to me in the course of
my life.’
Again Jean Valjean paused, swallowing his saliva with
an effort, as though his words had a bitter after-taste, and
then he went on:
‘When one has such a horror hanging over one, one has
not the right to make others share it without their knowl-
edge, one has not the right to make them slip over one’s own
precipice without their perceiving it, one has not the right
to let one’s red blouse drag upon them, one has no right
to slyly encumber with one’s misery the happiness of oth-