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‘Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my
forgiveness! And do you know what he has done for me, Co-
sette? He has saved my life. He has done more—he has given
you to me. And after having saved me, and after having giv-
en you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He
has sacrificed himself. Behold the man. And he says to me
the ingrate, to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the
guilty one: Thanks! Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet
of this man would be too little. That barricade, that sewer,
that furnace, that cesspool,—all that he traversed for me, for
thee, Cosette! He carried me away through all the deaths
which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself. Ev-
ery courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity he
possesses! Cosette, that man is an angel!’
‘Hush! hush!’ said Jean Valjean in a low voice. ‘Why tell
all that?’
‘But you!’ cried Marius with a wrath in which there was
veneration, ‘why did you not tell it to me? It is your own
fault, too. You save people’s lives, and you conceal it from
them! You do more, under the pretext of unmasking your-
self, you calumniate yourself. It is frightful.’
‘I told the truth,’ replied Jean Valjean.
‘No,’ retorted Marius, ‘the truth is the whole truth; and
that you did not tell. You were Monsieur Madeleine, why
not have said so? You saved Javert, why not have said so? I
owed my life to you, why not have said so?’
‘Because I thought as you do. I thought that you were
in the right. It was necessary that I should go away. If you
had known about that affair, of the sewer, you would have