382 Les Miserables
situation, but some of the details. He began by recognizing
the fact that, critical and extraordinary as was this situa-
tion, he was completely master of it.
This only caused an increase of his stupor.
Independently of the severe and religious aim which
he had assigned to his actions, all that he had made up to
that day had been nothing but a hole in which to bury his
name. That which he had always feared most of all in his
hours of self-communion, during his sleepless nights, was
to ever hear that name pronounced; he had said to himself,
that that would be the end of all things for him; that on the
day when that name made its reappearance it would cause
his new life to vanish from about him, and—who knows?—
perhaps even his new soul within him, also. He shuddered
at the very thought that this was possible. Assuredly, if any
one had said to him at such moments that the hour would
come when that name would ring in his ears, when the hid-
eous words, Jean Valjean, would suddenly emerge from the
darkness and rise in front of him, when that formidable
light, capable of dissipating the mystery in which he had en-
veloped himself, would suddenly blaze forth above his head,
and that that name would not menace him, that that light
would but produce an obscurity more dense, that this rent
veil would but increase the mystery, that this earthquake
would solidify his edifice, that this prodigious incident
would have no other result, so far as he was concerned, if so
it seemed good to him, than that of rendering his existence
at once clearer and more impenetrable, and that, out of his
confrontation with the phantom of Jean Valjean, the good