2324 Les Miserables
ear: ‘A trip! you wretch!’ How many times had his refrac-
tory thoughts rattled convulsively in his throat, under the
evidence of duty! Resistance to God. Funereal sweats. What
secret wounds which he alone felt bleed! What excoriations
in his lamentable existence! How many times he had risen
bleeding, bruised, broken, enlightened, despair in his heart,
serenity in his soul! and, vanquished, he had felt himself the
conqueror. And, after having dislocated, broken, and rent
his conscience with red-hot pincers, it had said to him, as it
stood over him, formidable, luminous, and tranquil: ‘Now,
go in peace!’
But on emerging from so melancholy a conflict, what a
lugubrious peace, alas!
Nevertheless, that night Jean Valjean felt that he was
passing through his final combat.
A heart-rending question presented itself.
Predestinations are not all direct; they do not open out
in a straight avenue before the predestined man; they have
blind courts, impassable alleys, obscure turns, disturbing
crossroads offering the choice of many ways. Jean Valjean
had halted at that moment at the most perilous of these
crossroads.
He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil.
He had that gloomy intersection beneath his eyes. On this
occasion once more, as had happened to him already in oth-
er sad vicissitudes, two roads opened out before him, the
one tempting, the other alarming.
Which was he to take?
He was counselled to the one which alarmed him by that