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strikes. He had not yet accomplished all progress, we admit.
He had not yet come to distinguish between that which is
written by man and that which is written by God, between
law and right. He had not examined and weighed the right
which man takes to dispose of the irrevocable and the irrep-
arable. He was not shocked by the word vindicte. He found
it quite simple that certain breaches of the written law
should be followed by eternal suffering, and he accepted, as
the process of civilization, social damnation. He still stood
at this point, though safe to advance infallibly later on, since
his nature was good, and, at bottom, wholly formed of latent
progress.
In this stage of his ideas, Jean Valjean appeared to him
hideous and repulsive. He was a man reproved, he was the
convict. That word was for him like the sound of the trump
on the Day of Judgment; and, after having reflected upon
Jean Valjean for a long time, his final gesture had been to
turn away his head. Vade retro.
Marius, if we must recognize and even insist upon the
fact, while interrogating Jean Valjean to such a point that
Jean Valjean had said: ‘You are confessing me,’ had not, nev-
ertheless, put to him two or three decisive questions.
It was not that they had not presented themselves to his
mind, but that he had been afraid of them. The Jondrette
attic? The barricade? Javert? Who knows where these rev-
elations would have stopped? Jean Valjean did not seem
like a man who would draw back, and who knows whether
Marius, after having urged him on, would not have himself
desired to hold him back?