“
Nature sometimes mingles her effects and her spectacles
with our actions with sombre and intelligent appropriateness,
as though she desired to make us reflect. For the last
half-hour a large cloud had covered the heavens. At the moment
when Jean Valjean paused in front of the bed, this
cloud parted, as though on purpose, and a ray of light, traversing
the long window, suddenly illuminated the Bishop’s
pale face. He was sleeping peacefully. He lay in his bed almost
completely dressed, on account of the cold of the
Basses-Alps, in a garment of brown wool, which covered his
arms to the wrists. His head was thrown back on the pillow,
in the careless attitude of repose; his hand, adorned with the
pastoral ring, and whence had fallen so many good deeds
and so many holy actions, was hanging over the edge of the
bed. His whole face was illumined with a vague expression
of satisfaction, of hope, and of felicity. It was more than a
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smile, and almost a radiance. He bore upon his brow the
indescribable reflection of a light which was invisible. The
soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.
A reflection of that heaven rested on the Bishop.
It was, at the same time, a luminous transparency, for that
heaven was within him. That heaven was his conscience.
At the moment when the ray of moonlight superposed
itself, so to speak, upon that inward radiance, the sleeping
Bishop seemed as in a glory. It remained, however, gentle
and veiled in an ineffable half-light. That moon in the sky,
that slumbering nature, that garden without a quiver, that
house which was so calm, the hour, the moment, the silence,
added some solemn and unspeakable quality to the venerable
repose of this man, and enveloped in a sort of serene
and majestic aureole that white hair, those closed eyes, that
face in which all was hope and all was confidence, that head
of an old man, and that slumber of an infant.
There was something almost divine in this man, who
was thus august, without being himself aware of it.
Jean Valjean was in the shadow, and stood motionless,
with his iron candlestick in his hand, frightened by this luminous
old man. Never had he beheld anything like this.
This confidence terrified him. The moral world has no
grander spectacle than this: a troubled and uneasy conscience,
which has arrived on the brink of an evil action,
contemplating the slumber of the just.
”
”