yet received Cosette''s letter; chance had treacherously carried it
to Jean Valjean before delivering it to Marius.
Up to that day, Jean Valjean had not been vanquished by trial.
He had been subjected to fearful proofs; no violence of bad fortune had been spared him; the ferocity of fate, armed with all vindictiveness and all social scorn, had taken him for her prey and had raged against him. He had accepted every extremity when it had been necessary; he had sacrificed his inviolability as a reformed man, had yielded up his liberty, risked his head, lost everything, suffered everything, and he had remained disinterested and stoical to such a point that he might have been thought to be absent from himself like a martyr. His conscience inured to every assault of destiny, might have appeared to be forever impregnable.
Well, any one who had beheld his spiritual self would have been obliged to concede that it weakened at that moment.
It was because, of all the tortures which he had undergone in the course of this long inquisition to which destiny had doomed him, this was the most terrible.
Never had such pincers seized him hitherto.
He felt the mysterious stirring of all his latent sensibilities.
He felt the plucking at the strange chord. Alas! the supreme trial, let us say rather, the only trial, is the loss of the beloved being.