I should have touched you with my elbow, which you have a right to feel offended at, and swindled you out of shakes of the hand. There would have been in your house a divided respect between venerable gray hairs and branded gray hairs; in your most intimate hours, when all hearts formed themselves to each other, when we were all four together, the grandfather, you two, and I, there would have been a stranger there. Hence I, a dead man, would have imposed myself on you who are living, and I should have sentenced her for life. You, Cosette, and I would have been three heads in the green cap! Do you not shudder? I am only the most crushed of men, but I should have been the most monstrous. And this crime I should have committed every day, and this falsehood I should have told every day, and this face of night I should have worn every day, and to you I should have given a portion of my stain everyday,--to you, my beloved, to you, my children, to you, my innocents! Holding one's tongue is nothing? Keeping silence is simple? No, it is not simple, for there is a silence which lies; and my falsehood, and my fraud, and my indignity, and my cowardice, and my treachery, and my crime I should have drunk drop by drop; I should have spat it out, and then drunk it again; I should have ended at midnight and begun again at midday, and my good day would have lied, and my good night would have lied, and I should have slept upon it, and eaten it with my bread; and I should have looked at Cosette, and responded to the smile of the angel with the smile of the condemned man; and I should have been an abominable scoundrel, and for what purpose? To be happy. I, happy! Have I the right to be happy? I am out of life, sir." Jean Valjean stopped, and Marius listened, for such enchainments of ideas and agonies cannot be interrupted. Jean Valjean lowered his voice again, yet it was no longer the dull voice, but the sinister voice. "You ask why I speak? I am neither denounced, nor pursued, nor tracked, you say. Yes, I am denounced! Yes, I am pursued! Yes, I am tracked! By whom? By myself. It is I who bar my own passage, and I drag myself along, and I push myself, and I arrest myself, and execute myself, and when a man holds himself he is securely held." And, seizing his own collar, and dragging it toward Marius, he continued,-- "Look at this fist. Do you not think that it holds this collar so as not to let it go? Well, conscience is a very different hand! If you wish to be happy, sir, you must never understand duty; for so soon as you have understood it, it is implacable. People may say that it punishes you for understanding it; but no, it rewards you for it, for it places you in a hell where you feel God by your side. A man has no sooner torn his entrails than he is at peace with himself." And with an indescribable accent he added,--