In whatever circle of ideas Marius might turn, he always came back to a certain horror of Jean Valjean; a sacred horror, perhaps, for, as we have stated, he felt a _quid divinum_ in this man. But though it was so, and whatever extenuating circumstances he might seek, he was always compelled to fall back on this: he was a convict, that is to say, a being who has not even a place on the social ladder, being beneath the lowest rung. After the last of men comes the convict, who is no longer, so to speak, in the likeness of his fellow-men. The law has deprived him of the entire amount of humanity which it can strip off a man. Marius, in penal matters, democrat though he was, was still of the inexorable system, and he entertained all the ideas of the law about those whom the law strikes. He had not yet made every progress, we are forced to say; he had not yet learned to distinguish between what is written by man and what is written by God,--between the law and the right. He had examined and weighed the claim which man sets up to dispose of the irrevocable, the irreparable, and the word _vindicta_ was not repulsive to him. He considered it simple that certain breaches of the written law should be followed by eternal penalties, and he accepted social condemnation as a civilizing process. He was still at this point, though infallibly certain to advance at a later date, for his nature was good, and entirely composed of latent progress. In this medium of ideas Jean Valjean appeared to him deformed and repelling, for he was the punished man, the convict. This word was to him like the sound of the trumpet of the last Judgment, and after regarding Jean Valjean for a long time his last gesture was to turn away his head--_vade retro._ Marius,--we must recognize the fact and lay a stress on it,--while questioning Jean Valjean to such an extent that Jean Valjean himself said, "You are shriving me," had not, however, asked him two or three important questions. It was not that they had not presented themselves to his mind, but he had been afraid of them. The Jondrette garret? The barricade? Javert? Who knew where the revelations might have stopped? Jean Valjean did not seem the man to recoil, and who knows whether Marius, after urging him on, might not have wished to check him? In certain supreme conjunctures has it not happened to all of us that after asking a question we have stopped our ears in order not to hear the answer? A man is specially guilty of such an act of cowardice when he is in love. It is not wise to drive sinister situations into a corner, especially when the indissoluble side of our own life is fatally mixed up with them. What a frightful light might issue from Jean Valjean's desperate explanations, and who knows whether that hideous brightness might not have been reflected on Cosette? Who knows whether a sort of infernal gleam might not have remained on that angel's brow? Fatality knows such complications,