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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: that if he wished to become good be must become an angel; that if he
wished to remain evil, he must become a monster?
Here, again, some questions must be put, which we have already put
to ourselves elsewhere: did he catch some shadow of all this in
his thought, in a confused way? Misfortune certainly, as we have said,
does form the education of the intelligence; nevertheless, it is
doubtful whether Jean Valjean was in a condition to disentangle
all that we have here indicated. If these ideas occurred to him,
he but caught glimpses of, rather than saw them, and they only
succeeded in throwing him into an unutterable and almost painful
state of emotion. On emerging from that black and deformed
Les Miserables |
