On the following morning, at daybreak, Jean Valjean was still by Cosette’s bedside; he watched there motionless, waiting for her to wake. Some new thing had come into his soul. Jean Valjean had never loved anything; for twenty-five years he had been alone in the world.
He had never been father, lover, husband, friend. In the prison he had been vicious, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and shy. The heart of that ex-convict was full of virginity.
His sister and his sister’s children had left him only a vague and far-off memory which had finally almost completely vanished; he had made every effort to find them, and not having been able to find them, he had forgotten them.
Human nature is made thus; the other tender emotions of his youth, if he had ever had any, had fallen into an abyss. When he saw Cosette, when he had taken possession of her, carried her off, and delivered her, he felt his heart moved within him.
All the passion and affection within him awoke, and rushed towards that child. He approached the bed, where she lay sleeping, and trembled with joy.
He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what it meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing. Poor old man, with a perfectly new heart!
Only, as he was five and fifty, and Cosette eight years of age, all that might have been love in the whole course of his life flowed together into a sort of ineffable light. It was the second white apparition which he had encountered.
The Bishop had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette caused the dawn of love to rise. The early