She still wore her sweet face for him.
This pallor sufficed but too thoroughly to trouble Jean Valjean. Sometimes he asked her:—
“What is the matter with you?”
She replied: “There is nothing the matter with me.”
And after a silence, when she divined that he was sad also, she would add:—
“And you, father—is there anything wrong with you?”
“With me? Nothing,” said he.
These two beings who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so touching an affection, and who had lived so long for each other now suffered side by side, each on the other’s account; without acknowledging it to each other, without anger towards each other, and with a smile.
VIII
The Chain-Gang
Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two. Youth, even in its sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.
At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile. It is the property of grief to cause the childish side of man to reappear. He had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was escaping from him. He would have liked to resist, to retain her, to arouse her enthusiasm by some external and brilliant matter. These ideas, puerile, as we have just said, and at the same time senile, conveyed to him, by their very