The former were men; the latter were women. What had the men done? They had robbed, violated, plundered, killed, assassinated; they were bandits, forgers, poisoners, incendiaries, murderers, and parricides. What had these women done? Nothing. On one side, brigandage and fraud, cozening, violence, lubricity, homicide, every sort of sacrilege, every variety of crime; on the other, only one thing,--innocence, perfect innocence, which was still attached to the earth by virtue, and already attached to heaven by holiness. On one side, confessions of crimes made in a whisper; on the other, confessions of faults made aloud. And what crimes, and what faults! On one side miasmas, on the other an ineffable perfume; on one side a moral pestilence, closely guarded, held down by cannon, and slowly devouring its plague-sufferers; on the other, a chaste kindling of all the souls on the same hearth. There darkness, here shadow, but a shadow full of light, and light full of radiance.
They were two places of slavery; but in the former there was a possible deliverance, a constantly visible legal limit, and besides, escape; in the second, perpetuity, the only hope being that gleam of liberty which men call death, upon the extreme horizon. In the former, people were only held by chains, in the latter, by faith. What emerged from the former? An immense curse, gnashing of teeth, hatred, desperate wickedness, a cry of rage against human society, and sarcasms hurled at heaven. What issued from the latter? Blessings, love. And in these two places, which were so similar and yet so varying, these two so different species of beings accomplished the same work of expiation.
Jean Valjean perfectly understood the expiation of the former, as personal; but he did not understand the expiation of the others, of these creatures who were without reproach or stain, and he asked himself with trembling: Expiation for what? A voice answered in his conscience: The most divine proof of human generosity, expiation for others.
Here we lay aside any and every personal theory; we are only the narrator, we are standing in Jean Valjean's place, and transferring his impressions. He had before his eyes the sublime summit of abnegation, the highest pinnacle of possible virtue, that innocence which forgives men their faults, and expiates them in their place; servitude endured, torture accepted, punishment demanded by souls which have not sinned, that they may absolve souls which have erred; the love of humanity swallowed up in the love of God, but remaining distinct and suppliant in it; gentle, feeble beings who have the wretchedness of those who are punished and the smile of those who are rewarded.