[His horror is plain on his countenance, yet he need not put this to words. Of what use is it to tell a man that what he has suffered is terrible, when none knows better than himself the depths of his own suffering? Instead, he asks a question.]
Let me ask you this: do you truly believe you are defective? That is, do you believe the judgment of the law?
[The law had judged him a dangerous man, all for the fact that he had been armed when he broke the window to take the loaf of bread. A dangerous man, for trying only to feed seven children! Even when he was freed from the galleys, when he thought those nineteen winters of misery unrelenting were behind him, he soon found that it was not freedom he had earned but a lifelong sentence. The yellow passport that he was compelled to disclose wherever he went branded him as an ex-convict, a dangerous man. Because of it innkeepers refused him service and foremen paid him a fraction of what other workers earned for the same hours.
How impossible it is to make your way as an honest man when none will trust you and none will respect you. So too, it seems to Jean Valjean that the children confined to this prison are crippled from the start, like seeds trampled before they might sprout. For how can a child so discarded grow to prove his virtue, his diligence, his intelligence? How can he help but develop the very qualities that society had hoped to stamp out?]
no subject
Let me ask you this: do you truly believe you are defective? That is, do you believe the judgment of the law?
[The law had judged him a dangerous man, all for the fact that he had been armed when he broke the window to take the loaf of bread. A dangerous man, for trying only to feed seven children! Even when he was freed from the galleys, when he thought those nineteen winters of misery unrelenting were behind him, he soon found that it was not freedom he had earned but a lifelong sentence. The yellow passport that he was compelled to disclose wherever he went branded him as an ex-convict, a dangerous man. Because of it innkeepers refused him service and foremen paid him a fraction of what other workers earned for the same hours.
How impossible it is to make your way as an honest man when none will trust you and none will respect you. So too, it seems to Jean Valjean that the children confined to this prison are crippled from the start, like seeds trampled before they might sprout. For how can a child so discarded grow to prove his virtue, his diligence, his intelligence? How can he help but develop the very qualities that society had hoped to stamp out?]