The narrator writes that Jean Valjean "beheld himself then, so to speak, face to face, and at the same time, through that hallucination, he saw, at a mysterious distance, a sort of light which he took at first to be a torch. Examining more attentively this light which dawned upon his conscience, he recognised that it had a human form, and that this torch was the bishop."
The "face to face" part in particular is what reminded me of 1 Corinthians 13:12: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." The study notes in my Bible gloss this passage, explaining that it's talking about the personal knowledge of God that the believer will have, but in Les Misérables, it seems to apply more to Jean Valjean's self-examination and his later certainty in what he has to do. Shortly before his seeing himself face to face, the narrator asks:
Did a voice whisper in his ear that he had just passed through the decisive hour of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him, that if, thereafter, he should not be the best of men, he would be the worst, that he must now, so to speak, mount higher than the bishop, or fall lower that the galley slave; that, if he would become good, he must become an angel; that, if he would remain wicked, he must become a monster?These two passages are linked by the expression "so to speak."* Of the two options presented, Valjean chooses to "mount higher than the bishop." The chapter (and Book Two) ends with him "in the attitude of prayer, kneeling upon the pavement in the shadow, before the door of Monseigneur Bienvenu."
That higher path is characterized by the bishop bearing illumination, which is a similar description to what 1 Corinthians 13:12 has. Things are no longer seen dimly, but with illumination ("The light grew brighter and brighter in [Valjean's] mind..."). The preceding verse seems to have some relation to Valjean's choice too: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways" (1 Corinthians 13:11). Valjean also seems to acquire a new perspective (he now "know[s] fully"):
His past life, his first offence, his long expiation, his brutal exterior, his hardened interior, his release made glad by so many schemes of vengeance, what had happened to him at the bishop's, his last action, this theft of forty sous from a child, a crime meaner and the more monstrous that it came after the bishop's pardon, all this returned and appeared to him, clearly, but in a light that he had never seen before. He beheld his life, and it seemed to him horrible; his soul, and it seemed to him frightful.At the end of the previous chapter (chapter 12 - "The Bishop at Work"), the bishop tells Jean Valjean that "It is your soul that I am buying for you. I am withdrawing it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I am giving it to God!" This dedication to God is an important part of the book, so it's fitting that Hugo's narrator uses Biblical descriptions like these from 1 Corinthians 13 to describe Valjean.
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*Usually, I'd be hesitant to assert something about a translated work based on a particular phrase, but I checked an-other translation I have, and it too uses "so to speak" in both passages.
