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He walked with drooping head for the first time in his life, and likewise, for the

first time in his life, with his hands behind his back. .

Up to that day, Javert had borrowed from Napoleon's attitudes, only that which is

expressive of resolution, with arms folded across the chest; that which is expressive of

uncertainty--with the hands behind the back--had been unknown to him. Now, a change had

taken place; his whole person, slow and sombre, was stamped with anxiety. .

He plunged into the silent streets. .

Nevertheless, he followed one given direction. .

He took the shortest cut to the Seine, reached the Quai des Ormes, skirted the quay,

passed the Greve, and halted at some distance from the post of the Place du Chatelet, at

the angle of the Pont Notre-Dame. There, between the Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change on

the one hand, and the Quai de la Megisserie and the Quai aux Fleurs on the other, the

Seine forms a sort of square lake, traversed by a rapid. .

This point of the Seine is dreaded by mariners. Nothing is more dangerous than this

rapid, hemmed in, at that epoch, and irritated by the piles of the mill on the bridge, now

demolished. The two bridges, situated thus close together, augment the peril; the water

hurries in formidable wise through the arches. It rolls in vast and terrible waves; it

accumulates and piles up there; the flood attacks the piles of the bridges as though in an

effort to pluck them up with great liquid ropes. Men who fall in there never re-appear;

the best of swimmers are drowned there. .

Javert leaned both elbows on the parapet, his chin resting in both hands, and, while

his nails were mechanically twined in the abundance of his whiskers, he meditated. .

A novelty, a revolution, a catastrophe had just taken place in the depths of his being;

and he had something upon which to examine himself. .

Javert was undergoing horrible suffering. .

For several hours, Javert had ceased to be simple. He was troubled; that brain, so

limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; that crystal was clouded. Javert felt

duty divided within his conscience, and he could not conceal the fact from himself. When

he had so unexpectedly encountered Jean Valjean on the banks of the Seine, there had been

in him something of the wolf which regains his grip on his prey, and of the dog who finds

his master again. .

He beheld before him two paths, both equally straight, but he beheld two; and that

terrified him; him, who had never in all his life known more than one straight line. And,

the poignant anguish lay in this, that the two paths were contrary to each other. One of

these straight lines excluded the other. Which of the two was the true one? .

His situation was indescribable. .

To owe his life to a malefactor, to accept that debt and to repay it; to be, in spite

of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice, and to repay his service with another

service; to allow it to be said to him, "Go," and to say to the latter in his

turn: "Be free"; to sacrifice to personal motives duty, that general obligation,

and to be conscious, in those personal motives, of something that was also general, and,

perchance, superior, to betray society in order to remain true to his conscience; that all

these absurdities should be realized and should accumulate upon him,--this was what

overwhelmed him. .

One thing had amazed him,--this was that Jean Valjean should have done him a favor, and

one thing petrified him,-- that he, Javert, should have done Jean Valjean a favor. .

Where did he stand? He sought to comprehend his position, and could no longer find his

bearings. .

What was he to do now? To deliver up Jean Valjean was bad; to leave Jean Valjean at

liberty was bad. In the first case, the man of authority fell lower than the man of the

galleys, in the second, a convict rose above the law, and set his foot upon it. In both

cases, dishonor for him, Javert. There was disgrace in any resolution at which he might

arrive. Destiny has some extremities which rise perpendicularly from the impossible, and

beyond which life is no longer anything but a precipice. Javert had reached one of those

extremities. .

One of his anxieties consisted in being constrained to think. The very violence of all

these conflicting emotions forced him to it. Thought was something to which he was unused,

and which was peculiarly painful. .

In thought there always exists a certain amount of internal rebellion; and it irritated

him to have that within him. .

Thought on any subject whatever, outside of the restricted circle of his functions,

would have been for him in any case useless and a fatigue; thought on the day which had

just passed was a torture. Nevertheless, it was indispensable that he should take a look

into his conscience, after such shocks, and render to himself an account of himself. .

What he had just done made him shudder. He, Javert, had seen fit to decide, contrary to

all the regulations of the police, contrary to the whole social and judicial organization,

contrary to the entire code, upon a release; this had suited him; he had substituted his

own affairs for the affairs of the public; was not this unjustifiable? Every time that he

brought himself face to face with this deed without a name which he had committed, he

trembled from head to foot. Upon what should he decide? One sole resource remained to him;

to return in all haste to the Rue de l'Homme Arme, and commit Jean Valjean to prison. It

was clear that that was what he ought to do. He could not. .

Something barred his way in that direction. .

Something? What? Is there in the world, anything outside of the tribunals, executory

sentences, the police and the authorities? Javert was overwhelmed. .

A galley-slave sacred! A convict who could not be touched by the law! And that the deed

of Javert! .

Was it not a fearful thing that Javert and Jean Valjean, the man made to proceed with

vigor, the man made to submit,--that these two men who were both the things of the law,

should have come to such a pass, that both of them had set themselves above the law? What

then! Such enormities were to happen and no one was to be punished! Jean Valjean, stronger

than the whole social order, was to remain at liberty, and he, Javert, was to go on eating

the government's bread! .

His revery gradually became terrible. .

He might, athwart this revery, have also reproached himself on the subject of that

insurgent who had been taken to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; but he never even thought

of that. The lesser fault was lost in the greater. Besides, that insurgent was, obviously,

a dead man, and, legally, death puts an end to pursuit. .

Jean Valjean was the load which weighed upon his spirit. .

Jean Valjean disconcerted him. All the axioms which had served him as points of support

all his life long, had crumbled awayin the presence of this man. Jean Valjean's generosity

towards him, Javert, crushed him. Other facts which he now recalled, and which he had

formerly treated as lies and folly, now recurred to him as realities. M. Madeleine

re-appeared behind Jean Valjean, and the two figures were superposed in such fashion that

they now formed but one, which was venerable. Javert felt that something terrible was

penetrating his soul--admiration for a convict. Respect for a galley-slave--is that a

possible thing? He shuddered at it, yet could not escape from it. In vain did he struggle,

he was reduced to confess, in his inmost heart, the sublimity of that wretch. This was

odious. .

A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good

for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin

himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the

heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to

admit to himself that this monster existed. .

Things could not go on in this manner. .

Certainly, and we insist upon this point, he had not yielded without resistance to that

monster, to that infamous angel, to that hideous hero, who enraged almost as much as he

amazed him. Twenty times, as he sat in that carriage face to face with Jean Valjean, the

legal tiger had roared within him. A score of times he had been tempted to fling himself

upon Jean Valjean, to seize him and devour him, that is to say, to arrest him. What more

simple, in fact? To cry out at the first post that they passed:--"Here is a fugitive

from justice, who has broken his ban!" to summon the gendarmes and say to them:

"This man is yours!" then to go off, leaving that condemned man there, to ignore

the rest and not to meddle further in the matter. This man is forever a prisoner of the

law; the law may do with him what it will. What could be more just? Javert had said all

this to himself; he had wished to pass beyond, to act, to apprehend the man, and then, as

at present, he had not been able to do it; and every time that his arm had been raised

convulsively towards Jean Valjean's collar, his hand had fallen back again, as beneath an

enormous weight, and in the depths of his thought he had heard a voice, a strange voice

crying to him:--"It is well. Deliver up your savior. Then have the basin of Pontius

Pilate brought and wash your claws." .

Then his reflections reverted to himself and beside Jean Valjean glorified he beheld

himself, Javert, degraded. .

A convict was his benefactor! .

But then, why had he permitted that man to leave him alive? He had the left to be

killed in that barricade. He should have asserted that left. It would have been better to

summon the other insurgents to his succor against Jean Valjean, to get himself shot by

force. .

His supreme anguish was the loss of certainty. He felt that he had been uprooted. The

code was no longer anything more than a stump in his hand. He had to deal with scruples of

an unknown species. There had taken place within him a sentimental revelation entirely

distinct from legal affirmation, his only standard of measurement hitherto. To remain in

his former uprightness did not suffice. A whole order of unexpected facts had cropped up

and subjugated him. A whole new world was dawning on his soul: kindness accepted and

repaid, devotion, mercy, indulgence, violences committed by pity on austerity, respect for

persons, no more definitive condemnation, no more conviction, the possibility of a tear in

the eye of the law, no one knows what justice according to God, running in inverse sense

to justice according to men. He perceived amid the shadows the terrible rising of an

unknown moral sun; it horrified and dazzled him. An owl forced to the gaze of an eagle. .

He said to himself that it was true that there were exceptional cases, that authority

might be put out of countenance, that the rule might be inadequate in the presence of a

fact, that everything could not be framed within the text of the code, that the unforeseen

compelled obedience, that the virtue of a convict might set a snare for the virtue of the

functionary, that destiny did indulge in such ambushes, and he reflected with despair that

he himself had not even been fortified against a surprise. .

He was forced to acknowledge that goodness did exist. This convict had been good. And

he himself, unprecedented circumstance, had just been good also. So he was becoming

depraved. .

He found that he was a coward. He conceived a horror of himself. .

Javert's ideal, was not to be human, to be grand, to be sublime; it was to be

irreproachable. .

Now, he had just failed in this. .

How had he come to such a pass? How had all this happened? He could not have told

himself. He clasped his head in both hands, but in spite of all that he could do, he could

not contrive to explain it to himself. .

He had certainly always entertained the intention of restoring Jean Valjean to the law

of which Jean Valjean was the captive, and of which he, Javert, was the slave. Not for a

single instant while he held him in his grasp had he confessed to himself that he

entertained the idea of releasing him. It was, in some sort, without his consciousness,

that his hand had relaxed and had let him go free. .

All sorts of interrogation points flashed before his eyes. He put questions to himself,

and made replies to himself, and his replies frightened him. He asked himself: "What

has that convict done, that desperate fellow, whom I have pursued even to persecution, and

who has had me under his foot, and who could have avenged himself, and who owed it both to

his rancor and to his safety, in leaving me my life, in showing mercy upon me? His duty?

No. Something more. And I in showing mercy upon him in my turn--what have I done? My duty?

No. Something more. So there is something beyond duty?" Here he took fright; his

balance became disjointed; one of the scales fell into the abyss, the other rose

heavenward, and Javert was no less terrified by the one which was on high than by the one

which was below. Without being in the least in the world what is called Voltairian or a

philosopher, or incredulous, being, on the contrary, respectful by instinct, towards the

established church, he knew it only as an august fragment of the social whole; order was

his dogma, and sufficed for him; ever since he had attained to man's estate and the rank

of a functionary, he had centred nearly all his religion in the police. Being,--and here

we employ words without the least irony and in their most serious acceptation, being, as

we have said, a spy as other men are priests. He had a superior, M. Gisquet; up to that

day he had never dreamed of that other superior, God. .

This new chief, God, he became unexpectedly conscious of, and he felt embarrassed by

him. This unforeseen presence threw him off his bearings; he did not know what to do with

this superior, he, who was not ignorant of the fact that the subordinate is bound always

to bow, that he must not disobey, nor find fault, nor discuss, and that, in the presence

of a superior who amazes him too greatly, the inferior has no other resource than that of

handing in his resignation. .

But how was he to set about handing in his resignation to God? .

However things might stand,--and it was to this point that he reverted constantly,--one

fact dominated everything else for him, and that was, that he had just committed a

terrible infraction of the law. He had just shut his eyes on an escaped convict who had

broken his ban. He had just set a galley-slave at large. He had just robbed the laws of a

man who belonged to them. That was what he had done. He no longer understood himself. The

very reasons for his action escaped him; only their vertigo was left with him. Up to that

moment he had lived with that blind faith which gloomy probity engenders. This faith had

quitted him, this probity had deserted him. All that he had believed in melted away.

Truths which he did not wish to recognize were besieging him, inexorably. Henceforth, he

must be a different man. He was suffering from the strange pains of a conscience abruptly

operated on for the cataract. He saw that which it was repugnant to him to behold. He felt

himself emptied, useless, put out of joint with his past life, turned out, dissolved.

Authority was dead within him. He had no longer any reason for existing. .

A terrible situation! To be touched. .

To be granite and to doubt! To be the statue of Chastisement cast in one piece in the

mould of the law, and suddenly to become aware of the fact that one cherishes beneath

one's breast of bronze something absurd and disobedient which almost resembles a heart! To

come to the pass of returning good for good, although one has said to oneself up to that

day that that good is evil! To be the watch-dog, and to lick the intruder's hand! To be

ice and melt! To be the pincers and to turn into a hand! To suddenly feel one's fingers

opening! To relax one's grip,--what a terrible thing! .

The man-projectile no longer acquainted with his route and retreating! .

To be obliged to confess this to oneself: infallibility is not infallible, there may

exist error in the dogma, all has not been said when a code speaks, society is not

perfect, authority is complicated with vacillation, a crack is possible in the immutable,

judges are but men, the law may err, tribunals may make a mistake! To behold a rift in the

immense blue pane of the firmament! .

That which was passing in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear conscience, the

derailment of a soul, the crushing of a probity which had been irresistibly launched in a

straight line and was breaking against God. It certainly was singular that the stoker of

order, that the engineer of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse with its rigid

road, could be unseated by a flash of light! that the immovable, the direct, the correct,

the geometrical, the passive, the perfect, could bend! that there should exist for the

locomotive a road to Damascus! .

God, always within man, and refractory, He, the true conscience, to the false; a

prohibition to the spark to die out; an order to the ray to remember the sun; an

injunction to the soul to recognize the veritable absolute when confronted with the

fictitious absolute, humanity which cannot be lost; the human heart indestructible; that

splendid phenomenon, the finest, perhaps, of all our interior marvels, did Javert

understand this? Did Javert penetrate it? Did Javert account for it to himself? Evidently

he did not. But beneath the pressure of that incontestable incomprehensibility he felt his

brain bursting. .

He was less the man transfigured than the victim of this prodigy. In all this he

perceived only the tremendous difficulty of existence. It seemed to him that, henceforth,

his respiration was repressed forever. He was not accustomed to having something unknown

hanging over his head. .

Up to this point, everything above him had been, to his gaze, merely a smooth, limpid

and simple surface; there was nothing incomprehensible, nothing obscure; nothing that was

not defined, regularly disposed, linked, precise, circumscribed, exact, limited, closed,

fully provided for; authority was a plane surface; there was no fall in it, no dizziness

in its presence. Javert had never beheld the unknown except from below. The irregular, the

unforeseen, the disordered opening of chaos, the possible slip over a precipice-- this was

the work of the lower regions, of rebels, of the wicked, of wretches. Now Javert threw

himself back, and he was suddenly terrified by this unprecedented apparition: a gulf on

high. .

What! one was dismantled from top to bottom! One was disconcerted, absolutely! In what

could one trust! That which had been agreed upon was giving way! What! The defect in

society's armor could be discovered by a magnanimous wretch! What! An honest servitor of

the law could suddenly find himself caught between two crimes-- the crime of allowing a

man to escape and the crime of arresting him! Everything was not settled in the orders

given by the State to the functionary! There might be blind alleys in duty! What,-- all

this was real! Was it true that an ex-ruffian, weighed down with convictions, could rise

erect and end by being in the left? Was this credible? Were there cases in which the law

should retire before transfigured crime, and stammer its excuses?--Yes, that was the state

of the case! And Javert saw it! And Javert had touched it! And not only could he not deny

it, but he had taken part in it. These were realities. It was abominable that actual facts

could reach such deformity. If facts did their duty, they would confine themselves to

being proofs of the law; facts--it is God who sends them. Was anarchy, then, on the point

of now descending from on high? .

Thus,--and in the exaggeration of anguish, and the optical illusion of consternation,

all that might have corrected and restrained this impression was effaced, and society, and

the human race, and the universe were, henceforth, summed up in his eyes, in one simple

and terrible feature,--thus the penal laws, the thing judged, the force due to

legislation, the decrees of the sovereign courts, the magistracy, the government,

prevention, repression, official cruelty, wisdom, legal infallibility, the principle of

authority, all the dogmas on which rest political and civil security, sovereignty,

justice, public truth, all this was rubbish, a shapeless mass, chaos; he himself, Javert,

the spy of order, incorruptibility in the service of the police, the bull-dog providence

of society, vanquished and hurled to earth; and, erect, at the summit of all that ruin, a

man with a green cap on his head and a halo round his brow; this was the astounding

confusion to which he had come; this was the fearful vision which he bore within his soul. .

Was this to be endured? No. .

A violent state, if ever such existed. There were only two ways of escaping from it.

One was to go resolutely to Jean Valjean, and restore to his cell the convict from the

galleys. The other . . .

Javert quitted the parapet, and, with head erect this time, betook himself, with a firm

tread, towards the station-house indicated by a lantern at one of the corners of the Place

du Chatelet. .

On arriving there, he saw through the window a sergeant of police, and he entered.

Policemen recognize each other by the very way in which they open the door of a

station-house. Javert mentioned his name, showed his card to the sergeant, and seated

himself at the table of the post on which a candle was burning. On a table lay a pen, a

leaden inkstand and paper, provided in the event of possible reports and the orders of the

night patrols. This table, still completed by its straw-seated chair, is an institution;

it exists in all police stations; it is invariably ornamented with a box-wood saucer

filled with sawdust and a wafer box of cardboard filled with red wafers, and it forms the

lowest stage of official style. It is there that the literature of the State has its

beginning. .

Javert took a pen and a sheet of paper, and began to write. This is what he wrote: .

A FEW OBSERVATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SERVICE. .

"In the first place: I beg Monsieur le Prefet to cast his eyes on this. .

"Secondly: prisoners, on arriving after examination, take off their shoes and

stand barefoot on the flagstones while they are being searched. Many of them cough on

their return to prison. This entails hospital expenses. .

"Thirdly: the mode of keeping track of a man with relays of police agents from

distance to distance, is good, but, on important occasions, it is requisite that at least

two agents should never lose sight of each other, so that, in case one agent should, for

any cause, grow weak in his service, the other may supervise him and take his place. .

"Fourthly: it is inexplicable why the special regulation of the prison of the

Madelonettes interdicts the prisoner from having a chair, even by paying for it. .

"Fifthly: in the Madelonettes there are only two bars to the canteen, so that the

canteen woman can touch the prisoners with her hand. .

"Sixthly: the prisoners called barkers, who summon the other prisoners to the

parlor, force the prisoner to pay them two sous to call his name distinctly. This is a

theft. .

"Seventhly: for a broken thread ten sous are withheld in the weaving shop; this is

an abuse of the contractor, since the cloth is none the worse for it. .

"Eighthly: it is annoying for visitors to La Force to be obliged to traverse the

boys' court in order to reach the parlor of Sainte-Marie-l'Egyptienne. .

"Ninthly: it is a fact that any day gendarmes can be overheard relating in the

court-yard of the prefecture the interrogations put by the magistrates to prisoners. For a

gendarme, who should be sworn to secrecy, to repeat what he has heard in the examination

room is a grave disorder. .

"Tenthly: Mme. Henry is an honest woman; her canteen is very neat; but it is bad

to have a woman keep the wicket to the mouse-trap of the secret cells. This is unworthy of

the Conciergerie of a great civilization." .

Javert wrote these lines in his calmest and most correct chirography, not omitting a

single comma, and making the paper screech under his pen. Below the last line he signed: .

"JAVERT, "Inspector of the 1st class. "The Post of the Place du

Chatelet. "June 7th, 1832, about one o'clock in the morning." .

Javert dried the fresh ink on the paper, folded it like a letter, sealed it, wrote on

the back: Note for the administration, left it on the table, and quitted the post. The

glazed and grated door fell to behind him. .

Again he traversed the Place du Chatelet diagonally, regained the quay, and returned

with automatic precision to the very point which he had abandoned a quarter of an hour

previously, leaned on his elbows and found himself again in the same attitude on the same

paving-stone of the parapet. He did not appear to have stirred. .

The darkness was complete. It was the sepulchral moment which follows midnight. A

ceiling of clouds concealed the stars. Not a single light burned in the houses of the

city; no one was passing; all of the streets and quays which could be seen were deserted;

Notre-Dame and the towers of the Court-House seemed features of the night. A street

lantern reddened the margin of the quay. The outlines of the bridges lay shapeless in the

mist one behind the other. Recent rains had swollen the river. .

The spot where Javert was leaning was, it will be remembered, situated precisely over

the rapids of the Seine, perpendicularly above that formidable spiral of whirlpools which

loose and knot themselves again like an endless screw. .

Javert bent his head and gazed. All was black. Nothing was to be distinguished. A sound

of foam was audible; but the river could not be seen. At moments, in that dizzy depth, a

gleam of light appeared, and undulated vaguely, water possessing the power of taking

light, no one knows whence, and converting it into a snake. The light vanished, and all

became indistinct once more. Immensity seemed thrown open there. What lay below was not

water, it was a gulf. The wall of the quay, abrupt, confused, mingled with the vapors,

instantly concealed from sight, produced the effect of an escarpment of the infinite.

Nothing was to be seen, but the hostile chill of the water and the stale odor of the wet

stones could be felt. A fierce breath rose from this abyss. The flood in the river,

divined rather than perceived, the tragic whispering of the waves, the melancholy vastness

of the arches of the bridge, the imaginable fall into that gloomy void, into all that

shadow was full of horror. .

Javert remained motionless for several minutes, gazing at this opening of shadow; he

considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled attention. The water roared. All at

once he took off his hat and placed it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall

black figure, which a belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom,

appeared erect upon the parapet of the quay, bent over towards the Seine, then drew itself

up again, and fell straight down into the shadows; a dull splash followed; and the shadow

alone was in the secret of the convulsions of that obscure form which had disappeared

beneath the water. .

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