Chapter Chapter 340 · THE GRANDFATHER

Basque and the porter had carried Marius into the drawing-room, as he

still lay stretched out, motionless, on the sofa upon which he had been

placed on his arrival. The doctor who had been sent for had hastened

thither. Aunt Gillenormand had risen.

Aunt Gillenormand went and came, in affright, wringing her hands and

incapable of doing anything but saying: “Heavens! is it possible?” At

times she added: “Everything will be covered with blood.” When her

first horror had passed off, a certain philosophy of the situation

penetrated her mind, and took form in the exclamation: “It was bound to

end in this way!” She did not go so far as: “I told you so!” which is

customary on this sort of occasion. At the physician’s orders, a camp

bed had been prepared beside the sofa. The doctor examined Marius, and

after having found that his pulse was still beating, that the wounded

man had no very deep wound on his breast, and that the blood on the

corners of his lips proceeded from his nostrils, he had him placed flat

on the bed, without a pillow, with his head on the same level as his

body, and even a trifle lower, and with his bust bare in order to

facilitate respiration. Mademoiselle Gillenormand, on perceiving that

they were undressing Marius, withdrew. She set herself to telling her

beads in her own chamber.

The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet, deadened by

the pocket-book, had turned aside and made the tour of his ribs with a

hideous laceration, which was of no great depth, and consequently, not

dangerous. The long, underground journey had completed the dislocation

of the broken collar-bone, and the disorder there was serious. The arms

had been slashed with sabre cuts. Not a single scar disfigured his

face; but his head was fairly covered with cuts; what would be the

result of these wounds on the head? Would they stop short at the hairy

cuticle, or would they attack the brain? As yet, this could not be

decided. A grave symptom was that they had caused a swoon, and that

people do not always recover from such swoons. Moreover, the wounded

man had been exhausted by hemorrhage. From the waist down, the

barricade had protected the lower part of the body from injury.

Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages; Nicolette

sewed them, Basque rolled them. As lint was lacking, the doctor, for

the time being, arrested the bleeding with layers of wadding. Beside

the bed, three candles burned on a table where the case of surgical

instruments lay spread out. The doctor bathed Marius’ face and hair

with cold water. A full pail was reddened in an instant. The porter,

candle in hand, lighted them.

The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly. From time to time, he made a

negative sign with his head, as though replying to some question which

he had inwardly addressed to himself.

A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues of the

doctor with himself.

At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius’ face, and lightly

touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a door opened at the

end of the drawing-room, and a long, pallid figure made its appearance.

This was the grandfather.

The revolt had, for the past two days, deeply agitated, enraged and

engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand. He had not been able to sleep on

the previous night, and he had been in a fever all day long. In the

evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that everything in

the house should be well barred, and he had fallen into a doze through

sheer fatigue.

Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand’s chamber adjoined the

drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had been taken,

the noise had awakened him. Surprised at the rift of light which he saw

under his door, he had risen from his bed, and had groped his way

thither.

He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle of the

half-open door, with his head bent a little forward and quivering, his

body wrapped in a white dressing-gown, which was straight and as

destitute of folds as a winding-sheet; and he had the air of a phantom

who is gazing into a tomb.

He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding, white

with a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth, and pallid

lips, stripped to the waist, slashed all over with crimson wounds,

motionless and brilliantly lighted up.

The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully as ossified

limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneæ were yellow on account of his

great age, were veiled in a sort of vitreous glitter, his whole face

assumed in an instant the earthy angles of a skull, his arms fell

pendent, as though a spring had broken, and his amazement was betrayed

by the outspreading of the fingers of his two aged hands, which

quivered all over, his knees formed an angle in front, allowing,

through the opening in his dressing-gown, a view of his poor bare legs,

all bristling with white hairs, and he murmured:

“Marius!”

“Sir,” said Basque, “Monsieur has just been brought back. He went to

the barricade, and....”

“He is dead!” cried the old man in a terrible voice. “Ah! The rascal!”

Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this

centenarian as erect as a young man.

“Sir,” said he, “you are the doctor. Begin by telling me one thing. He

is dead, is he not?”

The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, remained silent.

M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible laughter.

“He is dead! He is dead! He is dead! He has got himself killed on the

barricades! Out of hatred to me! He did that to spite me! Ah! You

blood-drinker! This is the way he returns to me! Misery of my life, he

is dead!”

He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were stifling,

and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into the street, to

the night:

“Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces! Just look at

that, the villain! He knew well that I was waiting for him, and that I

had had his room arranged, and that I had placed at the head of my bed

his portrait taken when he was a little child! He knew well that he had

only to come back, and that I had been recalling him for years, and

that I remained by my fireside, with my hands on my knees, not knowing

what to do, and that I was mad over it! You knew well, that you had but

to return and to say: ‘It is I,’ and you would have been the master of

the house, and that I should have obeyed you, and that you could have

done whatever you pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you

knew that well, and you said:

“No, he is a Royalist, I will not go! And you went to the barricades,

and you got yourself killed out of malice! To revenge yourself for what

I said to you about Monsieur le Duc de Berry. It is infamous! Go to bed

then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead, and this is my awakening.”

The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters, quitted

Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm. The

grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes which seemed

exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him calmly:

“I thank you, sir. I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death of

Louis XVI., I know how to bear events. One thing is terrible and that

is to think that it is your newspapers which do all the mischief. You

will have scribblers, chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes,

discussions, progress, enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty of

the press, and this is the way that your children will be brought home

to you. Ah! Marius! It is abominable! Killed! Dead before me! A

barricade! Ah, the scamp! Doctor, you live in this quarter, I believe?

Oh! I know you well. I see your cabriolet pass my window. I am going to

tell you. You are wrong to think that I am angry. One does not fly into

a rage against a dead man. That would be stupid. This is a child whom I

have reared. I was already old while he was very young. He played in

the Tuileries garden with his little shovel and his little chair, and

in order that the inspectors might not grumble, I stopped up the holes

that he made in the earth with his shovel, with my cane. One day he

exclaimed: Down with Louis XVIII.! and off he went. It was no fault of

mine. He was all rosy and blond. His mother is dead. Have you ever

noticed that all little children are blond? Why is it so? He is the son

of one of those brigands of the Loire, but children are innocent of

their fathers’ crimes. I remember when he was no higher than that. He

could not manage to pronounce his Ds. He had a way of talking that was

so sweet and indistinct that you would have thought it was a bird

chirping. I remember that once, in front of the Hercules Farnese,

people formed a circle to admire him and marvel at him, he was so

handsome, was that child! He had a head such as you see in pictures. I

talked in a deep voice, and I frightened him with my cane, but he knew

very well that it was only to make him laugh. In the morning, when he

entered my room, I grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all

the same. One cannot defend oneself against those brats. They take hold

of you, they hold you fast, they never let you go again. The truth is,

that there never was a cupid like that child. Now, what can you say for

your Lafayettes, your Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de

Corcelles who have killed him? This cannot be allowed to pass in this

fashion.”

He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless, and to whom

the physician had returned, and began once more to wring his hands. The

old man’s pallid lips moved as though mechanically, and permitted the

passage of words that were barely audible, like breaths in the death

agony:

“Ah! heartless lad! Ah! clubbist! Ah! wretch! Ah! Septembrist!”

Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed to a corpse.

Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal eruptions

should come to the light, the sequence of words returned, but the

grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength to utter them, his

voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed to come from the other

side of an abyss:

“It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that I am. And to

think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would not have been

delighted to make this wretch happy! A scamp who, instead of amusing

himself and enjoying life, went off to fight and get himself shot down

like a brute! And for whom? Why? For the Republic! Instead of going to

dance at the Chaumière, as it is the duty of young folks to do! What’s

the use of being twenty years old? The Republic, a cursed pretty folly!

Poor mothers, beget fine boys, do! Come, he is dead. That will make two

funerals under the same carriage gate. So you have got yourself

arranged like this for the sake of General Lamarque’s handsome eyes!

What had that General Lamarque done to you? A slasher! A chatter-box!

To get oneself killed for a dead man! If that isn’t enough to drive any

one mad! Just think of it! At twenty! And without so much as turning

his head to see whether he was not leaving something behind him! That’s

the way poor, good old fellows are forced to die alone, nowadays.

Perish in your corner, owl! Well, after all, so much the better, that

is what I was hoping for, this will kill me on the spot. I am too old,

I am a hundred years old, I am a hundred thousand years old, I ought,

by rights, to have been dead long ago. This blow puts an end to it. So

all is over, what happiness! What is the good of making him inhale

ammonia and all that parcel of drugs? You are wasting your trouble, you

fool of a doctor! Come, he’s dead, completely dead. I know all about

it, I am dead myself too. He hasn’t done things by half. Yes, this age

is infamous, infamous and that’s what I think of you, of your ideas, of

your systems, of your masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of

your scape-graces of writers, of your rascally philosophers, and of all

the revolutions which, for the last sixty years, have been frightening

the flocks of crows in the Tuileries! But you were pitiless in getting

yourself killed like this, I shall not even grieve over your death, do

you understand, you assassin?”

At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his glance, still

dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M. Gillenormand.

“Marius!” cried the old man. “Marius! My little Marius! my child! my

well-beloved son! You open your eyes, you gaze upon me, you are alive,

thanks!”

And he fell fainting.

BOOK FOURTH—JAVERT DERAILED

CHAPTER I

Javert passed slowly down the Rue de l’Homme Armé.

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 Grève, and halted at some distance from

the post of the Place du Châtelet, 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 Mégisserie 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 reappear; 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 Armé, 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 reverie gradually became terrible.

He might, athwart this reverie, 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 away in 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 reappeared 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

right to be killed in that barricade. He should have asserted that

right. 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 right? 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 Châtelet.

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 Préfet 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’Égyptienne.

“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 Châtelet.

“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 Châtelet 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.

BOOK FIFTH—GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER