Les Misérables
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