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.