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