|
Javert passed slowly down the Rue de l'Homme Arme.
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 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 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 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 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.
|
