بخش 5 کتاب 4

BOOK FOUR

JAVERT DERAILED

JAVERT DERAILED

JAVERT HAD WALKED away from the rue de l’Homme-Armé with slow tread.

He walked with his head down for the first time in his life, and also for the first time in his life with his hands behind his back. Until that day, Javert had only ever adopted, of Napoléon’s two poses, the one that expresses resolution, arms folded over the chest; the one that expresses uncertainty, hands behind the back, was unknown to him. Now a change had occurred; his whole person, slow and sombre, was stamped with anxiety.

He plunged into the silent streets. Yet he was headed in only one direction. He took a shortcut to the Seine, reached the quai des Ormes, followed the quai, passed La Grève and stopped, at some distance from the place du Châtelet guardhouse, at the corner of the pont Notre-Dame. There, between the pont Notre-Dame and the Pont-au-Change, on the one hand, and between the quai de la Mégisserie and the quai aux Fleurs, on the other, the Seine forms a sort of squared-off lake crossed by a rapid.

This point of the Seine is dreaded by bargemen. Nothing is more dangerous than this rapid, confined in those days and churned up by the piles of the bridge mill, since demolished. The two bridges, being so close to each other, increase the peril; the water rushes mightily under the arches. It rolls there in wide and terrible corrugations; it gathers and builds; the torrent charges at the piles of the bridges as though to rip them out with fat liquid ropes. Men who fall in there never reappear; the best swimmers drown.

Javert leaned on the parapet with both elbows, his chin in both hands, and while his nails mechanically raked through his thick sideburns, he reflected.

A new thing, a revolution, a catastrophe, had just taken place deep inside him and he had good grounds for examining himself. Javert was in appalling pain. For some hours now, Javert had stopped being a simple man. He was deeply troubled; that brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud in the crystal. Javert felt duty splitting in two in his conscience and he could not dodge the fact. When he had run into Jean Valjean so unexpectedly on the bank of the Seine, he had felt something like a wolf catching its prey again—but also like a dog that once more finds his master.

He saw two roads before him, both equally straight, but he saw two of them; and this terrified him, for he had never in his life known more than one straight line. And what made the anguish more poignant was that the two roads were radically opposed. One of the two straight lines ruled out the other. Which of the two was the true one? His situation was more than he could bear.

To owe your life to a malefactor, to accept this debt and pay it back, to be, in spite of yourself, on a par with a fugitive from justice and to pay him back for a good deed done by another good deed; to let him say to you, “Off you go” and to say to him in turn, “You’re free,” to sacrifice duty, that all-encompassing obligation, to personal motives, and to feel in those personal motives something that was also all-encompassing and, perhaps, superior; to betray society in order to remain true to your conscience—that all these absurd things should happen and should come and heap themselves upon him, absolutely floored him.

One thing had amazed him and that was that Jean Valjean had spared him; and one thing had petrified him, and that was that he, Javert, had spared Jean Valjean.

What had he come to? He looked for himself but could not find himself anymore.

What was he to do now? To hand over Jean Valjean was bad; to let Jean Valjean go free was bad. In the first case, the man of the law would fall lower than the man of the galleys; in the second, a convict would rise above the law and trample it underfoot. Both cases meant dishonour for him, Javert. Whichever course he took, there was a fall. Destiny has certain extreme overhangs that loom, sheer, over the abyss of the impossible and beyond which life is no more than a free fall. Javert was standing on one of those overhangs.

One of the things worrying him was being made to think. The very violence of all these contradictory emotions forced him to do so. Thinking was not something he was used to and it was oddly painful.

Thinking always involves a certain amount of inner revolt and he was annoyed at having anything like that in him.

Thinking, on any subject at all outside the narrow circle of his functions, would have been pointless and tiring for him no matter what; but thinking about the day that had just run its course was torture. Yet he had to look inside his conscience after such a series of shake-ups and give an account of himself.

What he had just done sent a shiver down his spine. He—he, Javert—had seen fit to decide, contrary to all police regulations, contrary to the whole social and judicial system, contrary to the code as a whole, in favour of a release; that had suited him; he had substituted his personal concerns for public concerns. Wasn’t that beyond the pale? Every time he faced this unspeakable action that he had committed head-on, he shuddered from head to toe. What could he reconcile himself to doing? There was only one resort left to him: to return swiftly to the rue de l’Homme-Armé and have Jean Valjean locked up. It was clear that this was what had to be done. He could not do it.

Something barred the way to him on that side. Something? What? Could there be anything else in the world besides law courts, binding verdicts, the police, and authority? Javert was shattered.

A galley slave, sacred! A convict justice could not seize! And this, due to Javert!

That Javert and Jean Valjean, the man made to ruthlessly mete out punishment and the man made to submit to it, that these two men, who were the two sides of the same coin known as the legal system, had come to this, to both place themselves above the law—wasn’t this terrifying?

What then! Would such outrages be allowed to happen and no one be punished! Would Jean Valjean be allowed to be stronger than the entire social order, to be free and he, Javert, continue to eat the government’s bread!

His thoughts gradually became unbearably black.

He could also have reproached himself somewhat over the insurgent who was taken back to the rue des Filles-du-Calvaire while he was at it; but he didn’t think of that. The lesser fault got lost in the bigger one. Besides, the insurgent was obviously dead and, legally, death puts an end to pursuit.

Jean Valjean, that was what was weighing on his mind.

Jean Valjean threw him. All the axioms that had propped up his whole life collapsed before that man. Jean Valjean’s generosity toward him, Javert, devastated him. Other deeds that he remembered and that he had once dismissed as lies and acts of madness, came back to him now as real facts. Monsieur Madeleine reappeared behind Jean Valjean and the two figures merged into one—one that was to be revered. Javert felt that something awful was seeping into his soul, admiration for a convict. Respect for a galley slave, was that possible? He shuddered at it, yet could not shake it off. There was no point trying to fight it; he was reduced to admitting, in his deepest heart, the sublimeness of that poor miserable bastard. This was monstrous.

A benevolent malefactor, a compassionate convict, gentle, helpful, clement, doing good in return for bad, offering forgiveness in return for hate, favouring pity over revenge, preferring to be destroyed himself to destroying his enemy, saving the one who had brought him down, kneeling at the pinnacle of virtue, closer to an angel than a man! Javert was forced to admit that this monster existed. It could not go on like this.

Of course, and we must insist on this, he had not surrendered without resisting this monster, this loathsome angel, this vile hero, who outraged him almost as much as he amazed him. Twenty times, when he was in that carriage face-to-face with Jean Valjean, the legal tiger in him had roared. Twenty times he had been tempted to throw himself at Jean Valjean, to seize him and devour him, that is, arrest him. What could be simpler, in effect? To shout out at the first guardhouse they came to: “Here is a fugitive from justice who has returned illegally!” To call the gendarmes and tell them, “This man is yours!” and then be on his way, to leave the damned outcast there, forget about the rest, not get involved, not interfere in anything again. This man is forever a prisoner of the law; the law will do with him what it likes. What could be more just? Javert had told himself all that; he had tried to carry on regardless, to act, to apprehend the man, and, then as now, he had not been able to; and every time his hand had shot up convulsively toward Jean Valjean’s collar, his hand had dropped again, as though under an enormous weight, and in the back of his mind, a voice, a strange voice, cried out to him: “Go on, then. Hand over your saviour. Then have them bring you Pontius Pilate’s washbasin1 and wash your claws.” His thoughts then turned back to himself, and beside Jean Valjean ennobled, he saw himself, Javert, demeaned. A convict was his benefactor!

And another thing, why had he allowed that man to let him live? He had every right to be killed, at that barricade. He ought to have exercised that right. Rallied the other insurgents to his aid against Jean Valjean, got himself shot by force, that would have been better.

His supreme anguish was the evaporation of all certainty. He felt torn up by the roots, annihilated. The code was now a mere stub in his hand. He was facing scruples of an unknown kind. An emotional revelation was taking shape within him and it was entirely distinct from assertion of the law, till then his sole measuring stick. To keep to his former honesty was no longer enough. A whole order of unexpected acts surged up and subjugated him. A whole new world appeared to his soul: kindness accepted and returned, devotion, miséricorde, leniency, the havoc wreaked on austerity by pity, acceptance of other people, no more definitive condemnation, no more damnation, the possibility of a tear pearling in the eye of the law, some indefinable sense of justice according to God’s rules that was the reverse of justice according to man. He saw in the darkness the terrifying sun of an unknown morality dawning; and he was appalled and dazzled by it. Like an owl forced to gaze out of an eagle’s eyes.

He told himself that it was true, then, that there were exceptions, that authority could be unseated, that the rules could be brought up short by a deed, that not everything was framed within the text of the code, that the unforeseen commanded obedience, that the virtue of a convict could present a snare for the virtue of a public servant, that the monstrous could be divine, that destiny set up these kinds of ambushes, and he thought with despair that even he had not been safe from a surprise.

He was forced to acknowledge that goodness existed. This convict had been good. And he had just been good himself, which was unheard of. Clearly, he was becoming depraved. He found himself spineless. He horrified himself.

The ideal for Javert was not to be humane, to be great, to be sublime; it was to be irreproachable. Well, he had just faltered.

How had he come to this? How had all this happened? He could not have said how, not even to himself. He took his head in his two hands but it was no good, he could not manage to explain it to himself.

He had certainly always had the intention of handing Jean Valjean back over to the law, whose captive Jean Valjean was, while he, Javert, was its slave. He had not admitted to himself for a single instant, while he held him, that he was thinking of letting him go. It was in a way without his being aware of it that his hand had opened and released him.

All kinds of puzzling new doors began to crack open before his eyes. He put himself questions and gave himself answers, and his answers scared him. He asked himself this: “This convict, this desperado, whom I pursued to the point of persecution, and who had me under his foot, and could have taken his revenge, and who should have done, every bit as much out of resentment as for his security, in granting me life, in sparing me, what did he do? His duty? No. Something more. And me, in sparing him in turn, what did I do? My duty? No. Something more. So there is something more than duty?” This is where he became alarmed; his balance was out of whack, the scales tipped; one of the scale pans toppled into the abyss, the other flew off up into the heavens; and Javert was no less horrified by the one on high than by the one down below. Without in the least being what is known in the world as a Voltairean, or a philosopher, or a skeptic, being, on the contrary, instinctively respectful of the established Church, he knew it only as an august fragment of the social whole; law and order was his dogma and was enough for him; since he had come of age and become a public servant, he had poured just about all his religion into the police, being, and here we use the terms without the least irony and in their most serious sense, being, as we say, a spy the way another man is a priest. He had a superior, one Monsieur Gisquet; till that day he had barely given a thought to that other superior, God.

This new chief, God, he sensed unexpectedly and this disturbed him.

He was disoriented by this unforeseen presence; he did not know what to do with this particular superior, aware as he was that the subordinate is bound always to bow and scrape, that he must not disobey or blame or discuss, and that, in relation to a superior who throws him too much, the inferior has no other recourse than to hand in his resignation. But how do you go about handing in your resignation to God?

Be that as it may, and it was always to this that he came back, one fact overruled all else for him and that was that he had just committed a terrible offence. He had just turned a blind eye to a recidivist in breach of his ban. He had just set a galley slave free. He had just robbed the laws of a man who was theirs by rights. He had done that. He could not understand himself anymore. He was not sure he was himself. The very reasons for his action escaped him, all that was left of them was vertigo. He had lived till that moment on the sort of blind faith that engenders a dour probity. That faith was leaving him, that probity was letting him down. All that he had believed was coming apart at the seams. Truths he wanted nothing to do with obsessed him inescapably. From now on, he had to be another man. He was suffering the strange pangs of a conscience suddenly operated on for cataracts. He could see what he hated seeing. He felt emptied, useless, cut off from his past life, demoted, dissolved. Authority was dead in him. He had no reason to go on living. What a terrible situation! To be moved!

To be granite, and to have doubts! To be the very statue of punishment, cast all of a piece in the mould of the law, and to suddenly realize that under your breast of bronze you have something absurd and unruly that almost resembles a heart! To come to this—returning good for good—even though you have told yourself till then that this particular good was bad! To be a watchdog and lick! To be ice and melt! To be a vice and turn into a hand! To suddenly feel your fingers opening! To let go—appalling! A human projectile, no longer knowing what path to take and recoiling!

To be obliged to admit to yourself: that infallibility is not infallible, that there may be error in dogma, that the code does not have the last word, society is not perfect, authority is ambiguous and can vacillate, the immutable can crack, judges are only men, the law can be mistaken, the courts can be wrong! To see a fissure in the immense blue of the firmament!

What was happening inside Javert was the diverting of a rectilinear conscience, the throwing off course of a soul, the smashing of a probity irresistibly launched straight ahead and shattering against God. Of course, this was strange. That the engine driver of order, that the mechanic of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse of the straight and narrow, could be thrown by a shaft of light! That the incommutable, the direct, the correct, the geometric, the passive, the perfect, could bend! That there was for the locomotive a road to Damascus!

God, who is always within man, and resistant, He the true conscience, to the false, stopping the spark from going out, ordering the sunbeam to remember the sun, enjoining the soul to recognize the true absolute when faced with the fictitious absolute; indestructible humanity, the inadmissible human heart, that splendid phenomenon, the most beautiful perhaps of our inner wonders, did Javert understand it? Did Javert fathom it? Did Javert even register it? Obviously not. But the pressure of the incomprehensible, the incontestable, was so great he felt his skull cracking open.

He was more a victim of this miracle than transfigured by it. He endured it, exasperated. He only saw in all that an immense difficulty in being. It seemed to him that from that point on, his breathing would be forever laboured. To have the unknown hanging over his head was not something he was used to.

Until now all that had been hanging over him had been, in his eyes, a clean, simple, limpid surface; nothing unknown or obscure there; nothing that wasn’t defined, coordinated, linked, precise, exact, circumscribed, limited, closed; completely foreseen. Authority was something flat; no falling there, no vertigo before it. Javert had never seen the unknown except down below. The irregular, the unexpected, the disorderly unlocking of chaos, the possibility of sliding into an abyss—this is what happened in lower realms, to rebels, to rotters, to those poor bastards, the dregs. Now Javert was tipping over backward and he was suddenly scared by this unheard-of apparition: an abyss up above. Hell! A person was completely demolished! A person was absolutely thrown! What could a man hold on to? What a man was convinced of was crumbling!

What! The chink in society’s armour could be found by some magnanimous outcast! What! An honest servant of the law could suddenly find himself caught between two crimes, the crime of letting a man get away and the crime of arresting him! All was not clear in the instructions given to the public servant by the government! Duty could have dead ends! Jesus Christ! All this was real! Was it true that a former crook, buckled under the weight of his convictions, could straighten out and end up being in the right? Was it conceivable? Were there really cases, then, where the law should back off in the face of crime transfigured, and stammer its excuses?

Yes, it had happened! And Javert saw him! And Javert touched him! And not only could he not deny it, but he had a hand in it. These things were real. It was abominable that real facts could wind up getting so twisted.

If the facts did their duty, they would stick to being evidence in law; the facts are God-given. Was anarchy now about to descend from on high?

And so—with the distortion caused by anguish and the optical illusion caused by extreme dismay, anything that might have checked and corrected his impression evaporated, and society, and the human race, and the whole world, now looked to him to be simply hideous—and so punishment, the thing judged, the force due to legislation, the decrees of the sovereign courts, the magistracy, the government, prevention and repression, official wisdom, legal infallibility, the principle of authority, all the dogmas on which rest political and civilian security, sovereignty, justice, the logic devolving from the code, the social absolute, public truth, all that was now wreckage, rubble, chaos; himself, Javert, the keeper of order, incorruptibility at the service of the police, the heaven-sent mastiff guarding society, was defeated and floored; and on this whole ruin, there was one man left standing, with a green cap on his head and a halo over his brow; this was the shattering upheaval, spinning him head over heels, to which he had come; this was the terrifying vision now lodged in his soul.

That this could be bearable. No.

It was a violent state, if ever there was one. There were only two ways out. One was to go resolutely to Jean Valjean and to slam the jailbird back in the dungeon. The other … Javert pushed off from the parapet and, holding his head high this time, set out with firm tread for the guardhouse indicated by a lantern at a corner of the place du Châtelet.

When he got there, he saw a police officer through the window and went in. Merely by the way they push open the guardhouse door, policemen recognize each other. Javert gave his name, showed his card to the sergeant, and sat down at the guardhouse table, where a candle was burning. On the table there was also a pen, a lead inkwell, and spare paper for eventual police reports and the statements of the night patrols.

This table, always completed by its straw chair, is an institution; it exists in all police stations; it is invariably adorned with a boxwood saucer full of sawdust and a little pasteboard cup full of red sealing wafers, an example of the lower official style. It is with that table that state literature begins.

Javert took the pen and a sheet of paper and began to write. This is what he wrote:

SOME OBSERVATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SERVICE

First: I beg Monsieur le préfet to cast his eyes on this.

Second: The detainees coming from the initial hearing take their shoes off and remain barefoot on the flagstones while they are being searched. Several cough on returning to prison. This entails hospital expenses.

Third: Tailing is good, with relays of officers at intervals, but for important occasions, there ought to be at least two officers who do not lose sight of one another, so that if, for any reason, an officer takes sick on the job, the other can keep watch over him and stand in for him.

Fourth: It is hard to explain why the special regulations of Les Madelonnettes prison ban prisoners from having a chair, even when they pay for it.

Fifth: At Les Madelonnettes, there are only two bars on the canteen window, which allows the woman running the canteen to let the prisoners touch her hand.

Sixth: The detainees, known as barkers, that call the other detainees to the visitors’ room, make the prisoner pay them two sous to call out their name clearly. This is theft.

Seventh: For a dropped thread, ten sous are held back from a prisoner in the weaving workshop; this is an abuse on the part of the contractor, since the cloth is just as good.

Eighth: It is annoying that visitors to La Force prison have to cross the cour des Mômes to get to the visitors’ room of Sainte-Marie-l’Egyptienne.

Ninth: It is a fact that every day, in the prefecture courtyard, one hears gendarmes recounting the interrogations of those held by the magistrates. For a gendarme, who should be beyond reproach, to repeat what he has heard in the examining magistrate’s chamber, amounts to serious disorderly conduct.

Tenth: Madame Henry is an honest woman; her canteen is extremely clean; but it is bad for a woman to be posted at the trapdoor leading down to solitary. This is not worthy of the Conciergerie of a great civilization.

Javert wrote these lines in his calmest, most correct handwriting, not leaving out a comma, and making the paper screech firmly under his pen. Below the last line he signed: Javert.

Inspector—1st class.

At the police station of the place du Châtelet.

June 7, 1832, approximately one o’clock in the morning.

Javert dried the fresh ink, folded the sheet of paper like a letter, sealed it, wrote on the back Note for the administration, left it on the table, and walked out of the station. The door with its glass panels and iron bars swung shut behind him.

Once more he crossed the place du Châtelet diagonally, regained the quai, and went back with automatic precision to the very spot he had left a quarter of an hour earlier; he leaned there and found himself again in the same position on the same flagstone of the parapet. It was as though he had not stirred.

The darkness was now pitch black. It was that deathly moment that follows midnight. A ceiling of clouds hid the stars. The sky was just a sinister density. The houses of the Cité no longer had a single light in them; no one was out walking; the streets and the quais were deserted as far as the eye could see; Notre-Dame and the towers of the Palais de Justice were outlined like features of the night. A streetlamp turned the rim of the quai red. The silhouettes of the bridges were distorted in the mist, one behind the other. Rain had swollen the river.

The spot where Javert was leaning was, as you will recall, located right above the rapid of the Seine, right over that fearful swirling whirlwind that spirals this way, then that, like an endless screw.

Javert poked his head over and looked. Everything was black. You could not make anything out. You could hear the noise of the foam; but you could not see the river. Now and then, a glimmer of light flashed in those dizzying depths and dimly snaked along, the water having the power, on the blackest of nights, to take the light who knows where and turn it into a death adder. The glimmer of light vanished and everything became indistinct again; immensity seemed to open out there. What you had below you was not water, it was a yawning chasm. The quai wall, abrupt, confused, merging into the vapour, suddenly hidden, struck you as being a cliff of infinity.

You could not see a thing, but you could feel the hostile coldness of the water and smell the staleness of the wet stones. A savage breath rose from that abyss. The swelling of the river more guessed at than seen, the tragic whispering of the waves, the gloomy enormity of the arches of the bridge, the easily imaginable fall into that sombre void, all that darkness was full of horror.

Javert stood dead still for some minutes, gazing at this window on darkness; he studied the invisible with a fixedness that was like attention. The water gurgled. All of a sudden, he took off his hat and placed it on the edge of the quai. A moment later, a figure appeared, tall and black, which from a distance anyone still out and about could well have taken for a phantom, standing on the parapet, leaning toward the Seine, then it straightened up and fell straight into the darkness; there was a muted splash; and the shadow alone was in on the secret of the convulsions this obscure form made as it disappeared beneath the water.