296 Les Miserables
was absolute, and admitted no exceptions. On the one hand,
he said, ‘The functionary can make no mistake; the magis-
trate is never the wrong.’ On the other hand, he said, ‘These
men are irremediably lost. Nothing good can come from
them.’ He fully shared the opinion of those extreme minds
which attribute to human law I know not what power of
making, or, if the reader will have it so, of authenticating,
demons, and who place a Styx at the base of society. He was
stoical, serious, austere; a melancholy dreamer, humble and
haughty, like fanatics. His glance was like a gimlet, cold and
piercing. His whole life hung on these two words: watch-
fulness and supervision. He had introduced a straight line
into what is the most crooked thing in the world; he pos-
sessed the conscience of his usefulness, the religion of his
functions, and he was a spy as other men are priests. Woe
to the man who fell into his hands! He would have arrested
his own father, if the latter had escaped from the galleys,
and would have denounced his mother, if she had broken
her ban. And he would have done it with that sort of inward
satisfaction which is conferred by virtue. And, withal, a life
of privation, isolation, abnegation, chastity, with never a di-
version. It was implacable duty; the police understood, as
the Spartans understood Sparta, a pitiless lying in wait, a
ferocious honesty, a marble informer, Brutus in Vidocq.
Javert’s whole person was expressive of the man who spies
and who withdraws himself from observation. The mystical
school of Joseph de Maistre, which at that epoch seasoned
with lofty cosmogony those things which were called the
ultra newspapers, would not have failed to declare that Jav-