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