ot 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,