r. As for the rest, he had very little
skull and a great deal of jaw; his hair concealed his forehead and
fell over his eyebrows; between his eyes there was a permanent, central
frown, like an imprint of wrath; his gaze was obscure; his mouth pursed
up and terrible; his air that of ferocious command.

This man was composed of two very simple and two very good sentiments,
comparatively; but he rendered them almost bad, by dint of exaggerating
them,--respect for authority, hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes,
murder, robbery, all crimes, are only forms of rebellion. He enveloped
in a blind and profound faith every one who had a function in the state,
from the prime minister to the rural policeman. He covered with scorn,
aversion, and disgust every one who had once crossed the legal threshold
of evil. He was absolute, and admitted no exceptions. On the one hand,
he said, "The functionary can make no mistake; the magistrate 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: watchfulness and supervision. He had introduced a
straight line into what is the most crooked thing in the world;
he possessed 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 diversion. 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 n