Les Misérables 2.5.10
Javert was afraid of being deprived of his convict.
Thank you Victor Hugo.
(via esteliel)
Of course, Javert is very much moved in the end, with the revelation of Jean Valjean’s sublime qualities. But while Marius responds to the same discovery by trying to make amends, Javert commits suicide. Having abandoned his own quest to bring the outlaw to justice, the policeman triggers a series of reflections that flesh out his psychological profile. The man with no inner life is amazed to find that he has “under [his] breast of bronze something preposterous and disobedient that almost resembles a heart” (1325). He has learned to understand, to empathize with, and therefore to care about another.
In consequence, he has rendered good for good without any regard to external factors. Perhaps most puzzling, he has been able “to sacrifice duty, that general obligation, to personal motives, and to feel in these personal motives something general too, and perhaps superior” (1320). Public affairs have yielded to personal concerns of equal, if not greater, weight. The dichotomy between the particular and the general has suddenly dissolved, as private emotions have become invested with the sense of universal value previously reserved for the legal code.
This capacity for discerning and affirming a unique identity brings not joy and liberation but terror and disorientation: “Javert’s ultimate anguish was the loss of all certainty. He felt uprooted. The code was no longer anything but a stump in his hand… . Within him there was a revelation of feeling entirely distinct from the declarations of the law; his only standard hitherto” (1323).