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 newspapers, would not have failed to declare that Javert was a symbol. His brow was not visible; it disappeared beneath his hat: his eyes were not visible, since they were lost under his eyebrows: his chin was not visible, for it was plunged in his cravat: his hands were not visible; they were drawn up in his sleeves: and his cane was not visible; he carried it under his coat. But when the occasion presented itself, there was suddenly seen to emerge from all this shadow, as from an ambuscade, a narrow and angular forehead, a baleful glance, a threatening chin, enormous hands, and a monstrous cudgel.
In his leisure moments, which were far from frequent, he read, although he hated books; this caused him to be not wholly illiterate. This could be recognized by some emphasis in his speech.
As we have said, he had no vices.
When he was pleased with himself, he permitted himself a pinch of snuff.
Therein lay his connection with humanity.
The reader will have no difficulty in understanding that Javert was the terror of that whole class which the annual statistics of the Ministry of Justice designates under the rubric, Vagrants. The name of Javert routed them by its mere utterance; the face of Javert petrified them at sight.
Such was this formidable man.
Javert was like an eye constantly fixed on M. Madeleine.
An eye full of suspicion and conjecture.
M. Madeleine had finally perceived the fact; but it seemed to be of no importance to him.
He did not even put a question to Javert; he neither sought nor avoided him; he bore that embarrassing and almost oppressive gaze without appearing to notice it.