This man was made up of two very simple and relatively excellent feelings, but which he almost rendered bad by exaggerating them,--respect for authority and hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes, robbery, murder, and every crime were only forms of rebellion. He enveloped in a species of blind faith everybody in the service of the State, from the Prime Minister down to the game-keeper. He covered with contempt, aversion, and disgust, every one who had once crossed the legal threshold of evil. He was absolute, and admitted of no exceptions; on one side he said: "A functionary cannot be mistaken, a magistrate can do no wrong;" on the other he said: "They are irremediably lost: no good can come of them." He fully shared the opinion of those extreme minds that attribute to the human law some power of making or verifying demons, and that place a Styx at the bottom of society. He was stoical, stern, and austere; a sad dreamer, and humble yet haughty, like all fanatics. His glance was a gimlet, for it was cold and piercing. His whole life was composed in the two words, watching and overlooking. He had introduced the straight line into what is the most tortuous thing in the world; he was conscious of his usefulness, had religious respect for his duties, and was a spy as well as another is a priest. Woe to the wretch who came into his clutches! he would have arrested his father if escaping from prison, and denounced his mother had she broken her ban. And he would have done it with that sort of inner satisfaction which virtue produces. With all this he spent a life of privation, isolation, self-denial, chastity. He was the implacable duty, the police comprehended as the Spartans comprehended Sparta, a pitiless watchman, a savage integrity, a marble-hearted spy, a Brutus contained in a Vidocq.