What was taking place in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear conscience, the overthrow of a mind, the crushing of a probity irresistibly hurled in a straight line and breaking itself against God. It was certainly strange that the fireman of order, the engineer of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse, could be unsaddled by a beam of light! That the incommutable, the direct, the correct, the geometrical, the passive, the perfect, could bend; that there should be for the locomotive a road to Damascus! God, ever within man, and Himself the true conscience, refractory to the false conscience; the spark forbidden to expire, the ray ordered to remember the sun, the mind enjoined to recognize the true absolute when it confronts itself with the fictitious absolute, a humanity that cannot be lost; the human heart inadmissible,--did Javert comprehend this splendid phenomenon, the most glorious, perhaps, of our internal prodigies? Did he penetrate it? Did he explain it to himself? Evidently no. But under the pressure of this incomprehensible incontestability he felt his brain cracking. He was less transfigured than the victim of this prodigy: he endured it with exasperation, and only saw in all this an immense difficulty of living. It seemed to him as if henceforth his breathing was eternally impeded. He was not accustomed to have anything unknown over his head; hitherto everything he had above him had been to his eye a clear, simple, limpid surface; there was nothing unknown or obscure,--nothing but what was definite, co-ordinated, enchained, precise, exact, circumscribed, limited, and closed. Everything foreseen, authority was a flat surface; there was no fall in it or dizziness before it. Javert had never seen anything unknown except below him. Irregularity, unexpected things, the disorderly opening of the chaos, and a possible fall over a precipice,--all this was the doing of the lower regions, of the rebels, the wicked and the wretched. How Javert threw himself back, and was suddenly startled by this extraordinary apparition,--a gulf above him!