Page 804 - les-miserables

cesses which are talked of long in advance and have had
the bloom brushed off. He preferred to elaborate his master-
pieces in the dark and to unveil them suddenly at the last.
Javert had followed Jean Valjean from tree to tree, then
from corner to corner of the street, and had not lost sight
of him for a single instant; even at the moments when Jean
Valjean believed himself to be the most secure Javert’s eye
had been on him. Why had not Javert arrested Jean Valjean?
Because he was still in doubt.
It must be remembered that at that epoch the police was
not precisely at its ease; the free press embarrassed it; sev-
eral arbitrary arrests denounced by the newspapers, had
echoed even as far as the Chambers, and had rendered the
Prefecture timid. Interference with individual liberty was a
grave matter. The police agents were afraid of making a mis-
take; the prefect laid the blame on them; a mistake meant
dismissal. The reader can imagine the effect which this
brief paragraph, reproduced by twenty newspapers, would
have caused in Paris: ‘Yesterday, an aged grandfather, with
white hair, a respectable and well-to-do gentleman, who
was walking with his grandchild, aged eight, was arrested
and conducted to the agency of the Prefecture as an escaped
convict!’
Let us repeat in addition that Javert had scruples of his
own; injunctions of his conscience were added to the in-
junctions of the prefect. He was really in doubt.
Jean Valjean turned his back on him and walked in the
dark.
Sadness, uneasiness, anxiety, depression, this fresh mis-

804 Les Miserables