Yes, man is broad, too broad, indeed. I'd have him narrower.
I am struggling and very much failing to contain an integral image of a man who is both intrinsically possessed of an "air of ferocious command" and also had always known he would fall; who can both feel about someone as "the dog who finds his master again" and yet be seemingly completely estranged from any human contact, without, however, having any problems in the day-to-day social interaction.
I can hold in mind one part of that charactarisation at a time, but not all of them at once. I was long opposed to thinking Javert a sullen loner, a pathological introvert who wouldn't know what a human connection was even if it punched him in the face; yet there doesn't seem to be much choice. I very much do not want to make up another Spock, another improved-me (a lonely emotionally-five-year-old longing for any affection and masking it with an air of indifference + characterised as being implausibly cool/successful in something which requires much more stability than that), and yet the dynamics certainly point in that direction.
It seems one always has to bear in mind his imperious and self-assured (even self-righteous) manner. I, never having an ounce of it, am at pains to imagine those traits enmeshed so intimately with those which make up the core of my character.
Most important of all, there must be not an ounce of sentimentality in him and a goddamned mountain of pride (made up in equal parts of the unbreakable previously-life-saving habit of complete self-reliance and, consequently, unbearable fear of trusting anybody with one's self).
An ungainly picture this paints. Severity and borderline cruelty as the only defence against complete submerging of self?
Yeah, our Inspector is not a happy man.
Except for when he is, and I firmly believe (read: hope it's possible to fit into canon) that he did reach a state of functional equilibrium in the years between the Little Picpus chase and the Gorbeau affair.
