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Chapter Text

“That Javert, who has been annoying me so long; (...) that frightful hunting dog!”

—Jean Valjean in  Les Misérables Volume 1 Book 7 Chapter 3, Hapgood translation

“You annoy me. Kill me, rather.”

— Javert to Jean Valjean, in Les Misérables Volume 5 Book 1 Chapter 19, Hapgood Translation

Jean Valjean dragged Javert out of the Seine and then crawled onto the quai, shivering like a wet cat. His eyes were bloodshot.  He was nearly weeping with fatigue. His fingernails dug into the pavement like claws.  

“I wish that I could die,” he sighed.

They were on a decrepit stone quai; the only thing docked there was a small wooden boat, rotted and full of holes, buffeted by the current. The grey wall of the quai loomed above them like the wall of a prison. A single ruddy oil lantern sputtered somewhere, and it seemed to only redden the area rather than light it. The outlines of the bridges and the city were lost in the mist. Not a single light burned in any of the houses above; no one could be heard passing; all of the streets and other quais which could be seen from their position were deserted; Notre-Dame and the towers of the Court-House were shapeless in the fog. The only sound was the rushing of the river. 

The sky was starless. Occasionally bright gleams of light appeared in the river, and undulated vaguely in its waters; Jean Valjean watched them.

“There are no stars in the sky,” he muttered, as if in a dream,  “they are on earth now.” 

Then he looked at Javert, who was breathing but unconscious, and shuddered. 

After Javert had so unexpectedly lost his mind and left him at the Rue de l’Homme Armé, Jean Valjean had quickly recovered his composure. His first task, he’d decided, was to conceal all of this from Cosette. There was no need for her future happiness to be sullied by his misery; her marriage should not be poisoned by the galleys and the sewer. She would be shielded from these realities. He would begin by bathing in the Seine, to wash the worst of the sewer mire off himself;  the next morning, he would reserve a private room in a bathhouse, and scrub the rest of it away with the strongest soap he could buy; and after that, after that…

He had quitted the Rue de l’Homme Armé and headed for the Seine, with the lost and passive air of a sleepwalker. Too weary to follow any conscious direction, he’d mechanically allowed his feet to guide him through the familiar streets; he had some vague idea that he would see where his body took him; somehow, he had found his feet taking him towards the Pont Au Change. When he heard the rushing of the water he’d started, as if waking from a dream. “How stupid I am!” he’d thought, “I have come to the rapids! What is it I’m doing? This is not a place for bathing; I would drown.”  Yet he had lingered for a moment. 

That had been a mistake.

He had then noticed a tall shadow, like a phantom, leaning on the parapet. When the phantom stood on the parapet, he had realized it was a living man who was attempting suicide. He’d staggered over to rescue him. Then a light had fallen on the man’s face— Jean Valjean had recognized Javert, shuddered, and hesitated. Yet when Javert had leapt into the river, he had followed him, and pulled him to safety. 

“This night!” he said bitterly, staring at the stones of the quai; cold water trickled off his clothes and formed a puddle around him. His hands trembled.  “That man!”

So Javert, that relentless frightful hunting dog, had apparently gone mad and thrown himself in a river; very well!  And now, had God decreed that it was the duty of Javert’s prey to lick his wounds? Was it the duty of the hunted fox to rescue the hound? He had tasted this agony before, but that did not make it less humiliating. 

What a terrible night this was! Every time he thought he was exhausted past all endurance God threw another trial at him, worse than the last. And he endured them all; oh God, he endured and endured and endured. Somehow his body did not break. He knew that it would not. He knew that it could not; he had lost all hope of that. If suicide had formed any part of why he had leapt into the river after Javert, he had failed in it— but he was not allowed to think of suicide, a profoundly irreligious act. He accepted that his lot was to suffer, and die, and be reborn, and suffer again. 

No man should have been able to survive this point of the Seine. He and Javert should both be dead. But God would not permit him to die, and by touching Javert he had imparted that curse to him as well.

Jean Valjean could not stay dead; the dead were at peace. He was doomed to live. 

He thought bitterly, and with a sort of rage, that even Prometheus had been given time to rest. It had seemed for the last few days that his organs were being devoured endlessly and without pause. There was no time to breathe, no time to regrow what had been taken; and every time he felt that his body was entirely broken, he discovered something new within him that could break. He did not know how much longer his body could be forced to live. 

“If I were allowed to die!” he said, as a prayer; the thought seemed blessed and sweet. 

But there was no time to rest. He had another task. He had another burden, another trial, another stone to roll up the hill. He had to help the horrible shivering creature he had just fished out of the river. 

He was too exhausted to think; he felt he was in a dream, and could not separate reality from his imagination. He attempted to focus on what he was certain was there in front of him. 

Javert was alive, more or less. He lay flat on his stomach, as limp as a drowned dog or a sack of potatoes. He was breathing but unconscious. 

What a poor sad wretch that Javert was! He could not fear him now. Looking at his limp body, Jean Valjean did not know how he had ever been afraid of such a pitiable thing. God had shown him his folly, to be afraid of such a pathetic creature. 

He knew that Javert would live. He knew this because it would be far too convenient for Jean Valjean if he were dead. God would never deliver him so easily. It was his fate to suffer all that a man could suffer, to be punished in every way a man could be punished, to crawl through life on his knees and leave his blood on every stone— so it was entirely fitting that he would need to rescue the man who had hounded him for years, who had murdered Fantine, and who would now send him back to prison. 

“First I saved that ninny Marius, so he can take my happiness,” Jean Valjean said with a smile, “And now this creature Javert, so he can take my freedom!”

And then he laughed— it was a laugh of triumph, and a laugh of despair. A few moments passed and it turned into a sob. The sound echoed against the wall in a way that was unbearably lonely. 

But then, he had nothing to fear anymore. All was over for him.  And he would not last long in prison, not at his age—! 

“But where to take him-- Javert,” Jean Valjean muttered.  “He must be taken…to the place where injured people go…”

He saw shadows in the corner of his vision. Every muscle in his body cried out in agony or exhaustion. He did not know if he would have the strength to carry Javert’s body anywhere.

“He belongs to the police,” Jean Valjean continued. “I could take him to the station-house by the Place du Châtelet, and leave him there like a foundling left on its doorstep…”

He attempted to stand. A horrible splitting pain shot up his leg and he collapsed back to the ground, shivering. He should avoid standing on that leg, he thought— it had been injured in the sewer, and the injury had grown worse when he had leapt into the river. 

He would have to find a way to bear Javert to safety without the use of one of his legs.

“That should be no matter for me,” he said between his teeth, thinking of the chain gang. He knew how to bear heavy burdens with one of his legs restricted. 

He crawled over to Javert’s side, wincing in pain, his bad leg dragging uselessly behind him. Then he began to inspect the man closely, calculating how he would carry him. 

Javert was a tall brick-shaped man with a broad chest and large flat hands. He lay on his stomach with his bulldog-like face and whiskers squashed against the stone. He wore a massive heavy greatcoat that was drenched with water, and a puddle had formed on the pavement around him. He would be heavy, he would be very heavy, he would be much heavier than Marius; he would be like carrying a massive drowned wolf. 

He sighed and tried to think. Every idea seemed absurd. Should he sling him over his back like Marius, and stagger along on one foot? Should he grab Javert by the legs and drag him? Should he attempt to crawl away like a cat and carry Javert with his teeth? 

His sigh turned into a sob. He would endure it; he had to. He would bear it; he had to. How he would do it he did not know. The only thing he knew for certain was that Javert would be lighter without his greatcoat. 

He gently turned Javert over onto his back. The man’s limbs flopped limply, like he was one of Cosette’s little dolls. His hands fell pathetically at his sides like the paws of a dead animal. Jean Valjean felt again: to think that I was ever afraid of this poor creature!

He began to undo the buttons of Javert’s greatcoat. His vision darkened, his hands trembled, and undoing the buttons seemed a monumental and impossible task. They were cold and slippery. He worried that Javert would awaken to stop him, like a guard dog attacking an intruder. 

But Javert remained motionless. His eyes remained shut. His only movements were the faint rise and fall of his breath, and the steady trickle of water down his face and through his whiskers. 

Javert, that terrible hunting dog who had hounded him for so long, was finally at bay.

 Jean Valjean was suddenly overwhelmed with pity.

 It was the same pity he would have felt for any other man in Javert’s position. The cruel part of him that valued self-preservation had urged him to let Javert die; he had been tempted to listen; he had been tempted to let Javert drown and let his identity drown with him. He still, after all, had a deep fear of the police, and a helpless rage at his own persecution. And yet his conscience had cried out; he had obeyed his conscience; and now—

And now, looking at Javert’s poor unconscious face, he was relieved that he had. 

The drowned thing in front of him no longer seemed like an embodiment of the law; it was simply a helpless injured man, shivering in the cold like a child. He thought of his temptation to let Javert die and spat it out in disgust. That he should rob a man of his life for such a petty reason! That he should allow any living creature to be condemned to death for his own cowardice! Javert reminded him of Thénardier, and of his former chainmate who had become a turnkey — all those men broken by society, led down such horrible paths— how could he fear wretches who were so pitiable? He had not been any better when he had left the galleys. 

He was filled with the pride of self-sacrifice, and with the bitter joy of martyrdom. So Javert would arrest him– very well! He would return to infamy in the eyes of men and enter into sanctity in the eyes of God.

He continued unbuttoning Javert’s coat, his fingers struggling with the slippery brass buttons. His hands shivered in the cold. The tips of his fingers were numb. 

Javert’s lips parted slightly as if he were speaking in a dream. The wind blew through his whiskers. He shuddered violently, he stammered something in his sleep, and his fingers twitched like he was grasping for his cudgel. Jean Valjean wondered if he was dreaming of hunting men the way a dog would dream of hunting squirrels. 

It was far easier to find pity for Javert than it was to find pity for Marius. That insufferable Marius was despicable even when he was unconscious. He had a pedantic air even when he wasn’t speaking. 

But Javert, while unconscious, was easy to pity. So long as Javert was not awake— was not able to argue and threaten and make demands—he could care for him as easily as he would care for any other soul in pain. As long as Javert was asleep, he was nothing more than an object of sympathy. 

“At least God had granted me this one small mercy,” Jean Valjean said with a sad smile, “the poor wretch is not awake to make things difficult.”

Then Javert coughed. His eyes slowly fluttered open.

Jean Valjean dropped his hands to his sides. He gently closed his eyes. He raised his head. He rubbed his forehead with both hands, and took a long, slow, deep, pained, breath. 

“Ah,” Jean Valjean said in an indescribable tone of voice.

Javert slowly regained consciousness, squinting under the lamplight like a newborn puppy. He stared at his surroundings with a look of utter incomprehension, and then began sniffing at the air with his bulldog-like snub nose, as if trying to determine his location by smell. His brows furrowed, as if he recognized a familiar scent; then he made a sound of disgust, as if he smelled the lingering stench of sewage. He slowly adjusted to the light and opened his eyes wider. 

At last, he recognized Jean Valjean.

“Oh,” Javert said, dropping his eyelids, his voice barely above a whisper. “Of course.”

Another wave of exhaustion swept over Jean Valjean. His vision darkened, and he dug his nails into his palms to prevent himself from collapsing into unconsciousness. He wanted this to be over— oh God, how Javert might delay things now that he was awake! That annoying man! He might not get to rest for days yet! He would be trapped out here, wounded and in agony, with this strange stubborn argumentative bulldog of a man who always acted so bizarrely!  That this should happen to him, tonight, after all that he had already suffered! After all the good he had already done for that ninny Marius!

Why was that not enough? God, what would be enough? After all that he had suffered in prison, after all that he had suffered in Montreuil-Sur-Mer, after the eternity of these last few days, after all that he had done at the barricades, after all the help he had given those rebels, after dragging that pedantic boy though the endless sewers so that he could steal all that remained of his own happiness, after losing Cosette, after losing everything, after growing old without ever having been young, after suffering every agony a man could suffer without being permitted to have any of the joys that made them bearable, after accepting he was not permitted to have any of those joys, after surrendering, after recognizing that all was over for him, after agreeing to be arrested, after turning himself in, after diving into the rapids of the Seine to rescue a man who who would take whatever he had left— why was that not enough?  What else would he have to do? How much more should he have to bear?  That he should have to face a stubborn unreasonable man like Javert again, and argue with him, while he was so exhausted he could hardly think! That God should test him like this—! It was hard, it was very hard —

Jean Valjean looked up at the starless sky, pressed his hands together, and silently prayed that Javert would miraculously cooperate with him in a way that he never had before and that this would all be over quickly. 

Javert slowly struggled up onto his elbows, then winced in pain.

He looked down at his chest and saw his coat buttons were all undone. He muttered a curse under his breath, and began to mechanically button them all back up. 

Jean Valjean sighed.

“I suppose this is hell— or heaven!” Javert grumbled, without looking up from the buttons. “Apparently there’s no difference in this country…”

“This is a quai near the Pont Au Change,” Jean Valjean said in the infinitely patient voice he usually reserved for talking to small children.

“So I’m not dead yet,” Javert scoffed. “A pity!”

Jean Valjean stared at him, exhausted. 

Javert looked up and stared back, exhausted. 

They continued staring at each other, both of them in too much pain to speak. 

Then Javert raised his head, which appeared to take all of his energy; he wore the weary expression of a criminal in the presence of his judge. After a few moments he finally spoke. 

“Well,” Javert said tiredly. His words were slurred, as if he were drunk with fatigue. “You ought to finish it. Execute me.”

“Ah,” Jean Valjean said tiredly, his words also slurred. “No.”

“Come, come, now I’ve thought about it,” Javert said with an exhausted hand gesture, as if thinking was something very rare and special for him. “I ought to have gotten myself executed by force. That’s what ought to have happened. Here, that’s —that’s how it is.”

“You are being very odd,” Jean Valjean said. 

“I can tell you where to hide the body,” Javert offered helpfully. “I know where the police don’t look.” 

“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary,” Jean Valjean said politely, rubbing his temples and wondering whether this odd conversation was a dream. 

“Come-- if you execute me now, I can swear that I won’t tell anyone you did it!”

Jean Valjean frowned at him. 

Javert grinned.  

Jean Valjean continued frowning at him. 

Javert grinned wider, a horrible savage smile that showed all of his canine-like teeth and gums.

“Ah,” Jean Valjean said. “No, that would — no. Grant me this one favor. For all your faults you have always been an honest man, so I shall be honest with you. We do not have much time. You must—“

“I can always finish it myself,” Javert said, intent on his one idea. He attempted to gesture with his hand, but then grew tired and let it drop uselessly to the ground. “But it’s less honorable, if— resignation can be honorable, so execution is better. You see how it all is—“

Jean Valjean did not see how it all was. He could hardly hear what Javert was saying and did not understand anything he heard. His vision darkened, heart began to race, and the pain in his leg became more intense. Beads of perspiration began to trickle down his forehead. His thoughts grew more confused; they assumed the stupefied quality of despair.

He saw Javert slowly drag himself on his elbows a few inches back towards the river. 

“No,” Jean Valjean said, struggling to recall how to say words.

“I’ve thought about it,” Javert said.

“You must…think of something else.” 

“There are too many things in this world.” 

“Ah, yes,” Jean Valjean said in a voice that was almost a sob. “There are far too many things.”

He reached out and gently touched Javert’s hand.  

Javert recoiled wildly, drawing his hand back. Even his whiskers seemed to bristle, like a dog’s fur standing on end. He stared at his hand, as if stupefied that it had not burst into flames– then stared at Jean Valjean, trembling like a cornered animal.

Jean Valjean met Javert’s gaze. He looked deeply into his eyes, as if trying to plunge into the depths of his conscience and speak to him there. Javert’s eyes were wide and candid; it seemed that all of his conscience was easily visible in them; he felt that he could read the man’s very thoughts; it appeared as if there was nothing in his soul that was not also on his face. 

Jean Valjean saw that Javert was utterly terrified of him.

He was too exhausted to know how this made him feel. 

“Here, come,” Jean Valjean said, holding Javert’s gaze and cautiously extending his hand as if he were attempting to tame a feral animal. “Have no more fear of me than I have of you.”

“Hm!” Javert said, shuddering and dragging himself a few inches farther away. 

“You will come with me,” Jean Valjean said in a grave, firm voice.  “We will take you to— wherever is the best place for you, poor thing.”

Javert scowled, cursed, and muttered something about hating kindness. Jean Valjean stared at him in mingled annoyance and concern. He did not know if this was Javert’s usual unreasonable behavior or if he had suffered a head injury. 

 “Poor thing,” Jean Valjean thought inwardly. “It is not its fault.”

“That’s an order, is it,” Javert growled, casting his eyes down like an inferior in the presence of his supervisor.  “It’s an order to come with you.” 

“It is.”

“You say that I have to come with you.”

“You do.”

“I’m not permitted to—“ he mimed slitting his throat.

“You are not.”

“Well then, Monsieur,” Javert grumbled in mock-sarcasm that did not sound sarcastic at all, “I suppose I can’t refuse.”

“What a very odd creature,” Jean Valjean said distantly, almost to himself. He was nearly faint with pain. He wanted this to be over. He wanted everything to be over. He did not know what this indescribably bizarre man wanted from him. 

“Can you stand?” he asked. “Or shall I carry—?”

“I can stand!” Javert snarled. He attempted to stand, staggered to his feet, whimpered in agony, and instantly fell flat on his face.

Jean Valjean, still kneeling, stared at him. Then he sighed deeply and buried his face in his hands, stifling a sob. 

“You ought to stop this absurdity,” Javert said into the ground, his voice muffled by the pavement. “It’s only right. It’s only just, you see. This is all false kindness! Or I thought it was, I don’t know what any of it is anymore. I hate kindness. It’s horrible. It enrages me. You know, when a dog bites— what does a reasonable man do? He isn’t kind, I tell you! He puts the dog down, is what he does. That is the sort of thing that must be done in this world.”

“Is it?” Jean Valjean asked, in far too much pain to comprehend anything Javert had said.

Javert was silent for a long time. 

“I don’t know,” Javert said despairingly.

Jean Valjean was struck by a sudden wave of pain from his leg. He made a strangled sound of agony and nearly collapsed, his vision darkening. His mind had lost its ability to retain thoughts; they passed over him like waves, and all he felt was anguish.

“Time is running short, Javert,” he said, struggling to keep his voice even, polite, and patient. “You may dispose of me how you will. It makes no difference to me. You know I have no intention of escaping you. I did not give you my address with the intent of escape. But grant me this favor; let me carry you—”

“Come, he still talks of prison!” Javert barked at the ground. “Damned saint!”

Javert crawled over to the wall of the quai, muttering curses, and began to use the wall to fight his way to a standing position. 

Jean Valjean did not move. He could not. He was overpowered by pain and exhaustion, and his body refused to obey him.

“I cannot endure this,” he said to himself. “I’ve finally broken. This– this is more than I can bear.”

Javert did not hear him.  

“They always make the walls too slippery by these damned quais,” Javert said, struggling for purchase against the wall. 

Jean Valjean attempted to move, but his fatigue was too great. It did not matter if he wanted to stand and help Javert— he could not. His limbs would not allow him to do it. His body was utterly broken. It was impossible.

He was filled with joy. 

It was the joy he had felt when his cart had broken on the way to Arras. He was done. He was finished. It was over. At last, at last, this hellish trial was over. 

He had done all he could, but it was no longer within his power; it was no longer his fault; it was out of his hands, and he could rest. All was over for him. He was forced to rest.

“You must know that’s all over— I’ve resigned!” Javert was barking, although Valjean hardly heard him.  “Now here, you see, something bars the way…”

“I cannot continue,” Jean Valjean quietly said to himself, nearly weeping with relief.  He could not move. “I cannot.” 

“…a horrible world this is, where magistrates are down below and convicts are on high! Where the police are the servants of— jumble and confusion! A government of anarchy!  I ought to be punished, and I can’t be part of it...!“ 

Javert continued rambling incoherently. Jean Valjean did not catch his words, but only the vague outlines of them. He was so overwhelmed with relief that the rush of the river sounded comforting, and even Javert’s curses sounded like music. 

He collapsed. The world became dark and muffled around him. He settled into that darkness with a serene smile, and prayed that he would sleep forever. 

Javert was determined not to do any more thinking. 

He had finished with all that— with thinking. Thought was useless and a fatigue; he’d made his decision. Before throwing himself into the river Javert had been forced to think and while thinking he had decided on two things: 

Jean Valjean should be alive, and free, at Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7.

He, Javert, should be dead. 

 Those were the only two things he knew for certain in this repugnant unreasonable world. That was the path he had chosen, and all he needed to do was ensure it was followed. He would be dead shortly, but the road to his death was straight. At last there was one straight track again. Whenever his mind tried to force him to think, he shut his eyes and calmly repeated the two simple points he had decided on: Jean Valjean should be alive and free at Rue de l’Homme Armé No. 7, and he, Javert, should be dead. There was no need to “think” about anything anymore. 

Jean Valjean had attempted to throw things into confusion; of course he had. That was the sort of thing that happened in this horrible country, as Javert was beginning to understand. Of course that hideous angel had dragged Javert from the river and ordered him to stay out of it. 

Javert could not disobey his order. Jean Valjean was an authority in this world, apparently— this was a world where saints were convicts and convicts were saints, a world where where a bagnard with a green cap could also have a halo on his brow and a holy scepter in his hand — and Javert would never disobey an authority. He could not remember a time before obedience had been beaten into him. He did not understand, but he knew that his duty was to obey his superiors regardless of whether he understood. It was not his place to argue or find fault. His place was to obey. Javert was a well-trained dog. 

But even if he could not disobey an authority, he could remind an authority of the way things were. He could bow his head and follow their orders for the moment, but remind them of the things they ought to know and the punishments they ought to give. 

Right now he was reminding Jean Valjean that he should be killed. 

He was explaining things very logically and rationally. It was all perfectly comprehensible. Soon that man would remember why Javert needed to be dead, why it was right, and then he would stop ordering him not to kill himself. 

Perhaps, he hoped, Jean Valjean might even execute him! How fitting that would be! How Javert would deserve it! How he would submit to it, as perfectly and obediently as a man should submit to his just punishment! How right it would be! There was nothing more just! Surely that convict must see that! And then Jean Valjean would return to Rue de l’Homme Armé No. 7 with blood on his monstrous holy hands, and Javert would be rotting in some shameful ditch, and everything between them would be as it should.

“And then, see,” Javert said between labored breaths as he finished another line of thought, one of his hands propping him up against the wall of the quai and the other twined mechanically in his whiskers, “As I’m your damned accomplice now, apparently, as I’ve sunk to that… or risen to it, it’s all the same in this country!… I’ll warn you the, the gendarmes are looking for insurgents. Rebels and barricades…such things there are in this world…!”

Javert forgot how he was going to end the sentence and made a tired gesture with one hand. He noticed that forming words was more of an effort than usual— it likely had something to do with “fatigue” or “agony”— but he was certain it did not affect his speech.  

“And this is the right thing to do, apparently,” he said mockingly. “The ‘right thing to do’ is to help criminals rebel against the government– ha!”

He struck the wall in frustration and reflected on how the world was an awful place where all the morally correct things to do were also terrible. This was why he was turning in his resignation.

“And you were at the barricades– that’s a crime, rebellion! If you don’t want to be shot dead in the street, hurry along. They patrol this area. You’ll be arrested by— another man! Not me, hear. Another man!”

He jabbed his finger in Jean Valjean’s direction.

“So move along now, move along, that’s my damned criminal advice for you,” he said. “Valjean?”

He noticed that Jean Valjean had collapsed onto the pavement and lay there unmoving. 

“Valjean?” He repeated.

A breath of wind from the river stirred Jean Valjean’s white hair. Otherwise, he did not move.

“Valjean!” Javert repeated in a worried snarl. “Or Fauchelevent, or Madeleine, or whatever absurdity—! ”

A sudden horror seized him. 

He reminded himself of the two decisions he had come to that night, the decisions he had repeated to himself like a mantra: that Jean Valjean should be alive and free at Rue de l’Homme Armé No. 7, and that he, Javert, should be dead. 

What if Jean Valjean were to die?

And what if he were to die without rescinding his order for Javert to stay alive? 

“I won’t think about it!” Javert barked, covering his ears with his hands, “because he won’t!”

He staggered towards Jean Valjean, seized with a sudden energy. If Javert had been attempting to turn in his resignation to God, then God had soundly rejected it; he was in agony, but he could still walk. 

He stood next to Jean Valjean’s body. He was alive. He was alive because he had to be. It was decided. He was not allowed to be dead; it simply could not be allowed to happen. He would not think about that. 

Yet it was strange to see the man who had loomed so large in his thoughts suddenly lying helpless at his feet. 

For decades Jean Valjean had been no more than any other criminal to him. Then, at the barricades, he had suddenly revealed himself to be— he did not know what he was! He was a divine monstrosity beyond Javert’s comprehension, a god hiding in the clothes of a convict, Jesus Christ in a green cap, a hideous angel with a fiery sword and a thousand eyes that could crush him with a glance and yet gently told him “be not afraid” and “you are free.” 

Now he looked disturbingly human. His white hair clung to his weatherbeaten face. His shirt, which had probably been white before he’d dragged it through the sewers, was torn— through the holes Javert could see the tangled outlines of scars on his back. Jean Valjean’s hands shivered against the stone; for such broad strong hands, they seemed strangely fragile. Every aspect of him breathed weariness and agony. He looked like any of the other criminals at Toulon, and any of the corpses that Javert had seen dragged out of the nets of Saint-Cloud—

“No thinking!” Javert growled, catching himself. “I’ve done my thinking! It’s done!”

Javert gently prodded Jean Valjean’s shoulder with the toe of his boot. Jean Valjean did not react, so he prodded him again. Jean Valjean remained still. Javert’s hands began trembling violently, he stammered out a curse, he refused to think about the possibility that he would not wake up, and then he prodded him again. 

At last, Jean Valjean’s eyes slowly opened. He moved his head, looked up at Javert… and then dropped his head back on the ground with a muffled groan of pain. 

“Your address is Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7,” Javert said. 

Jean Valjean babbled something incoherent.

“It is within walking distance!”

Jean Valjean babbled again. 

“It is within dragging distance too, if necessary!”

Javert stooped and, with enormous effort, managed to drape Jean Valjean’s arm over his shoulder and drag the man to his feet. One of his legs was apparently broken, he noticed; so Jean Valjean stood on his other one, leaning most of his weight on Javert like a crutch, the bad leg dragging uselessly behind him. 

It was horribly unpleasant. Jean Valjean was heavy. His white hair brushed against Javert’s cheek and sideburns, making him flinch; he was cold and dripping with grime and river water. He stank strongly of sewage.

Javert cursed; he hated that he lived in a horrible absurd country where saints could smell like sewage. A fine world this was! This was why he was turning in his resignation.

“Now, come along!” Javert said, and began to slowly help Jean Valjean stagger forward. Jean Valjean murmured something incoherent, but slowly took an awkward one-legged step.

“Here, we’re going. Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7. Before you get arrested. Yes?”

Jean Valjean sighed– an agonized, broken, hopeless sound. Then he murmured something that seemed like agreement, and nodded his head. 

For a moment Javert hesitated.

He reminded himself that the police and gendarmes were still prowling the streets. It would not be easy for him to play this criminal’s accomplice, for him to hide this insurgent convict from the eyes of the government, for two men who were owned by the law to try setting themselves above the law. Their injuries and ragged clothing made them suspicious, and they would be taken for vagrants if they weren’t taken for rebels. It was unlikely that he would get Jean Valjean back to Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7 without being stopped by an agent of the authorities. Then they would both be found out, and taken to prison! Then the law would reassert its rights, crime would be punished, insubordination would be violently extinguished, all this rebellion would be crushed as surely as the rebellion of the previous days had been crushed—

“I won’t think about that!” Javert snarled. “No more ‘thinking!’ The first thing is that Jean Valjean will be alive, and free, at Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7. The second thing is that I will be dead by morning. He’ll be put back where he’s supposed to be, and if anything stands in his way—“

Jean Valjean staggered forward and Javert caught him. 

“Well, he’s got a guard dog!” 

He let out another string of curses, and slowly helped Jean Valjean stumble forward. 

Chapter Text

“The dead are not subjected to surveillance. They are supposed to rot in peace. Death is the same thing as pardon.”

– Jean Valjean, Les Misérables, Volume 5 Book 7 Chapter 1,  Hapgood Translation

“Legally, death puts an end to pursuit.”

— Javert, Les Misérables, Volume 5 Book 4 Chapter 1, Hapgood Translation 

After the National Guard successfully suppresses a rebellion, there is relief among the ruling class; they exhale and breathe freely again; and then, they turn from crushing those who attack to crushing those who flee. They turn from attacking barricades to attacking safehouses.

The police are sent out in full force. The military occupies the city. Spies hunt for the dens of rebels, like hunting dogs for the dens of foxes. All the government’s forces fly out in pursuit of one object: that object is not the defeat of its enemies, as they have already been defeated; it pursues their annihilation. 

It is not enough for a barricade to fall, as the men who built the barricades must be executed; it is not enough for the men to be executed, as their ideas must be crushed with them. It is not a victory until the opponent is utterly extinguished. 

But men are harder to destroy than a barricade, and ideas are harder to kill than men.  

No government has ever succeeded in entirely annihilating their opposition. The Republic has its secret passages, its hideouts, its safehouses, its allies, its friends who are willing to say to the police: “no, so-and-so was certainly not at the barricades at all!” It has sympathizers who will lead its wounded to safety, and doctors who will tend to injuries without speaking to the police. Paris is a labyrinth, and all those persecuted by the law can find innumerable ways to escape into its depths. 

Even so, the aftermath of a defeated rebellion is a dark and mournful period. 

 A pall falls over Paris. These weeks are a funeral for a lost future. The heaps of paving stones, not yet restored to their places, appear like the headstones of unsettled graves. The graffiti on the walls— “Vivent Les Peuples, Vive Lamarque, Vive la République,”— are epitaphs for progress halted in its tracks.

The fighting continues amidst this funeral but its character is changed. The open violence of the National Guard is replaced by the furtive violence of the police spy. The heat of battle is replaced by the slow dread of legal investigation and court trials. The deaths of rebels in broad daylight and full view of the public are replaced by silent hidden deaths behind bars. The prisoner of war becomes the galley slave. Execution by musket-shot and cannon fire is replaced with execution by imprisonment and guillotine. 

And when the people of a country are surrounded by death on all sides, they are inevitably also surrounded by stories of ghosts. The National Guard was particularly uneasy. A ghost can be the manifestation of a guilty conscience.  

There is an ancient superstition, among certain members of the military, that if a man is out too late in the nights after a revolution he inevitably encounters phantoms. The ghosts of soldiers wander the roads, take aim, make salutes, follow orders, and hunt for dissidents. The ghosts of rebels tear through the streets, blazing with a dark fire, eyes flashing, hair floating, ripping up paving stones and flying a red flag.

These phantoms may not even be aware they are dead. 

The National Guard was fully mobilized; the military ordered its men to assist with crushing the rebellion; the soldiers had orders to stop and search anyone suspicious. 

Lieutenant Théodule Gillenormand found this tiring. 

He was a lancer. He was meant to sit upon a great horse and lead the cavalry against foreign enemies. He was built to ride at the forefront of parades, in his glorious uniform, with his girlish wasp-waist, and his blonde hair done neatly in the modern fashion, and his sword trailing victoriously, and his blue eyes flashing at the ladies, and his mustache waxed; he was meant, in short, to partake in all the glory and pageantry of war, and not in the parts that were ugly and cumbersome. 

Théodule had a profound respect for the military, but he only truly valued two things: having finery and looking pretty. He succeeded at these things very well. 

Yet because his regiment was in Paris he had received orders, bafflingly enough, to get involved with quelling some unexpected riot or other. He had fortunately avoided the front lines; “lancers would be of little use there, without our horses,” he told the foot soldiers who grumbled at their regiment’s cowardice. Théodule’s real concern was how the gunpowder stained his uniform and made his mustache droop, but it really was true that a man on horseback would’ve been worse than useless in such narrow streets, against such things as barricades.

But then, once all the barricades had been swept off, there came the work of “restoring order.” There were apparently very few men to spare, and even lancers were ordered to play police spies. They were to hunt for rebels who escaped the cannonfire, stopping and searching any persons who looked suspicious.

Lancers did not have much training in this. However, they did have something far more valuable, which was loyalty to the monarchy. In a time when servants of the government often defected to stand by the enemy, Théodule’s regiment was trusted to be faithful to King Louis-Philippe.   

So lancers on horseback were ordered to patrol the large open streets and ensure no crowds gathered to foment more unrest. In addition to stopping and searching suspicious persons, they were to stop any man who appeared to be making some grand speech to rally a group, to interrupt gatherings of protestors or mourners or who-knows-what-all, to threaten any smatterings of people who even stepped near the husks of the abandoned barricades; they were, in summary, to prevent even a handful of angry people ever getting themselves in one place. The lancers were given full authorization to charge their great horses into mobs of people to make them disperse.

However, it was thought that things would not need to come to that. The government believed that simply having lancers patrolling these areas would be enough to frighten people out of attempting to come together. It was believed that a tall handsome soldier, on a majestic white horse, glittering with medals, with a gun and a sword at his side, parading through the streets like a figure from a great Classical painting, would remind citizens of the government’s might and power.  

 Théodule had been ordered to patrol the area around the Pont au Change.

“Capital!” He muttered. “It seems a sleepy place. I shall be able to parade to and fro, without interruption, and make a great show.”

He arrived on his magnificent white horse— a beautiful stallion, with a long flowing mane that was carefully brushed, a wondrous silvery coat, a strong body with straining muscles, polished hooves, ornate studded reins, and every glittering accoutrement and decoration he could afford to lavish on him.  Théodule had given this stallion the most noble and worthy name he could think of, which was “Alfred.”

Alfred, like Théodule, was very pretty and not very given to deep thought. He dutifully trotted back and forth. 

For hours Théodule rode up and down along the length of the esplanade, twirling his mustache in the debonair manner he had. Occasionally he dutifully accosted some beggars, and made a pretense of having them turn out their pockets, though he did not care enough to look too closely. 

He had no excessive taste for this kind of police work, but he had his orders, and he was paid to follow them. 

He was assigned to patrol this area until his relief arrived at two o’clock in the morning. As the night grew deeper, there were no longer any chance passersby. The streets became empty and silent as a tomb. The funereal pall that had settled over Paris in the aftermath of the failed rebellion seemed to grow thicker. 

If the government’s goal was to prevent crowds from forming, they succeeded very well; Théodule was perceived as the threat the government intended him to be. By the time the last light vanished from the sky all the citizens of Paris had barricaded themselves indoors.

It was a dull thing to parade without an audience. 

“To think they are having me keep up this farce until two in the morning,” Théodule said. “There is not a soul awake tonight. The rebels have all gone back underground, or they are captured. It really is a bore.”   

At one o’ clock he rode his horse away from the Pont Au Change, down the Rue de la Verrerie, simply because it was something to do. However there had been some fighting in the area on the fifth, and the paving stones were so torn up it was treacherous to ride on; after a long time he gave up and turned back towards the Place du Châtelet.

“Bother all of this,” he muttered. “Tomorrow I will buy myself a new hat.”

As he rode back towards the Seine, he imagined what sort of hat he would purchase, and that perhaps he would also purchase a new coat— and perhaps some new shoes, too, if he could afford such an extravagance. He was so lost in dreams of haberdashery, and a large magnificent frock coat with three collars, and buttons of gold and silver, that he almost did not see the shadowy figures out of the corner of his eye.

He looked over at a huddle of buildings just in time to see the mysterious shadowy figures enter a narrow alleyway.

“Hey, what is this?” he said, reining in his horse. “I suppose it’s my duty to go and see about it.”

And he rode Alfred up to the entrance of the alley. It gaped between the tall buildings like a large horrible toothless mouth.

It is difficult, in these modern days, to truly remember the darkness of the alleys and side streets of 1832. This was before gas lanterns cast their bright lights into every single nook and corner, before the streets were thrown into garish light at all hours. The Old City was a place of shadow, where men could vanish into the night; it was filled by a darkness that confounded the police, that concealed the murderer and sheltered the rebel. Criminals of all types threw themselves into this shadow as into a river. They allowed themselves to be swallowed up and were lost— lost, at any rate, to the official records of the police. 

The profound darkness and solitude of this narrow side street might have provoked, in another man, some sort of solemn meditation and wariness of the horrors that could conceal themselves within it. 

Théodule was not that man. He made a habit of never thinking deeply about anything. All he noticed was that the side-street was very dark, and very poor. He also noticed that it had been affected by the fighting of the past few days; there were heaps of paving stones kicked up here and there. It was no place to take a horse, unless one wanted to break its knees.

He dismounted and tied Alfred to a nearby post. That was when he noticed his horse seemed unsettled by the alleyway. He whinnied nervously, and shook his great mane, and appeared to shrink away from the darkness as if he instinctively sensed the presence of a predator.

“Here,” Théodule said, “I will only be gone for a moment. This shall be over with quickly.”

He walked into the alley. 

There was, as we have mentioned, too little light to see by. The buildings, tall and narrow and stark, blocked out what light might have been given by the moon. There were no stars. A single lamp was strung in between the black buildings, and it produced only the smallest circle of light. 

However, it was clear that some large shadow was moving down the narrow street. Théodule followed, at a distance.

Was this shadow a man? No. Was it two men, walking together? That seemed more likely, from the shape of it. It was too dark to see for certain.

 But why should these two men be out so late at night, in such a deserted spot, after such an event as a rebellion? And— the thought suddenly occurred to him—if they were simple criminals then why did they walk so boldly and heedlessly near the police station-house at the Place du Châtelet, when all Paris knew that the government’s forces were currently out in their full might?

Théodule was not poetic or imaginative. Yet as he looked at this mysterious shadow, a strange chill passed over him, and he shuddered. He recognized within it the shroud of the uncanny. He wondered what it was that he was actually following, and whether he really ought to draw its attention.

There was something horrible and unnatural about its movements. The shadow did not walk; it shambled, with a slow jerking pace, like a piece of machinery that had broken, or clockwork that had run down. As Théodule stared deeply at it he thought he could vaguely see something that almost resembled a face, which was hideous; and he thought he could hear something that almost resembled a voice, which was monstrous. He fancied he heard fragments of things that almost sounded like words, and of curses, and of faint gasps of agony, and yet they did not sound like the sort of sounds humans would produce. 

It was as if all the immense obscurity of the night had been condensed into this unknown being. It had the air of a two-headed devil that had just returned from hell.

Certainly, this was the sort of suspicious thing he was ordered to investigate, he told himself. Certainly it was a simple matter. Certainly he had done right by dismounting his horse to follow them into the dark. Certainly these were simply two drunken rebels, whom it was necessary to stop, to search, to pinion, to restrain, to arrest. His orders demanded so; it was his duty; then afterwards he would buy his new hat. And what a lovely hat it would be! And perhaps if he arrested some very dangerous fellow, they would lavish him with a great sparkling medal that he could wear on his chest, and show to ladies, and polish very neatly until it shone. So he must accost these persons.

He halted. He found himself rooted to the spot. 

Théodule was a man of courage. However, he had the courage of the soldier— that is, to say, he had the courage of a man who fights by daylight, on horseback, side by side with his compatriots,  and advances on a known enemy at a time agreed upon in advance. He had not yet developed the courage of the assassin, which consists of blind violence alone in the dark.     

“Bosh!” Théodule said to himself. “So these are two beggars or vagabonds out tonight, perhaps, and I shall have to deal with them. That is all. A dull affair.”

Yet he was put out of countenance by the shadow, as it slowly shambled through the black street. There really was something inexplicably spectral and demonic about this apparition, appearing as it did in such an abandoned road, among the rubble of abandoned barricades, when Théodule had not seen another living being in nearly an hour.

He was not a superstitious man —save for the superstitions of the military. It was possible that even he, as frivolous and vain as he was, had become unsettled by the violence of the past days, and was affected by the funereal air that had fallen over Paris. He recalled the whispered legends among his fellow lancers that, after failed rebellions, the phantoms of combatants would appear in the streets to continue the battle. He recalled rumors of National Guardsmen dying alone in their homes, when they thought the fighting was over; he recalled rumors that the coroners could find no wounds on them, as if they had simply died of terror. 

Phantoms, unlike men, did not fear muskets. 

Still Théodule persisted, as was his duty. He had orders to follow.

He slowly walked deeper into the alley, as far as he dared; that is, to the very end of the weak circle of light from the hanging lamp. For the first time all night, he began to seriously consider which weapon he should use, and whether a sword would be better for close combat. He decided to leave his sword at his side and hold up his musket instead, as it seemed more threatening. The most important thing was to put on a great show of force, and a musket was better for show. 

And so he stood up straight under the narrow circle of lamplight and held his musket in his hands, proudly and openly, so that the shadow could see it. He also hoped it would see the sword that glittered at his side. If it were some pair of rebels, they would know not to try any nonsense. 

“Good evening,” he said. 

The shadow halted.

Then it slowly turned to face him. 

It was in the darkness beneath an awning, and seemed to melt into that darkness utterly. It was difficult to tell where the figures ended and the empty darkness began. Théodule saw that the shadow had two heads; one of them was hideous, and the other was horrible. 

So the shadow was only two men— one of them wounded and leaning on the other? It must be. But in the darkness they look conjoined. And something about their limbs seemed off, as if they had been broken so far they bent in the wrong directions. 

It remained silent, as if looking at him and considering him.

“Good evening,” Théodule repeated again, after a long silence. 

“Good …evening,” the shadow at last replied. The voice did not sound human. It was a sort of horrible savage rasp, that resembled the demonic growl of a ghoul or the snarl of a dying dog. 

And there was no fear in its voice. It was not afraid of his musket.

Théodule adjusted his musket again, gesturing with it, hoping to give the shadowy figures a bit of a fright— perhaps send them running, scare them enough that he could see them properly.  He noticed that he had entirely forgotten the script he was supposed to use with malefactors.  

He peered deeply at it– it, or them?-- and caught a sudden glint of light off the eyes of one of the shadowy figures. It was a savage furious light. It was the light in the eyes of a guard dog that senses a threat. It was the light flashing in the eyes of a wolf beneath the shadows of the forest as it prepares to pounce on the hunter.  

Théodule reflected, for the first time, on the solitude of the spot. These sorts of aimless side streets were Paris’s version of a wilderness, regardless of how close they were to a police station-house. If there were any place for a servant of the government to be ambushed by the rebels of the wild, for a servant of the King to be torn to pieces by the wolves of the Republic, it was in a narrow alley such as this. 

And if it did come to fighting— he would likely win, but it might spoil his uniform. This thought affected him deeply.

“Come! I am a lieutenant lancer,” Théodule said, in a voice quite unlike his usual easygoing tone. He gestured with his musket. “And I am well-armed.”

The shadow seemed to snarl exhaustedly; it produced a long series of sounds that were probably meant to be words, but they blended together like the growl of a beast, and Théodule did not understand them. Then the shadow eyed him in silence. 

“Can you repeat that?” Théodule asked.

When the shadow spoke again, its voice was different. This time the voice was not at all like the snarl of a hellhound, but the infinitely weary cry of a ghost, which seemed to rise from fathomless depths: 

“Do as you will with me,” it sighed. Yet there was still no fear in its tone. It expressed only resignation, grief, and a fatigue so utterly profound it was indescribable.

In such a tone, “do as you will with me” seemed a sinister challenge, or a bitter curse. Cain might have said "do as you will with me" in the same way.  

After that voice finished, the snarling one began speaking again, but Théodule could not comprehend what it was saying, only that it sounded furious.

The lieutenant, now entirely disconcerted, aimed his musket at the shadowy figures. 

The shadows, undeterred, began to advance towards him. He heard the snarling voice begin to speak, and to say— 

Suddenly the bells of Notre Dame struck two. 

“What is it I am doing!” Théodule said suddenly, slapping his forehead, and ignoring the ‘words’ the shadow was saying. “It is now two o’clock— it is time for my relief to take over. This is not my duty anymore. Tomorrow morning I will wake up early to buy my hat, a fine evening hat made of silk, and that is all that matters. That is good, that is capital. I will leave someone else to deal with the rest of this nonsense.”

The shadow’s voices said something incoherent that he did not listen to. 

“The deuce!” Théodule muttered, as he took this opportunity to make a retreat. “That vagabond beggar creature, or creatures — it is a problem for another man. For whoever they send out after me. Really, it is their fault for sending a lancer to do the work of a police spy!” 

He untied Alfred from the post, mounted him, and then rode away (perhaps a little more quickly than was warranted) in the direction of his barracks, twirling his well-curled mustache into a hook. 

The shadowy figures were left alone in the dark side street. 

“That ninny of a lieutenant!” Javert barked, staggering forward like a dog pulling at the end of its leash. “He was probably frightened.”

“Ah,” Jean Valjean said as he swayed against him. Javert no longer cringed at his touch.

They had been walking for— Javert had lost his ability to comprehend time; it seemed they had been walking endlessly, and that ‘time’ was another one of those lies which he once believed in, that had been proven false; time was another solid foundation which had abruptly given away, because of course it was, because of course there was nothing in which anyone could trust. At any rate they had been walking long enough that he was accustomed to Jean Valjean’s weight.

Despite all the time, they had not gotten far. Jean Valjean’s injured leg meant that they could only take short, awkward steps, and Javert was forced to assist him over the smallest of obstacles— a loose paving stone, a curb, a fragment of debris. If Javert permitted himself to think about it, he might have compared it to the way Jean Valjean had led him to his ‘execution’ in the alley of the Mondetour barricade, when his limbs were bound so tightly he could hardly walk; he might have reflected on how their roles had reversed, and have drawn some conclusion or other. He did not permit himself to think about it. He was outraged that he had even allowed himself to notice the similarity at all. 

There were only two things he was permitted to think, only two certainties that existed: by morning Jean Valjean should be returned to Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7, and he, Javert, should be dead.  

He no longer thought about the agony of his own body– “I will not be using it for much longer,” he sometimes muttered. Yet he recognized that he was unraveling. His brain was bursting beneath the pressure of the incontestable incomprehensibility that was weighing down on him, he spoke aloud without meaning to and said nonsense, he doubled over in pain involuntarily, the world was unsteady and monstrous all about him, his vision darkened and he would stagger along as if in a dream, and etc etc etc, all these ridiculous useless absurdities. He acknowledged them but did not dwell on them. He had his burden, his duty, his last trial before he was permitted to turn in his resignation, his last act of servitude that would end by finally permitting him the joy of a righteous execution. Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7– that was all there was. 

“Well, then, so now we have seen the dolts they are making into lieutenants,” Javert growled, “so these are the ‘great men’ they permit to eat the government’s bread!”

“Oh,” Jean Valjean said. 

 “What can one trust? There is nothing that can be agreed upon anymore! If one cannot even trust a bourgeois in such a uniform, and who the government calls a lieutenant, to behave properly! If one cannot trust a man in such a splendid coat! This,” he said in a low tone, grunting in pain as he struggled to help Jean Valjean take another step, “this is why I’m turning in my resignation.”

“Ah,” Jean Valjean said indifferently.

“If he had stayed and searched us, as was his duty,  I would’ve explained matters further,” he said haughtily. “He would not permit me to explain. If he had stayed, you would’ve seen how well I would have explained! I would have— ‘Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7.’ That is what there is. That is all there is. It is useless to think further. It is perfectly simple.”

“Oh,” Jean Valjean said.

“But I should have expected no better, as this is a false country— I have been compelled to see its falsehoods, to see that all of society and law and government and legislation and magistracy and sovereign authority and civil service and penal codes and all the dogmas on which rest political and civil security, can apparently only be summed up as a great farce someone is playing,” Javert’s words began to blend together into an utterly incoherent snarl of rage, “it is all deceit, deceit from on high, from the very forces ‘on high’ they tell you are incapable of deceit, they lie to their servants, so that their servants believe themselves honest when they are simply party to a great lie—and then they put their empty-headed imps of dandies into the uniforms of lieutenants, and they put their saints in the green caps of galley-slaves and brand them ‘forced labor for life,’ and they trick their honest servants into crime by dressing up the true authorities in the costumes of the false, and the false authorities in the costumes of the true! If there is any ‘true’ authority all! If one can trust in anything! If there is not a rift in the very firmament! If it is not all rubbish, waste, anarchy, a shapeless mass, ruin, chaos—If the very ground beneath our feet does not give way—!”

“Oh,” Jean Valjean said, stumbling on a loose paving stone; he lost his balance, clutched at Javert’s coat, and dragged him to the side. Javert staggered.  In a moment the two of them had fallen to the cobblestones in a confused painful tangle of limbs.

“Hmm!” Javert said, extricating himself from underneath Jean Valjean. Then he rose to his hands and knees and shook the sewer mire off himself, like a dog shaking the mud out of its fur. 

“This is why thought is useless,” Javert explained with a wag of his finger, haughtily dropping his eyelids. “See there! I was too busy thinking over some nonsense or other I have already settled, that I did not see the loose stone. You see what it is.”

“Ah,” Jean Valjean said, lying face-down on the pavement. 

“They always pave the streets badly in this country,” Javert added bitterly, “This is why I’m turning in my resignation!”

“Oh,” Jean Valjean said weakly. 

“Now come, get up, hurry along. Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7. Yes?”

Jean Valjean did not respond. 

“Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7?” Javert repeated.

Jean Valjean still did not respond. 

Javert started, and looked at Jean Valjean. He lay on the ground utterly silent and motionless. Javert could not tell if he was breathing. 

“Jean Valjean!”  

He did not not stir.

“Come—with this nonsense again!”  Javert  snarled, and half-pounced onto Jean Valjean. 

He placed his large hands on Jean Valjean’s shoulder, and rolled him over onto his back. Then he seized his wrists and felt for a pulse. His hands were icy cold. They were clammy and damp from the river. He did not know whether the pulse he detected was Jean Valjean’s or his own, and he could not determine if the shuddering was Jean Valjean’s or his own.

He looked at his face.  His eyes were shut, and his lips were parted; he bore an expression of utter unspeakable anguish. His skin was no longer pale, but livid; it appeared hardly lighter than his hair, which clung to his forehead, damp with river-water and with sweat. He seemed far older than he was. Javert listened closely for his breathing; and he heard that he was breathing, at the very least, but his respiration seemed weak to the point of extinction. 

“Rue de l'Homme Armé, No.7!” Javert growled to prevent himself from thinking. 

He put a question to himself: how was he to force Jean Valjean to live long enough to get him back to Rue de l'Homme Armé, No.7? And all that was not connected with this question vanished from his thoughts.

Javert had once more succeeded in reducing all that was complicated in the world down to a single straight line. There was only one duty, and it was to get this hideous angelic monster back to Rue de l'Homme Armé, No.7; there was only one path, and it was the road that would lead them there. There was no future after that to consider, for he, Javert, would be dead by morning.  

He had a great incomprehensible unknown hanging over his head, but he did not permit himself to think of it. He did not permit himself to reconsider or debate. He had done enough thinking and was finished with it forever. 

He had decided “he shall be left alive and free at that address” and he had decided “I shall turn in my resignation to God” —but then to his outrage those decisions had been revoked, and now he was furiously revoking the revocation. He was offended that things had come to such a pass. Some idiot had unwritten the correct ending and now his last implacable duty was to put things back where they rightfully belonged. 

This night, these hours, this road, this single straight path, this last duty before his execution,  that impossible man, that heartbeat which was so weak, those hands which were so cold, those breaths which were so faint, now made up all of existence for him. These small things constituted his entire universe. There was nothing beyond them on all sides but an endless yawning gulf. 

He looked at Jean Valjean’s unconscious face, the weak rise and fall of his chest, the trembling in his fingers, and he was filled with a strange fury. A tiger roared within him. He longed to fling himself upon Jean Valjean, seize him, sink his teeth into his neck as if devouring him, and drag him away like a wolf with its prey; that is, to say, Javert wished he possessed the strength to simply carry an unconscious Jean Valjean to Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7 in his arms. He did not. 

Instead he shook Jean Valjean’s shoulders vigorously, snarling in desperation.

After some minutes of shaking, Jean Valjean slowly opened his eyes. 

Javert released his grip. His hands trembled. He stared into Jean Valjean’s eyes as if trying to ransack his thoughts.

“Oh,” Jean Valjean said placidly. “I fell asleep.”

“Asleep!” Javert said. 

“Asleep,” Jean Valjean repeated distantly. He stared at Javert with the blank unreadable eyes of a corpse that had been forcefully pulled from its grave. It was the sort of gaze that expressed no emotion and forbade all questions.  

“Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7,” Javert said, sinking into his coat. “Then it will all be in order. You shall have me executed, if it pleases you, or I can do it myself. You shall give me orders. We shall go to Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7.”

“No.7,” Jean Valjean repeated. His eyes began to flutter shut.

“No, no, here —!” Javert grumbled. He clutched Jean Valjean, shook him, and hurriedly dragged both of them back to their feet so that Jean Valjean was once again standing while leaning on Javert’s shoulder. He was still able to stand, fortunately. Javert had him take a step, and he was still able to do that as well. But all of his limbs seemed stiffer, as if the rigidity of death was already falling upon him. 

“Oh,” Jean Valjean sighed in despair. “Oh.”

“It is not permitted,” Javert said. Even he did not know what he meant by this. 

“Ah,” Jean Valjean responded.

The two of them continued limping down the dark street, and the shadows of the night enveloped them like a shroud.

Chapter Text

“There is one improvement which these gentlemen of the police ought to make, and that is, to prevent prison contractors from wronging poor people. I will explain it to you, you see: you are earning twelve sous at shirt-making, the price falls to nine sous; and it is not enough to live on. Then one has to become whatever one can.”

-Fantine in Les Miserables Volume I Book 5 Chapter 13, Hapgood Translation

In the 19th century, France was at war with the world and with itself; war requires soldiers, and soldiers require uniforms. 

At the height of the Empire there were 413,000 soldiers in La Grande Armée, under Napoleon; that is, there must have been approximately 413,000 coats, 413,000 pairs of breeches, 413,00 coarse shirts, 413,000 shakos, and 413,000 pairs of boots.  There were 72,000 French soldiers at the battle of Waterloo, in 72,000 French uniforms; at the end of the battle, 25,000 uniforms would lie on corpses in the mud, to be looted by ragpickers.  

Who clothes an army?  

It was no small task to produce so many uniforms, in an age before sewing machines, when every garment was stitched by hand. To produce uniforms at such a scale required a massive labor force. The Empire in all its glory had set out to complete this task without emptying its coffers.

The first solution was to employ the cheap labor of the poorest seamstresses. Grisettes were given the raw materials and patterns; they sewed long into the night, squinting under the faint light of a dying candle; they stitched together copy after copy of the same cheap garment, until their fingers were pained and bleeding, and they had earned scarcely enough to pay for food and lodgings. 

The reader has already seen Fantine, and the living she was able to make off of her wages. 

But there is always more profit to be extracted, more product to be produced for less pay. A human being can be wrung out, and all of their blood can become money. The only thing more useful to a government than cheap labor is unpaid labor. 

Here, prisons offered a solution. 

Convicts cannot bargain. Prisoners do not need to be paid. Bagnards can be granted wages that are only nominal, a pittance intended to dismiss critics who claim prison labor is slave labor. A convict is forced to work; the government decides what his “wages” are and are not; what right does a criminal have to demand fair payment? 

It is not unusual to be caged and forced to sew clothing for your captors.

Cosette was awake. 

It was the 7th of June, 1832; the sun had not yet risen, and the sky was black; the bells of Notre Dame had just struck two in the morning. Cosette was sitting on the edge of the bed in her bare room in the Rue de l'Homme Armé, No. 7, staring at the moonlight against the window. 

She had been waiting for Marius to find her—“perhaps he shall be here at any moment, he is so clever!” she had told herself all day—but he had not found her. She had been waiting for her father to return—“he has been acting so strangely, more strangely than usual,” she thought—but he had not returned. 

Hours before, she had sworn that she heard someone enter the building. She had stood up; her heart had fluttered with hope with hope and relief. She told herself: “That will be Papa, the footsteps are too big for Marius, who moves like a ghost!” The heavy footfalls came up the stairs, and Cosette waited; but then, the heavy footfalls turned round, and retreated back down again. She waited in silence for a long time. The she became convinced she had dreamt the footsteps.

“How silly I am!” She said to herself. “Papa is simply off again— on one of his odd little ventures! Out in his wigs, giving money to people, and picking the locks on their doors so he can force more alms on them, most likely! Making his little Cosette worry, as he does! I am really very cross with him. Perhaps I can do a bit of reading, if I cannot sleep.”

She lit a candle and looked around, but saw only barren walls and empty furniture. It was at that moment she remembered that they had left the Rue Plumet in such haste that she had been unable to pack even her books. 

“Pough! This is what comes when a father wants to move so suddenly, without giving one’s daughter time to prepare things!” she said with bitterness. Then she was suddenly frightened at herself, and hesitated. For all of her life, she had never been in opposition to her father; their wills had always been similar, if not always the same. For the first time in his life, she began to think he was unfair to her. It was deeply unfamiliar to be angry with him. She was the kind of person who found it useless to be angry. 

“Well, I must find something to occupy me, if I cannot sleep,” she said, pacing her little room like a bird fluttering to and fro inside a tiny wire cage. 

Then she remembered what Toussaint had given her. Early in the afternoon, as Cosette had paced the house alone, confusedly listening to the sounds of gunfire from the “riots” in the distance, Toussaint had suggested she work on her embroidery. Cosette had explained that she left all of her tools “at home” and no longer had them. Then Toussaint revealed that she had brought along all their materials for knitting, “in case anyone needed them;” and she had given them to Cosette. 

“That is as fine a thing as any! It is better than staring out windows being tired and angry with people who will never tell you where they are going or what they are doing,” she said. 

Cosette walked over to her little nook by the window, placed the candlestick on the table, brought out the knitting needles and the yarn, and began to knit. 

Cosette did not actually like knitting, although she was good at it. It tended to bring up buried memories, like kicking up the silt in the bottom of a pond so that it obscured all the water. She only did it when she was in a pensive or anxious mood, and when she wanted to think about the kinds of things her father would never want to discuss with her.

“But it is something to do,” she said, “if one cannot sleep.”

Cosette’s memories  of her childhood were foggy, horrible, and confused—but as she knitted she always remembered that when she was a little girl, she used to knit stockings for other little girls to wear. 

As her fingers moved, memories from those times would sometimes suddenly recur to her as indistinctly as the vague forms of suffering that appear in a nightmare. She remembered darkness, or spiderwebs, or dreadful wooden shoes that hurt her feet, or a horrible pit of black water in the woods, or hunger, or a whip that hung on a wall, or the biting cold, or a pair of fists, or a table to hide under—or hatred, a vicious bestial hatred of all around her. Often she remembered two lovely girls who looked like dolls in dresses and bonnets and ribbons and stockings, and she remembered that she had knitted their stockings herself. 

She had read, in books, that knitting was a pleasant pastime for young girls. “What a splendid thing!” she often thought, “To make your own little clothes!” 

But as she set about knitting a new pair of stockings just “for a distraction,” it seemed as if her hands remembered her childhood better than she did. Her hands cast on the knitting; then, as if on instinct, they began sewing a stocking that would fit a young child.

“I used to do this for hours,” Cosette remembered, knitting mechanically, “but I forget quite who I was knitting for, except that they were terrible!”

Her memories of her rescue were more vivid. She remembered that she was eight years old; she was living in a sort of abyss; there were two monstrous hideous figures who she called Monsieur and Madame; she existed in a state of perpetual fear. She remembered she was taking a bucket to the well in the wood; she remembered the bucket was too heavy; she remembered a hand gently took the burden away from her. 

She remembered trusting the stranger the moment she saw him. 

His eyes were kind, gentle, and unbearably sad. His hair was very white. His voice sounded soft, as if he were speaking to mourners at a funeral. He walked the way that she did—silently, with the careful catlike tread of someone who is trying to avoid being seen.  He was not like the people at the inn, who shouted and swore and slammed doors and frightened her. He was quiet, shy, and gentle.

He also wore a beggarly threadbare yellow coat, mended many times over. Cosette knew already what a coat like that meant; it meant that he was more like her than he was like Monsieur and Madame. Evidently this kind gentleman was poor, and he would have little to eat, and he would be charged more money to stay in worse lodgings.

The stranger in the threadbare coat helped her carry her bucket back to the inn. No one had taken notice of her in such a way before, and she had hardly dared to hope that his kindness would extend beyond that moment. 

When the mysterious gentleman bought her labor from Monsieur and Madame, so that Cosette did not need to knit stockings that night, she was confused; when he bought her the magnificent doll, whose dress was a confusion of lace, she was astounded. The greatest gift came the following morning, when he announced she would leave this horrid place and go away with him— and gave her a magnificent new dress of her own.

Cosette was overwhelmed. She ecstatically exchanged the cold horrible scraps of linen rags she called her “clothing” for the warm black mourning gown; she put her feet into the stockings, and the little shoes; she threw on the little fichu.

While putting on the clothes, there was a moment when she wondered who had made them. 

Cosette and her father— she took to calling the strange man her father very quickly— moved to a little hovel in Paris. To Cosette it seemed very grand and wonderful. The faded walls were the wallpaper of a palace; the slums were as lovely as the streets around Versailles; the dingy lot was more beautiful than the Luxembourg gardens. Her heart was bursting with enough love to make all of Paris seem splendid and full of light. 

She slept in a small bed with her immense doll, which she named Catherine. 

Her father loved to stroll around the city, but only at night. He did not enter and leave his lodgings as much as he slipped in and out, like a thief or a wolf. He seemed frightened of the daylight; “or perhaps he only is awake at night, like a cat,” she thought.  

She followed him on his walks at every opportunity. “But you must have sleep,” her father would say gently. “I like to walk very late.”

“I am very awake! I used to work very late, it is no trouble for me,” She would reply, stifling a yawn. “Catherine is awake too.”

Then she would trail along at his side, carrying the immense doll in her arms. Her father favored the quieter parts of the city, loving most the places that were abandoned and silent, strolling by ruins and crumbled facades as if walking through a church. She would look at the things that he was looking at, and say: “oh, that is lovely! What a little building that is, see how it is falling apart! Oh, it is collapsing! How pretty, it is collapsing!” And he would patiently agree with her that it was lovely, and then point out little things that might interest her—a small pot of flowers, a pet bird in a window, a cat sleeping on a stoop. Sometimes she would grow very tired, and would fall into sleepwalking, still murmuring about the city; then her father would pick her up, and carry the rest of the way home. 

Her father also gave alms. As it was winter, he gave away clothes, particularly small warm scarves and gloves and stockings that were easy for him to carry.  Sometimes Cosette insisted on being allowed to help him carry these things, which filled her with joy.

On occasion, her father would visit dark houses where all the people were asleep. Then he would look around furtively, like a robber about to commit a crime. 

“Do you see anyone, Cosette?” he would ask softly, with indescribable gentleness.

She would look both ways and hunt for people, feeling very good to be given what felt like an important task. “No, the street is empty!” she would say.  

Then, her father would carefully fill a pair of stockings with money; then, he would ball up the stockings as if he were wrapping gift; then, he would gently force open a window; then, he would fling the stockings and money inside the house, shut the window, pick up Cosette, and run away into the night. 

Cosette did not question this with her words—but she sometimes stared at her father with large round eyes, considering. 

One night she asked why he did this.

“It is a present,” he said gently, with a melancholy smile. 

“Oh!” Cosette said. “But why through the window?”

“It is better they do not know who sent it.”

“Oh!” She said, thinking of how the Good Fairy and St. Nicholas did that on Christmas. “Alright!”

Cosette had never had a father before, but he was so tranquil about this that she understood it was simply a very ordinary thing for fathers to do. 

Cosette grew more bold with Catherine, and began to think she really was hers. She had Catherine go on “adventures” around the narrow stone lot they called a garden, having her hide behind loose paving stones and leap around weeds, until one day she played with her so enthusiastically that Catherine’s gown tore.

She looked at the tear once, twice, in a sort of stupefied terror—then, out of mindless instinct, she resolved to hide it from her father.

She stopped playing with Catherine, and instead tucked her in under the blankets of her bed. She left her there for days.  She did not even take her out on their walks. When her papa quietly asked her why Catherine was “sleeping,” Cosette responded that she was sick.  

“Does she need medicine?” Her father asked.

“No, no, she needs rest,” Cosette said. 

“Ah,” he said, “then I will be quiet.” 

However, one day it happened that Cosette could not resist the urge to take out Catherine again. She attempted to do it secretly, underneath a table, hiding the large tear in the gown with her little fist.

But she was not quite as careful now as she had been in the past, when she was afraid of Madame. She had relaxed, she had become too comfortable, she had grown reckless, and she let herself slip. Her father glanced over at her in a moment when the tear wasn’t covered.

“Catherine’s gown is torn,” he said softly.

“Oh! I had not noticed,” Cosette lied, in a sudden instinctual fright, “I can fix it, you must give me a needle and thread.”

“I can mend it for Catherine,” her father said gently. “It is no trouble.” 

“Oh!” she said.

She handed her father the doll. He held it with infinite tenderness, as if Catherine were a real young child, and then placed it on the little table. Then he procured a little box of sewing materials, and a needle and thread, and seated himself in front of the doll. He began the work of mending the dress.

Cosette climbed up onto the other chair and watched him, her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands.

Her father’s fingers moved quickly—they half-glided across the fabric, with the ease of a man who had mended thousands of garments in his lifetime. Cosette compared it to her own clumsy needlework and decided he must be over a hundred years old, to be so good at this. 

“How did you learn how to sew?” She asked. “It always takes me hours to mend things.”

Her father’s face clouded over. Then he sighed wearily.

“This was my work, once,” he said with a small pensive smile. 

“Oh?” she said. 

“I would sew shirts,” he continued. “I, and other men. Long ago. I suppose they are still sewing them.”

“Did you like it?” she asked.

Her father smiled with an indescribable bitterness. His brows furrowed slightly; his hands paused; his eyes looked far off. 

“It was hard work,” he said softly.

“Oh!” She said, worrying she had made him sad. “I know about that. I only knitted socks, and they had me mend things, but I was too slow, they said.”

“Ah,” he said, “you were too young.”

“But I can do it,” Cosette said. “Only, I am too slow.” 

“But see here,” he said. Then her father placed down his sewing and gently reached for her hand. She let him take it, and he held it up in the sunlight. 

“You see all those bruises,” he said in a quiet voice, “that is because your hands were too young for the work. You were far too young, it was unfair for them to make you do it, and so it hurt you. You were not ‘too slow;’ you were very good and very fast for your age. It was not your fault.”

Cosette looked at her small hand thoughtfully, as it lay inside her father’s large one. His hand was gnarled and broken-looking, covered in horrible strange scars.

Her father seemed to notice the meaning of her stare. 

“I am old,” he said, smiling kindly. “It is different for me.”

“That is what happens to old people?”

“It is,” he said.

“All of them look like this?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied. 

“Oh,”  Cosette said. 

Then she suddenly felt terribly guilty and uncomfortable, for reasons she could not describe; there was something in her that warned she was tricking her father, and lying to him, that she was stealing something that did not belong to her—and that she would soon be found out and taken away. 

She pulled away her hand.

“I tore Catherine’s dress, and I knew about it for days,” she muttered, picking at her own gown. “I lied!”

“Ah,” her father said, in a tone that implied he knew this all along. “I am sorry you were afraid to tell me.” 

“Oh, I do not know why I lied about it,” she said. 

“It is no matter,” he said. “You may lie, if you are afraid. This is all very new for you.”

Cosette silently watched him start sewing again. After a few long moments, he began to speak in a quiet voice:

“But If you ever tear your clothes, or Catherine’s-- you can always bring them to me, and I will mend them. I will never be angry.”

“What if I break something else, that isn’t clothes?” She asked.

“Bring it to me, so I can fix it.”

“What if I break it on purpose, not on accident?” 

“Play however you like. Break whatever you please. It is not your fault.”

“What if I break everything in this room, and tear all the clothes?”

Her father laughed quietly. “Will you then?”

“No, no,” she said, laughing. 

“Do as you please,” he said. 

“But what if I break things that can’t be mended?”

“Then we can buy more,” her father said. 

“What if there are no more?”

“There will always be more,” he said gently, and carefully continued to mend Catherine’s dress. 

A few years later, they were living in the Petit-Picpus convent, and Cosette began to believe that she truly understood her father.

At thirteen Cosette was awkward, homely, bold, and clumsy. She was an adventuress, despite the rules of the convent. The school punishments that frightened the other children did not frighten her as much; and then, the donations her father made to the convent likely ensured the nuns treated her more leniently. She fluttered about as she pleased.

She enjoyed racing through the garden, climbing trees, pilfering apples, and attempting to see over the convent wall; she sang often and laughed loudly; she played among the flowers planted by her father and uncle, digging up weeds.

As a result of all this, she often wore out her clothes.

At first, she would have her father mend them, and watch as he expertly saved all her clothing from ruin. Her father’s fingers seemed to glide along her garments, and a worn area of fabric was mended in moments. He knew how to make alterations so subtle and so practical that she was amazed.

But part of her convent education was learning how to mend clothing herself, and soon she became enthusiastic about fixing her own dresses. Her father assisted whenever she struggled, but she felt a fierce joy at slowly learning to accomplish things on her own.

Whenever she visited her father in his little cottage, they would work on clothes together. They would talk about this and that; Cosette would chatter about her studies and her adventures, while her father would speak softly about his books and his gardening. 

Sometimes she asked about the time long ago “when he worked sewing shirts.” He always responded with a vague answer and a deflection, gently turning the conversation to Cosette’s schoolwork and her classes and her new interest in reading.

The only other window she had into her father’s past was his brother, Père Fauchelevent, and she sometimes plied him with questions about her father’s old work. But he usually refused to speak about her father’s youth, because “he does not like me to talk about it.” Sometimes he did tell her long peasant stories out of the North, however, and she would imagine how her father must have fit into them. “When I am older,” she said to herself, “I will look up all the tailors in Picardy, and find which one my father worked for.” She was capable of being very stubborn.

“Can you teach me to sew hidden pockets?” she asked her father one day.

He looked up at her. The two of them were sitting together at the little table in her father’s cottage; bright sunlight streamed through the open window, and the birds fluttered through the melon patch outside. Her father was mending one of his threadbare old coats; Cosette was mending the hem of an old school dress.

“Hidden pockets,” he said. “On your dresses?”

“Yes, like all the hidden ones you have on your yellow coat!”

Her father looked placid.

“I do not know what you mean,” he said.

“Oh, come, you are being silly! I see all the hidden pockets you sew into the lining. It is very clever work. You keep such odd things in them.”

“Ah,” he said.

“I do not understand why you keep all those hideous little wigs in your pockets,” she said. 

“Surveillance,” he replied sadly. He did not elaborate. 

“Whatever you use the pockets for, I would like to know how to make them. It will be a very fun project.” 

He nodded in assent, and began to calmly explain the process to her. After some time, when she nearly understood the basics, she heard the convent bell ring; she understood she was late for class, and began gathering up her things.

“I do wonder where you learned all this!” she said. “It must have been at your old work— where did you say you worked? Somewhere in Picardy with Uncle?”

“It is no matter,” her father said.

“So it was in Picardy?”

Her father looked at her, and then gave something that may have been a nod.

“Was it for a tailor, or a dressmaker or—what sort of place?”

“Oh,” he said evasively, as if waiting for her to leave. “You will be late for your classes.” 

Cosette stood in place and waited. 

“A tailor,” he said lightly, with a pained smile. “But they are gone now, and I have had no word of them, and it is useless to speak of them. You will be late for your lessons.”

Cosette set out for class, thrilled to have learned something about her father’s past. 

Years passed and they left the convent. Cosette began to worry that her father’s story was not what he claimed. 

It happened very simply: the more she learned about clothing, the more she realized her father did not know. 

The convent had only taught basic sewing, knitting and embroidery. They strictly regulated which books could come in and out, and especially which ones could be accessed by the young girls. But once they left the convent, suddenly she had access to all the books in the world—books on lace, damask, the latest fashion plates, the art of the hat, the whole science of the bonnet, the gown, the mantle, the boot, the cuff, and all the stuff which is in fashion. Her father refused nothing to her, and bought her every book and every garment and every accessory she desired.

They still worked on clothing together. She would visit him in his little hut in the backyard, and coax him into lighting a fire. Then they would sit on the straw chairs beside his rickety old table, gently speaking to each other with their heads bowed over their projects. Cosette would always work on exciting new custom alterations to her handkerchiefs and scarves and gowns, inspired by the latest fashions or by particular bits of fancy embroidery she encountered in her new books, challenging herself to learn more with every day that passed, and feeling her hands grow more deft and nimble with each passing hour, and saying proudly: "See here, I am an artist!" Her father would still work on mending his old well-worn coats, as if he had not changed at all since she was a child.

“Can you help me with this bit of embroidery?” she asked him once.

 Her father dutifully made an attempt. 

The results were sad, nearly unusable, like the work of a convent schoolgirl attempting it for the first time. It seemed as if the skill her father had in sewing and mending simply did not translate to something like embroidering a decorative rose. He returned it to her apologetically, and with what seemed like genuine distress; she lightly joked over it, and thanked him, and soon he was in better spirits again.

“Oh, I suppose you rarely had to embroider flowers when you worked for that tailor!” she said. 

“I never worked for a tailor,” her father said calmly.

Cosette started.

“Oh, but you said you worked—in some sewing place, under a tailor in Picardy, making clothes—you said?” she continued.

“Did I say that,” her father said sadly.

“You did! You certainly did! And Uncle said so, too, or he said to trust whatever you said—it was true, wasn’t it?” 

“Ah,” her father sighed, “yes.”

But she could detect the lie in his voice. 

Now she was wary. She soon noticed that her father seemed to know very little about most clothing, after all. She said words like “damask” and “pelisse” and he looked at her strangely, as if she were speaking an entirely different language. Any fashion that was somewhat decorative —gigot sleeves, Turkish silk, sleeve pumpers—threw him into confusion; if he knew what it was, he did not know how to work on it. 

This by itself did not unsettle her; she would expect him to have only worked on a certain style of clothing, and be unfamiliar with the others. But the way he lied to her about it made her wonder if he had worked in clothing at all. Or if he had—where had he worked? And why would he be so unwilling to speak to her about it? 

Her life clouded over by degrees.  

Her father was at all times gentle, kind, and absurdly attentive to her. If she appeared the slightest bit sad, he would lavish her with attention and gifts, particularly clothing, because he knew she enjoyed it—and he  would spend hours sweetly talking and laughing with her about novels and gardening, he would buy her presents and cakes, he would take her shopping, he would find her new sheet music to play on her harmonium, he would let her choose new places for them to go on their walks, and he would even let her plan for them to visit theaters or festivals despite his own discomfort with crowds. They still went on long walks together, at dawn and at sunset, through the quieter parts of the city. If she seemed the slightest bit sick, he stayed by her at every moment and spoiled her with every present she could possibly ever dream of wanting, as if she were on her death-bed. 

But when her father became deeply distressed, he would have his “fits.” She had taken to calling them “fits” because she had no other word for them.  

During his fits he would not get angry; he would not weep; he would not try to upset her. He would simply stop being her father. 

She would try to talk to him and he would not hear anything she said. He would not appear to know where he was, or to have any consciousness of his surroundings. His eyes would stare blankly without seeing, like the eyes of a corpse. When he spoke, it would sound as if he were sleeptalking, murmuring things from a dream. Sometimes he would begin to shudder, and look around him in a vague fear, as if searching for someone who was not there; he would flinch at loud noises, like a child afraid of being beaten.

He always seemed as if he were lost somewhere, and it took time for him to find himself again. 

Most fits were usually very brief. They sometimes happened if she pressed him too hard for information about his past or about her mother; he would become agitated like that, like a cornered frightened animal, and so she had stopped asking. 

Once he had arrived back home from a nightly walk with a horrible mangled burn on his arm, in the middle of a ‘fit’ so terrible he did not even recognize her at first. 

Another time they had seen a horrible chain-gang of galley slaves, and the sight affected him so deeply that he had ‘fits’ for weeks afterward. (“He must have found them very frightening,” she thought.) 

When she was very young and lived in the convent, the fits had never been too terrible. She had only seen them once or twice. It helped that her Uncle Fauchelevent was there, and he seemed to take it upon himself to make her father feel better. When her father entered these fits of melancholy lethargy, Uncle Fauchelevent would say “now, where has he gone? Has he buried himself away again?” And would ply him with tea and idle chatter until he came back to himself. Her father did not seem to recognize this, and often seemed to forget his brother existed at all. Deep in her heart, a part of Cosette wondered if they were really brothers.

Ordinarily her father never did anything terrible while having his ‘fits.’ It was rather the opposite. He became utterly passive; he did not want to decide anything; he wished only to be left alone, to think and do nothing until he came back to himself. 

He became like a statue wearing her father’s clothes; someone dressed as her father, who was cold and unreachable. 

Cosette worried. 

“To England, so suddenly!” Cosette said, with a cheerfulness she did not feel. “How silly men are! One day they are happy to live in Paris. Then they say, ‘we shall go to another country,’ and they pack your bags all at once! Without giving you a moment to speak about it! It really is all so sudden!” 

Cosette and her father were in a carriage on the road to their new home, in the Rue de l'Homme Armé. The carriage was small and rather dirty. They brought disconcertingly little with them. Cosette thought that moving all the way to another country meant they would have to prepare boxes of furniture and clothing, but they had time to pack practically nothing. 

Her father had his “inseparable,” his horrible little suitcase that smelled faintly of embalming, upon his lap. He was staring forward with a melancholy look on his face and did not seem conscious of his surroundings. 

“Papa,” she said. “Papa.”

Her father turned to look at her, blinking slowly as if waking from a dream. His eyes were glassy.

“Papa, I have been speaking to you for a very long time,” she said. 

“Ah,” he said gently, with sincere regret. “Forgive me; I did not hear. What have you said?”

“I was saying that is very odd, all of this! It is one thing to move your Cosette from one end of Paris to another. That is an adventure, a little game. But another country! Well, that is quite far, to move so suddenly!”

Her father gazed at her mournfully, like a lost cat.

“It is far,” he said placidly.

“Shall I even be able to get a passport?” she said. “I hardly know how a person gets one. I think they will not let me have one, and then you shall have to go without me, and I must stay here! How funny that would be. But that is what happens when you move so quickly. I ought to have been warned in advance.”

“You will have a passport,” her father said softly. 

“But this is so sudden,” She said.

“Oh,” he said. “I am sorry.” 

She wondered, with a sort of terror, if her father had somehow learned of Marius—and if all of this business was a way to punish her. She had hidden her love for Marius on instinct, lying by omission without knowing why. Her father had never punished her before and she did not think he was the sort of man who ever would. But perhaps she could have been mistaken? Perhaps she had done something terribly wrong? 

“Are you angry with me?” she asked, suddenly frightened. 

“Angry?” Her father said. He turned to look at her again. He seemed to have briefly risen from his stupor—his face was kind, and his eyes were sad. 

“I would never be angry with you,” he said with inexpressible gentleness. He smiled and pressed her hand. “We will be happy in England.”

“But it is another country, and I know nothing about it,” Cosette said, “I do not know if English people can be happy!”

“They can be,” her father said. “Sometimes.”

“Do you speak English? Have you asked them? I am very poor with English, I should be able to understand very little.” 

“I understand enough.”

“Well! Let us say we are going shopping, and I wish to get a new lace parasol. I do not know the words in English, and you hardly know the proper words in French! We should make fools of ourselves in front of the shopkeeper.”

“I shall buy you whatever you please, in England,” her father said kindly. “Anything you ask for will be yours—the finest dresses, and fabric, and lace. You can have dressers full of all the clothing you would like.” 

“That is not what I am saying at all—!” Cosette said, but her father did not hear her, because at that moment the carriage clattered to a stop at the Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7.

Time passed. It was a little after two o’clock in the morning on June 7th, 1832, in the Rue de l’Homme Armé.

Cosette‘s stocking had not come together. 

She had been distracted, and her work had been poor and erratic.  In the flickering light of the candle, the stocking was small and wretched.

“Bah,” she said. “This is what comes of thinking too deeply about upsetting things, when it is late at night!”

She flung the needles and the unfinished stocking down on the table.

“It is no wonder father refuses to speak of it. It is the past: what is the use of dredging it all up? Only to make oneself even more miserable, it seems!”

She looked at the unfinished stocking with a strange fury. Then she took it up in her fists again.  

“Here, that strange bear of a father tells us to move, that we must leave at once, and then he disappears on one of his trips! And Marius is gone too. And there is a row, and gunfire, and people are fighting,” she said, twisting the yarn nervously in her hands. “If I didn’t know he was good, I would be frightened of him. And angry!”

She meditated for a moment, then balled the stocking up, got to her feet, and began to furiously pace the room. 

“I hate these horrid stockings, and all these silly little things!” she said finally, “and he must return soon, he must, so I can sleep. Where is he?” 

In a narrow alley some distance away,  Jean Valjean staggered against Javert’s shoulder.  

The sky was black. The buildings towered over him like the walls of a prison or the crests of great dark waves. His thoughts were confused, stupefied; he could not speak, he moved as if in a dream, and he plunged forward as if he were slowly drowning. Figures came in and out of his vision like the vague forms of a nightmare.

A lieutenant lancer appeared in the road. He spoke to them. Jean Valjean caught a name on the wind: “Lieutenant Théodule Gillenormand.” 

Jean Valjean did not hear the rest of what Javert said or what the lancer said. Instead he looked at the lancer’s uniform, and his lovely coat, with a strange wistfulness.

He reflected that his old uniform, of the National Guard, had not been so different. He had loved that costume; it had granted him an air of respectability; it had made him resemble any other man who paid his taxes; it had made him appear like an honest man, to the world and to Cosette. Jean Valjean’s ideal was to behave like an angel but appear like a bourgeois. 

That uniform was now gone. He had cast away that uniform at the barricades, and cast away the false identity with the uniform, and cast away his role as Cosette’s father with his false identity. That costume had been flung aside like a skin he had outgrown; and he regretted, bitterly, that Cosette had loved the costume of Fauchelevent as if he were her family.

He eyed the lancer. The lieutenant was, outwardly, the perfect image of the ideal bourgeois in his dress; he seemed like a specter of that false respectability Jean Valjean had striven for since Montreuil-sur-Mer. He appeared fashionable, honorable, upright, reputable; a fine soldier in fine cloth with golden buttons and epaulettes, and a chest studded with medals.

Jean Valjean remembered, confusedly, that the undershirts of the military were often sewn by convicts. Had those shirts gone to elegant lancers, like this man? Or had they only gone to the ground troops, to the lower ranks of the army— the most disposable outcasts of society sewing clothing for the most disposable members of its military?  Jean Valjean had sewn hundreds of these shirts during his imprisonment; he smiled, grimly, at the realization that he no longer remembered which men would have worn them.

His thoughts frayed apart, and vague memories recurred to him, of long days full of endless sewing. The work was hard. It hurt his hands. He had the privilege to experience many forms of hell within the bagne: the work of sewing shirts was a hell of boredom, a hell of repetition, a hell of mechanical mindless labor, a slow deliberate hell that was in its own way far worse than the swift violence of the lash. 

He thought of the rough horrible clothing he had sewn for so long, and he contrasted it with the splendid bourgeois uniform of the lancer. He felt a phantom pain in his fingers. Strangely, he found himself remembering the way Cosette used to stare at her doll, admiring its dress, its robe of pink crepe, and its lace; he remembered how she used to marvel at him whenever he mended the tears in her gowns, as if the skills he learned in the galleys were only a gentle form of magic.

“Cosette would have loved this lancer’s uniform,” Jean Valjean thought despairingly, “she always loved fine clothing.”

Chapter Text

“Thought was something to which [Javert] was unused, and which was peculiarly painful.”

-Les Miserables Volume 5 Book 4 Chapter 1, Hapgood translation.

“[Jean Valjean] yield[ed] to that mysterious power which said to him: “Think!” as it said to another condemned man, two thousand years ago, “March on!”

-Les Miserables Volume 1 Book 7 Chapter 3, Hapgood Translation

As the rubble of the barricades is swept away, the rebels begin to regroup. Every stroke has its counterstroke. In the midst of defeat there comes the process of rebuilding. The failures are counted, the losses are counted, the deaths are counted; the grieving process begins, an essential part of rebuilding. They “lay low,” they tally which of the members have survived, they tally which have been taken to prison, they form plans to free those who are going on trial.

Progress is not a short, straight road. It is a Sisyphean struggle, an unending climb towards the light; it is a burden taken up and never let go. Whatever horror befalls a nation, there is always the promise of tomorrow. What is destroyed today can be rebuilt tomorrow; what is lost today can be found tomorrow. There is not always a guarantee of victory, but there is always a guarantee of a sunrise.

There is only one way of rejecting tomorrow, and that is to die.

Jean Valjean was not dead. He accepted this with an indescribable despair.

He had been resting by the side of the Seine; he had fallen asleep on the quai near the river; he had foolishly dared to believe, for a single blessed moment, that God would have mercy on him and grant him a single moment of peace.

Then large hands seized him by the shoulders. Rough arms dragged him to his feet. A horrible voice barked orders in his ear. Jean Valjean trembled violently, like a fox thought it had escaped the hound only to suddenly feel its teeth close around his throat.

Where was he? Who was this? Where was he going? In that moment he could not have said.

The horrid instincts Jean Valjean had learned in the bagne did not abandon him even in his moments of greatest distress; he bowed his head, and retreated into a tranquil deferential obedience. He made no effort at resistance. He did not utter a single cry. His terror gave way to a docile stupidity, like that of a cow being led to the slaughter; he submitted to his captor’s orders as calmly as he would’ve submitted to the orders of a prison guard holding a whip.

“Oh,” he said calmly. It was the “oh” of Prometheus recognizing his eagle.

He had some half-formed idea he must still be near the Pont Au Change, but his eyes were bleary; he was not sure if he was dreaming. Every street seemed the same street, over and over; all the buildings seemed the same buildings, tall and warped, looming over him like the four walls of a prison; he watched them pass with a look of dread. They were the corpses of houses. He felt it was impossible that people were sleeping there.

The horrible creature that held him captive was saying indescribably bizarre nonsense. Jean Valjean did not hear any of his words, only that they were incomprehensible.

“And this is rebellion pure and simple, you see, rebellion against the government, because there is a higher authority above the government, an authority that is too high, it is far too high, it is a superior that astounds too greatly, and in the face of such impossible monstrosities one has no course but resignation!” the creature snarled erratically. “One must resign. Being sacked, being fired, that is, to be executed– that should have been better! But they do not know how to execute people properly anymore!”

“Ah.”

“You would have seen how well I would have been executed, I did my part properly. I would have been executed very well, you would see how I would have taken the bullet, the knife, it would have not mattered to me, I am not proud, I know what it is to have a “duty,” really it would make no difference to me– Why had I permitted them to leave me alive? I ought to have gone back and gotten myself shot by force. Such things that should have been done! But you shall execute me.”

“Ah…”

“And then this; here, what kind of country is this, where the watch-dog of the government licks the hand of the intruding thief? He fawns for the bagnard, does he– sick, slavering, depraved? A horror to itself. See how this is nothing but the revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite that must be punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping–!”

“Surely I must be dreaming!” Jean Valjean thought. “Or this poor beast has struck his head very hard.”

Shadows of people passed them by. There was a lieutenant lancer, with fine clothing, and a coat Cosette would have loved. Then he was asleep, then he was shaken awake, and then those horrible violent claws were dragging him and forcing him to walk again.

“Come, here, you are still alive?” the man said after a few paces.

“Sometimes,” Jean Valjean said.

“There, he is still speaking-- good!” he growled. Jean Valjean, with bland curiosity, looked at him through bleary eyes.

He was an old man with a hideous square dog-like face, short cropped hair, and large bushy whiskers; his hair and whiskers were matted and erratic, which gave him a decidedly feral appearance. His eyes glinted with a strange savage fury. He wore no hat. His coat was askew. His leather cravat hung limply around his neck like the knot of a noose, or the collar of a dog that had broken its leash.

“Ah,” Jean Valjean said in the midst of his dazed stupor, “a police officer!”

He meditated for a few moments. Then he remembered his name.

“Javert!” he added inanely.

“There, he’s said my name, he wants something. Well? What? Speak!”

Javert halted in his paces, and Jean Valjean staggered to a stop, swaying against his shoulder. It was as if he leaned against a statue.

“Come— what is it?” Javert said roughly.

Jean Valjean stiffened, bracing himself to receive a blow from Javert’s fists. He did this unconsciously, with no emotion other than resignation; he knew how best to receive the violence of a prison guard; this was an instinct that never abandoned him even in his moments of greatest fatigue.

A few moments passed and Javert did not strike him. Instead he only stared at him under furrowed brows.

Jean Valjean remained silent. His heartbeat was loud and terrible in his ears. One of Javert’s hands dug into his side like a talon, or a horrible grasping claw; Jean Valjean submitted to this grip inertly. He could feel Javert’s breath, which was hot and unsteady and horrible, like the breath of a slavering guard dog. They had sent dogs after him, during one of his escape attempts from Toulon; the dogs were half starved, and their ribs stood out sadly against their skin, and they had gazed at him with a furious hunger. Javert’s eyes looked similar. He turned his head, avoiding his stare, and instead looked at a heap of paving stones near the corner of the street.

That lone heap of paving stones seemed horribly sad to him.

“What is all this?” He said in the midst of his stupor, in a voice that was hardly audible.

“Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7,” Javert replied with a sort of comfortable smugness. “We have agreed, we have discussed, it is all settled, it is a settled matter. There is a gulf on high. An inferior must turn in his resignation at a world such as this, but if he has committed a grievous error it is better for him to be discharged. You shall have me executed- that is what it is.”

“Oh?”

His answer had not clarified any of the obscurity as much as it had unsettled it. Jean Valjean vigorously thought about his words, and fought to return to himself. After a struggle, he slowly recalled where he was; he remembered Cosette, and that horrible Marius; he remembered Javert having some poorly-timed fit of madness, and he remembered using the last of his strength to drag the creature out of the river, so that he could complete his work.

That was why he kept rambling about executions and duties and discharge— it was the language of prisons and police, the only language this man appeared to know. Jean Valjean remembered, vaguely, that when he had his wits Javert was horrifyingly competent: ruthless, efficient, dangerous, threatening, the terror of all those who lived on the margins of society; he was a hound trained for the sole purpose of hunting criminals, who accomplished that purpose with a savage glee. Now in his fit of madness the poor creature forgot everything save for that— save for his policework and duties.

So Jean Valjean would be returned to the galleys!

So he had rescued a mad prison guard who was grabbing him by the collar and guiding him back to the bagne. He had saved the police officer who would arrest him. He was, dutifully, walking back to his grave. He was a corpse walking to his own burial.

“Ah,” Jean Valjean said, with a nearly imperceptible nod.

“He sees, he understands now! See, it will all be put to rights,” Javert said haughtily. “There is duty, there is Authority; one must obey one’s duty!”

Javert began walking again, and Jean Valjean obeyed mechanically.

It would be beautiful if, after all the penance he had done, Jean Valjean felt no regret over this. It would be beautiful if, having rescued Javert, he felt nothing except for the noble satisfaction of saving him. It would be beautiful if, having done all he had done and been all he had been, he felt nothing for Javert but lofty forgiveness, compassion, and pity. It would be beautiful if he were so familiar with resigning himself to his duty that nothing within him cried out against it.

After all, how many times before had he committed such an act of self-sacrifice? How many times before had he saved a life that could destroy his own? How many times had he rescued that which would ruin him, against the pleading of his own selfishness? How many times had his animalistic desire for self-preservation battled against his conscience, only to be overthrown, defeated, and dragged into the dust! How many times had he caught himself in a fault, and overcome his own resistance to God! How many times, hurled to earth by the light, had he begged for mercy! How many times had he risen bleeding, bruised, broken, enlightened— with despair in his heart but serenity in his soul!

And yet he felt, dimly, that his feelings for Javert were not kind. He felt that, after all, he would rather that none of this had happened.

The truth was that he would have preferred not to have encountered Javert ever again, after he had left him at the Rue de l’Homme Armé. He would have preferred to have never seen him at the Pont au Change. After rescuing Javert, he would have preferred to be left on the bank of the river rather than dragged again to his feet, and forced back on the long road to imprisonment or execution.

Jean Valjean had learned to bear pain, but he had not fully learned how to bear humiliation. The court trials, the exposition, the pillory, the savage jeers of a crowd— the open air of labor in the bagne, which had the air of a zoo— to see all of society turn towards him in scorn, to hear “that one was the mayor of Montreuil-Sur-Mer” as if they were describing a ridiculous stupid animal— despite all that had happened to him, despite all he had become, there was still a part of his soul that was proud and recoiled against it.

And yet he had long resigned himself to the truth that he could only be holy in the eyes of God if he was despised in the eyes of men. Monsieur Fauchelevent, the respectable dignified bourgeois, was vile; it was Jean Valjean, the horrible creature of the bagne, who was capable of being holy. It was his pride that was wrong. To suffer shame, to accept indignity, to be scorned, to be spat on, to be trod underfoot— that was to be holy. The convent had taught him this and he had accepted it.

And yet he thought of Cosette with a violent pang.

To go to the galleys was nothing; to go to the galleys without speaking to her one last time was hard, it was very hard. He had a final farewell that was taken from him, stolen from him, by Javert’s fit of insanity. He was irritated at Javert: he felt almost that he had been tricked.

He recognized that this would be his last combat. Whatever happened to him tonight, whatever desperate decisions he made, whether he “came quietly” or escaped, whether he resisted Javert or submitted to him– this would determine at last, for the final time, whether his conscience triumphed over his pride and selfishness.

As he reflected on this, he recognized it was better that he did not speak again to Cosette.

He interrogated himself, and asked him what right he had to speak to her. She had her Marius, her husband, and he was no longer her father, he was nothing. What right did he have to impose his prison upon their happiness? What right did he have to track sewage into her drawing room?

His ego limply protested. He told himself it was necessary for him to tell her where to find her Marius; his conscience responded that evidently Marius knew her address already, or he excelled at finding it, and he should visit her the moment he healed. He told himself it was necessary to tell her where he had hidden the money; his conscience responded that Marius was wealthy, and she was perhaps clever enough to find where her father had buried things.

The only reason to visit, he acknowledged bitterly, was selfishness. It was to say goodbyes, to say farewells, to see his little angel, to have the poor child weep over him. They would laugh, they would remember when she was very small and played “adventure games” with her little dolls in the convent, and how she would climb trees to pick apples, and write “stories” in her notebooks, and look for insects under rocks; he would tell her how old she was now, and she would weep, and she would tell him to stay. It might even be enough to drive him to escape, for her sake.

Such a farewell would only hurt her, and perhaps dig up what was better left buried. It was better for him to vanish all of a sudden— and then, she already thought he was going to England; she could perhaps continue to believe this. It would be an easy severing of bonds, that would cause her little pain. Or perhaps Marius would remember Monsieur Fauchelevent from the barricades, and Cosette would believe that Monsieur Fauchelevent, the good old man, had died there.

So perhaps this was an act of mercy after all. The world would despise him, scorn him, mock him; but, in the heart of Paris, there would be one soul who remembered him fondly, knowing nothing of who or what he had been. He would be a monster to all but a saint to her. It was a kindness he did not deserve.

So he would make no resistance, he decided.

Far from encouraging him, this decision filled him with an inexpressible weariness.

Perhaps he should have found Javert’s presence reassuring. It seemed that all around him was empty, dead, and nightmarish, a sunken city, as if he were already buried deep underground, as if he had never escaped the fontis of the sewers— but here was another man! Here was a man whose warm breath he could feel, a man whose trembling arms held him upright, a man who spoke to him in a voice choked with some strangled emotion, a free man, a man who was living. Perhaps he should feel reassured that here in the midst of all his suffering there was another human being beside him.

He did not.

“Facts are horrible,” Javert snarled. “Damned facts!”

“….Oh?” Jean Valjean said.

“If facts were sensible, they would constrain themselves to being proofs of the law.”

“Oh.”

“But then, they are not sensible. The facts do not say what the government says they ought to say! The reality is not what the government says that reality is! The facts often do not agree with the Code. I have noticed this before,” Javert said, with a wag of his finger, “and I always thought it was because facts were evil.”

“….ah.”

“Yet it is clear that one cannot argue with facts; it is God who sends them. And then, God is an authority—“

Jean Valjean resigned himself to Javert’s incomprehensibility and his mind drifted. Javert staggered and limped like a dog with a wounded paw, clutching at Jean Valjean in a rough brutal way that made him flinch.

He longed to rest. It was not allowed. God would not permit it. He took another awkward slow step, his bad leg dragging behind him like useless meat. Javert said something else he did not hear; it was one of his strange rants about wanting to be executed, or some other oddity; what a strange pathetic man he was!

In a moment of selfishness he wondered, bitterly, why God had made him the prisoner of this wretched suffering thing, this poor mad creature, this injured dog that barked and snapped at anyone close enough to its muzzle.

Jean Valjean reflected that he had dared, in his idiocy, to allow himself to grow accustomed to being treated with kindness. He, who had formerly only experienced violence at the hands of other men, had grown used to pretending to be a parent; he had grown used to the tenderness of playing at a family; he had grown used to accepting gentleness; he had grown used to his daughter’s childlike hugs and her sweet affectionate smiles.

Now he was once again a prisoner. It was not unfamiliar to be roughly manhandled, to be brutally dragged, to be shoved here and there and forced to walk like a stupid stubborn animal. It was not a new experience, to feel the agony of a beast of burden that is beaten for being unable to carry its load. It was not novel for him, to be pushed beyond what he could endure— to cry “I have had enough,” to plead “I cannot continue” and to beg “ let me rest” — and then to feel the claws of a prison guard sink into him and force him to work past the point of breaking.

In Toulon, a prisoner who spent too long at the whipping post was often left unable to move. A guard would drag them to their feet, as they bled and wept, and roughly force them to walk back to the salle. This was not so different.

He was a fool to think that gentleness could ever belong to him. He reflected, with a bitter grief, that to experience such gentleness and then have it stolen away was more horrible than death, and that he would have really preferred to be left to die.

“Oh,” Jean Valjean said.

Javert said some other absurd nonsense he did not hear.

“Oh,” he repeated again.

He staggered, shut his eyes, and remembered how good it had been to lie on the pavement next to the river. How unbearably sweet it was! To sleep, to rest, to cast aside all burdens, to forget that frightful Javert, to forget himself, to fall into oblivion, to die— to drop the heavy chains of his conscience at last. Surely some chains are too horrible to bear for so long, and there comes a moment where a man is justified in saying: “Enough!”

But after recalling the euphoria that he had felt, he examined it with a sort of fury.

Why should he have felt joy when he collapsed? Why should he have felt misery when Javert dragged him to his feet? After all, this was his choice. No one was truly forcing him to continue walking. Javert, that horrid old hunting dog, did not appear to be in a much better state than he was; he seemed to have lost his mind; whatever feeble resistance he could muster against him would be enough to free him from his clutches. If he wished to escape, he could escape.

He did not.

He asked himself whether Javert was truly the one forcing him to continue, if this was truly Javert’s decision, if this was all Javert’s doing. He admitted that it was not.

He bitterly reflected he was being forced along by something far stronger — his conscience. He was not passive, and everything that came to pass was coming to pass because he willed it, and he made it so. He was bound by his duty, the implacable light within him, and by his insurmountable will.

Javert was only the instrument it used for his destruction.

It was as if some horrible dagger had thrown itself into the Seine and Jean Valjean, driven by his duty, had dragged the dagger back up from the depths and plunged it into his own chest. By rescuing Javert, he had rescued the weapon with which he was to disembowel himself. He had rescued the knife he would use to lacerate his own entrails. He had rescued his crown of thorns, the cross on which he was to be crucified, the molten throne and mantle of fire that would burn his flesh.

Sisyphus understood his myth did not permit him a reprieve; he had dutifully recovered his boulder. Prometheus had rescued his falcon, and dutifully tore out his own liver to force it down the creature’s gullet.

He leaned against Javert as if bound to him. Every touch made his flesh revolt, and he submitted to it with the despair of an animal bound for slaughter or a man sentenced to execution. But beneath the weariness there was pride, the familiar bitter joy of martyrdom.

It was the corrosive purification of the soul. Yes, he reflected, Javert did not truly hold him. His conscience held him, and there was no stronger or more formidable grip.

He stumbled on a sewer grate and Javert caught him.

“They always put in these sewer grates badly,” Javert growled, tottering piteously.

Jean Valjean, struck with a sudden wave of pain, stopped moving and did not respond. His leg seemed to throb in time with his heartbeat. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead; he fought to calm the trembling in his hands; he thought, with resignation, that Javert would beat him.

He raised his head with the air of Jesus Christ bearing his cross.

“Here, you are not dead, are you? The little sewer opening has not killed you? Come!” Javert shook him.

Jean Valjean lifted his head, with a look of lofty pity. He saw a hellish savage face, with its mouth lifted into a snarl that was all canine teeth and gums. He was suddenly certain that if he did not respond Javert would rip out his throat with his teeth. He was indifferent to this, but altogether he understood it would only cause more trouble and he would prefer to avoid it, if possible. He recovered himself, with a superhuman effort.

“Oh,” Jean Valjean managed to say, in a soft tortured voice.

“Ah, good, he is alive. To be almost killed by a sewer grate the government has placed improperly– the government, how they– what a fine farce! Such is Governmental Authority!”

Javert patted Jean Valjean on the back as if to reassure himself that he wasn’t broken, then forced him to take another step.

“Ah.”

“What a horror it is! How they build cities these days, this country– now I see it clearly! See, see here; it is about how the cities are built; there is as much disorder below as there is on high, there is no reason to it! A man greater than a saint can be plunged into sewage! They drown Jesus Christ in the cesspit! There is nothing in which one can trust, there is no trust, you see how there is no trust, one can touch and feel the deception, a world where the authorities trip on sewer grates and can be plunged into filth so deep one cannot tell they are holy—“

Jean Valjean, not listening, raised his head high with an expression of holy, celestial suffering. He would follow the dictates of his conscience until providence intervened. As far as he was concerned, all was over for him.

And he reflected again that there was, perhaps, a mercy to this, and a rightness: that Cosette would continue to remember him fondly, and that should be enough for him.

As they continued to walk, his mind cleared. It was as if he received the clarity of a saint at the moment of ascension. Having fully accepted his fate, the world around him settled into place. At last he entered into a familiar reality.

The ground beneath his feet became solid and recognizable. The ashen nightmarish houses settled into the narrow buildings of a faubourg of Paris; the road became the familiar Rue des Roquelles; he felt that he saw everything, knew everything, and that the map to his destination was simple and clear.

Javert, limping, slowly dragged him out of this sidestreet into another road; he recognized it, calmly, as the Rue de la Verrerie.

This one was wide, and well-lit. It was intersected by a confusion of other small dark side streets that joined it at odd angles, each plunging pell-mell towards different areas of the city– some towards the river, some towards the police station, other towards the bourgeois housing of the Rue de l’Homme Armé.

Jean Valjean sighed with the noble weariness of a man who knows all the stops on the road to Calvary. He expected Javert to turn left and follow the Rue de la Verrerie until it joined the Rue de Lombardas, and then to the Rue de St. Denis, towards the police station at the Place du Châtelet.

Instead Javert halted.

He staggered uneasily, gazing with a strange horror at the various side streets, and appeared to be undergoing horrible uncertainty. One of his hands clutched Jean Valjean tightly, far too tightly, with the roughness of a practiced police inspector who had dragged many poor unwilling wretches to prison. His other hand was twined in his own whiskers, a sign of deep reverie. There was a new anxiety in his eyes.

“To reach Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7, I should take the— the— oh it is simple! I know the street.” Javert stamped his foot, which appeared to hurt him; he cursed. “It is perfectly simple, I should know the street, yes, it is very simple, I am missing something that is very simple, I know these streets very well, I have chased malefactors here enough, I have just come from this way and it should be very simple for me, I know the way, and it is not so far, I should recognize- I should–it is perfectly simple–” he growled, tugging at his whiskers and staggering to stay upright.

“Ah,” Jean Valjean said.

“There are too many streets in this city!” Javert snarled. “There should only be one street, one single straight road— there should not be this horrible maze of side streets and blind alleys, that prevents one from finding their destination! not in cities or in duties!— The government, see how they build these labyrinths, these traps, these snares, these jumbles, so you get lost in them— they build chaos and they call it ‘order!’ It’s such narrow labyrinths that men can build barricades in! If the government— ”

“Left,” Jean Valjean breathed.

“Yes,” Javert muttered. He stalked in that direction for a few paces and then suddenly brought them to a halt.

“No, no, that is not it!” Javert said. “That is towards the Place du Châtelet. That is not where we are going.”

Jean Valjean considered these words very slowly, then remembered that Javert had lost his mind. He felt a mild, saintly pity. He did not permit himself to feel exasperated.

Then he began to speak, in a polite and placid voice, enunciating every word carefully. His tone was halfway between a drunk man attempting to appear sober and an adult attempting to patiently explain simple concepts to an unruly child.

“But the Place du Châtelet is where you will find the police station-house,” Jean Valjean said. It was the longest sentence he had said in a very long time.

Javert started, then plunged his gaze into Jean Valjean’s eyes.

“Come!” Javert said. “That is not where we are going!”

Then Javert let out a string of offended indignant snarls that seemed to mean: “I am not taking you to the police station-house. I am not arresting you. We shall not go to the Place du Châtelet. We are going to the Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7, and you will not be sent to prison.”

“Oh,” Jean Valjean said in dull surprise.

“Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7!” Javert said smugly.

Jean Valjean at last recognized that Javert, in losing his mind, was also granting him freedom. He recognized Javert had been attempting to tell him this, probably, but that he had not been listening— or Javert had been phrasing it so bizarrely he had dismissed it as meaningless madman rambling. What had all the nonsensical talk about “executions” meant—?

But now it seemed quite clear: Javert was not taking him to the galleys. He was taking him back to his apartment. For a moment Jean Valjean felt a strange, twisted emotion that almost resembled relief.

And then he felt something like a burst of inward laughter.

So Javert was setting him at “liberty” for the moment— if this was liberty, to feel every step like a stab wound, to be weary beyond imagining, to regret every breath. He had the liberty to return to an apartment that would soon be empty, as his daughter left him for her new family. He had the liberty to return to isolation and paranoia, to feel the eyes of the police searching for him, to feel himself surveilled; he had the liberty to barricade himself away from the world and die in some wretched dark corner. When he had joy and light and love within his life, Javert hounded him; now that all his light was eclipsed, Javert was releasing his hold. Jean Valjean had the liberty to make this soon-empty apartment his cell. It once pleased Javert to arrest him, but now it pleased Javert to grant him this “freedom.” Very well!

This was not novel for him; Jean Valjean had been granted freedom by the state before. He had tasted the wretched dregs of the paltry conditional “freedom” that the law was capable of granting, the “freedom” that was only another kind of imprisonment.

After nineteen years the bagne had taken mercy on him, and deigned to grant him the right to be hounded and beaten and surveilled even outside of the prison walls— after a decade of persecution Javert had taken mercy on him, and deigned to grant him the right to die alone in an barren room outside of the prison hulks rather than within them. This was liberty!

What was a re-entry into the galleys compared to a re-entry into the void?

“Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7,” Javert growled haughtily. “That is where we are going. Here, it is— which way is it?”

“Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7,” Jean Valjean murmured thoughtfully. He had taken Cosette there; he had thought they would go to England together. How stupid he was! He had walked as if he were a living man, when he was already dead. Jean Valjean thought of returning to that blank empty apartment, seeing Cosette, dragging in mud and sewage, explaining where he had been in some way or other without telling her too much of the truth; he thought of struggling to collect himself while performing the work necessary to connect her to Marius, to her new family. He felt a weariness deeper than any he had ever experienced.

“It is— see here, it is this way,” Javert muttered, and began to limp towards one of the small narrow alleys.

Jean Valjean recognized that Javert was heading in the wrong direction.

That alley plunged away from his apartment. It would take them the wrong way. He should speak up, correct Javert, tell him to take him back to Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7– so that he could begin the work of arranging Cosette’s marriage and entombing himself.

Jean Valjean held his peace.

He said nothing. He mutely allowed Javert to take him the wrong way.

“We shall see,” he said internally. “We shall see. Perhaps he will change his course.”

Suddenly the apartment, far from being a refuge, had become a horror to him.

There are griefs so horrible the mind revolts against facing them. There is suffering so great the soul flees in terror. There is pain so deep that flesh instinctually recoils, and is physically repulsed, as if scorched by molten metal. Under the shadow of so much anguish brave men become cowards, strong men become weak, and virtuous men become corrupted.

Jean Valjean had not yet allowed himself to reflect on his loss of Cosette.

From the moment he had left for the Rue de la Chanvrerie he had shut his mind to it; he had walled up that portion of his thoughts; he had barricaded himself against it. He had felt that grief hanging over his head, like an immense towering wave about to crash down on him— and he had shut his eyes, postponing all thought with the firmness of terror. He made himself numb. He plunged himself into toil, and drowned himself in his task; he had said “nothing is settled yet,” and he had said “we will see if he lives,” and he had said “we will see if I am imprisoned again,” he had convinced himself that he may not even need to grieve after all, and he had clung to every foolish desperate illusion until the moment it turned to smoke within his hands. Now he found himself forced, once again, to reflect on it.

And then suddenly a hope occurred to him.

Deep griefs always come with shallow hopes. A man adrift at sea, doomed to die, will delude himself that every meaningless flash on the horizon may be the sail of a ship. Someone who has lost a loved one will say to themselves that the doctor may have made a mistake, that the newspaper may have misprinted the obituary, that they may have simply dreamed it after all; they will invent for themselves a thousand useless petty mirages to postpone sinking entirely into despair.

Jean Valjean had just deluded himself into seeing one of these mirages.

“Ah,” He said suddenly. And then he smiled, a horrible smile that would have rent the heart of anyone who saw it. Javert, who was absorbed in his own monologue about how the state of the paving stones reflected “the state of the government of this country,” did not see it.

Jean Valjean had just reflected that his injuries might be a blessing. Perhaps he should help Javert find the proper route. If he truly was returning to Cosette, then his wounds might fill her with pity— so much pity that she would forget all about her Marius, and wish only to take care of her father.

He remembered the day he had returned home with that horrible burn on his arm. The poor child had felt sorry for him; she had finally remembered her old broken suffering father, who she might have been on the point of forgetting. His daughter, who he feared was an adult, had suddenly turned into a child again.

If he returned like this, on the point of death-- perhaps his leg was entirely broken, and men could die from broken legs!-- Cosette would feel so much pity for him that she would entirely forget about that ninny from the Luxembourg. She would once again become his little child, the little girl who played with shuttlecocks and picked flowers and talked to him about her favorite birds and little books and the new songs she played on her harmonium; she would be a playful little child, not an adult who had no place for a father in her heart. Their life would continue just as it was.

He felt gratitude for Javert for plunging him into a situation where he should be wounded so terribly, with a merciful and beautiful wound. Existence seemed meaningful again. He felt a door open for him; life seemed splendid and full of light; a new day began to dawn in his soul; he reflected that all the agony of the barricade and the sewer and the river was a small payment after all to experience such a radiant bliss.

He was so intoxicated by the idea of his future happiness that he did not hear the ridiculous nonsense Javert was saying to him (“we have got to get over these paving stones, so listen carefully. You must listen and do as I say. Do you hear me? Jean Valjean? Do you hear me? He doesn’t hear me—“) and was transported.

A mirage of hope is fragile and insubstantial. If a man attempts to set any weight on it, it reveals itself to be empty air.

Jean Valjean then remembered that Cosette’s lover, Marius, was also terribly injured.

“Oh,” he said despairingly.

Jean Valjean shuddered. It was as if the door he thought had reopened was once again slammed shut in his face. The iron collar of a chain closed around his throat.

“Marius,” Jean Valjean said in a tone that was too exhausted to be loathing.

“The dead boy, Marius, yes,” Javert grumbled. Then he staggered, made a small groan of pain, and paused for a moment. “Wretched knees. Why should people have knees? Horrible. Now come, follow me this way, come this way, hurry along. Marius was the dead boy.”

“Marius was not dead,” Jean Valjean said dazedly, “that would be too simple.”

“Simple!” Javert snarled bitterly, still stumbling. “Yes, things were simple once—!”

Jean Valjean did not hear him.

Surely Cosette would spend all of her time with her injured lover, who was her existence now, and all she needed. She would tend him back to health; she would spend all her time by his bedside, she would bandage his wounds— of course, as her lover was young and full of life, and it is a far sadder thing for a young man to be injured than an old one.

The wretchedness of a young man interests a young girl, but the wretchedness of an old man interests no one. It is, of all distresses, the coldest.

What is the suffering of a peasant galley-slave, after all? Such men are used to suffering. They are accustomed to it. They are not meant to have people who take care of them in their old age.

He did not blame Cosette for this; it was natural, it was the instinct of youth to seek out youth, and for innocence to seek out innocence. He had dared to believe he could steal what did not belong to him.

Javert was tugging on him and saying some more useless nonsense or other (“here, if you listen, there is another half-built barricade or other, let me pull your leg over this—you must move your leg this way—I cannot do this for you this time, you are not a small man, come, here,—“) Jean Valjean did not hear him.

He was overwhelmed with grief. It was the grief of a last puerile and idiotic hope being extinguished.

In the midst of his dejection he felt a sudden horror at himself. He grew outraged at his own selfish fantasy of making his young daughter into his caretaker, a sort of permanent child and permanent nurse. He thought of the repulsive joy he had felt at making Cosette his lifelong doctor, and began to furiously interrogate himself for it.

Why should he have felt joy at such a selfish thing? Why should he have wanted to cruelly take advantage of his young daughter’s pity, and force her to play his servant? Why should he have felt happy, even for a moment, to deprive Cosette of youth, of joy, of freedom, of love, and of life?

He reflected that even if his inane selfish dream had come true, and Cosette had abandoned her Marius to spend all her life taking care of her pathetic injured father, she would have one day regretted it. Perhaps in the moment, she would have cared for him very deeply. But years later, as an old maid, with no other duty in life but to look after a sick and elderly parent, Cosette would have remembered Marius with regret.

She would have thought: “I wish I had not had my father to take care of. I have been forced to grow old without being young. If I did not have to carry this sick old man as a burden, my life could have been happy.” And she would have felt bitterness towards him every time she helped him through the weakness and sickness of old age, and her pity would have turned to disgust, and she would have even grown to hate him.

This thought, more selfish than the others, affected him most deeply. Jean Valjean’s reverie became more black and terrible.

His life was monstrous all around him. Every moment that passed made his muscles crack. The simplest tasks were arduous; to stand, to walk, and to breathe seemed like only so many terrible labors.

He reflected on this with an apparent terrifying calmness, the uncanny and inhuman coldness of a statue. Without, he was glacial and indifferent; within, he was breaking.

The parts of his soul he had once thought were solid and unyielding, the parts that had survived even nineteen years in the bagne, now crumbled. The subsoil within him gave way. The foundation of his existence collapsed into dust. It was as if the interior of his soul had been swept off by a torrential wave and all that remained was a massive floodplain; he felt that he had become hollow.

He no longer recognized himself.

Long ago, he had a family; long ago, he had lost them; long ago he had fought and struggled and grieved for years, uselessly and in vain; and long ago he had given up all hope and let go of his hold on them. He could not remember what they looked like anymore. He thought of them numbly, like an old wound so covered with scar tissue that it could no longer feel any sensations. He vaguely remembered that he must have loved them, once.

He told himself that this grief too could pass in the same way. He could lose Cosette, and grieve for her, and weep until his eyes were blinded, and cry out in agony until he lost his voice, until one day he was blind and mute and insensible, and the pain was a distant memory.

A voice within him howled in outrage.

At that moment, descending into that horrible forgetfulness seemed to him an act of abject criminal cowardice, as horrible as rejecting the memory of the Bishop or of God. It was better to suffer, to tear himself to pieces with his fingernails, to lacerate his own entrails, to rend his own heart, and to die.

Jean Valjean reflected that his original object, before he’d encountered Javert, had been to conceal all of this from Cosette. He had planned to clean himself, to remove the stench of the sewer and the river, and to hide whatever wounds he had.

Now he recognized that concealing everything from Cosette was impossible. He was too badly injured. He would not be able to visit a bath-house before returning to the apartment. His daughter would see that something, certainly, had happened to him the previous nights.

“I can explain it in some way or other,” he murmured.

Yet his mind was slow and heavy. His head throbbed with the effort of forming thoughts. He wondered, with a vague terror, if he would have the ability to lie.

And then there was the presence of Javert, that horrible hound-dog of the law, with his brutal violent honesty. Javert was not a man who concealed things.

Jean Valjean shuddered. In the blackest pit of his heart he said to himself that he would prefer for Javert to take him to the station-house at the Place du Châtelet. He felt a dim fury for Javert— for losing his mind at such a horrible wretched inopportune time, for refusing to arrest him at the only moment when it was necessary.

He thought, bitterly, of how not so long ago he had deluded himself into believing that Cosette would be allowed to continue loving him, even if he had the scorn of the rest of the world.

There were ways to send letters from prison, after all. He could easily bribe some guard or other into sending Cosette a letter that told her M. Fauchelevent had died while traveling; in that way, she would mourn her father, but she would mourn the good and innocent father who she loved. He would be dead to her, but he would be a dead man who she remembered with fondness, and not a wretched lying galley slave she remembered with horror.

“Now, here!” Javert barked suddenly. “I have taken the wrong road.”

He saw, vaguely, that Javert had led them into another black and lightless alley– the Rue de Piété. The walls were so narrow they seemed to close in about him like the bars of a cage.

Jean Valjean was overwhelmed with relief.

“Oh, there are too many streets in this country,” Javert muttered miserably, panting in exertion, and speaking in a voice that sounded slurred and half-asleep. “See what a miserable maze they call a ‘city!’ They-“

He went on in this fashion for a very long time. Jean Valjean did not listen, as he was absorbed by a sudden tragic realization.

“So this is why Javert has been sent to me,” Jean Valjean said to himself. “It is because I do not have the strength to leave her on my own.”

He had searched deeply within his own soul, and he had found weakness. He would never be able to let go of Cosette.

Even though he was perhaps only an imitation of a father, he could not let go of his child. He thought of how small she had been when he had first met her, trembling the forest, her eyes wide and glassy. Her small hands had been red with chilblains, the first time he had touched them; they were very white now. When she was young her shoes were small enough to fit in one hand, her clothes resembled the clothes of a doll; how tall she had grown, so quickly! He thought of how she loved to collect flowers and tie them into bracelets and garlands; she had first done this with the flowers from the convent garden (children were not allowed to pick them, but he would have denied her nothing). She used to play with dolls: there was the one she named Catherine, and the one she named Marguerite, the one she named Leopoldine, and the one she named Juliette; sometimes she left them in his cottage at the convent, “to keep him company.” When had she stopped playing with dolls? He could not remember. How quickly it had all happened! Her childhood had slipped through his fingers without his being aware of it. He had not even realized it had passed until it was gone. The games of childhood, the laughter, the gardens, the music, the books, the little conversations on their long slow morning walks; he had thought those things belonged to him.

He saw that even the power of his own conscience would be overthrown by the desperate possessive grief within him.

In his weakness, in his misery, he would’ve invented justifications for staying in Cosette’s life. He would have pretended she could need a husband and her father too. He would have pretended there were reasons to stay other than selfishness. He would have lied to himself, and lied to her; they would have lived in lies for decades, and he should have brought the filthy shadow of the galleys to the dinner table of Madame Pontmercy, and he would have poisoned her innocence with his guilt, and he would have cast a shadow over her happiness— all for his own weakness!

It was necessary for her to be freed. The bond needed to be cut. And if Jean Valjean could not cut it alone, something needed to force the separation.

This was why, he at last recognized, that God had placed Javert in his path. Here was a man who would forcibly sever the thread that bound Cosette to him. Here was an externalization of the warnings of his conscience. Here was a police officer, a man whose duty was to separate those who were outside of society from those who belonged to it. This was a man who understood that Jean Valjean could not be part of any family of men; this was a man who knew that all doors were shut to him. It was as if the force of Javert’s violent grasping claws had been added to the force of his conscience. The voice within him that cried he was unworthy, that he was a wretch who had no right to force himself upon the innocent, that he was a dead man who had no right to force himself upon the living— this voice had taken the form of a man, and that man was Javert.

This task required a more severe judge than himself, and hands that were more merciless than his own.

He would need only to surrender to Javert, to tell Javert he had gone the wrong way, to tell Javert that they were not too far from the Rue de l’Homme Armé now, and to guide him back to his apartment.

And then Javert would grab him by the collar, drag him through the door, and tell Cosette: “this is not your father; this is the galley slave Jean Valjean, and here, take him!” — and Cosette! She would not know what it meant, and he would have to explain it to her. Even if he were free from prison, that horrible frightening face of Javert would haunt him all his life, ensuring he was kept in his place, dodging him, hounding him, tormenting him. This would be the final severing of the bond between himself and the living world; this was why God had sent him into Javert’s path along the Pont Au Change.

He would be repulsive to the eyes of all mankind, and worse, he would be repulsive to the eyes of Cosette. It was only then that his soul would at last be pure. The selfishness within him would, at last, be burned away.

This was his final trial: to be loved, and then to be hated by the one who had loved him. By lowering himself in the eyes of Cosette he would finally raise himself in the eyes of God. Once this was accomplished, all could perhaps be over for him.

He had only to correct Javert’s mistake.

He opened his mouth, his lips trembling; then he shut it, in a fit of uncertainty.

Jean Valjean was in anguish at what he recognized was his last decision. Should he inform Javert of the correct way? Should he take on this last horrible act of sacrifice?

He was overwhelmed, crushed beneath waves of conflicting and contradictory ideas, which had attacked him all at once, and which were too much for him to bear. All of the sacrifices he had made before seemed simple and trivial. The first step was nothing: the last was everything. Champmatheiu was nothing; Cosette was everything.

His conscience was inexorable. Into that well of labor he had flung in his wealth, his riches, his fortune; he had cast in his life, his liberty, his well-being, his rest, his joy; still, it was not satisfied, it hungered, and it demanded more. He could only finish by throwing in his own heart.

He stood, trembling, hesitant, having thought so deeply and yet decided nothing; he felt as if he were standing on the edge of a gulf and deciding whether to leap.

Javert had resolved not to think about anything. This resolve was being sorely tested.

He looked at the narrow unfamiliar street around him with the air of a feral animal that had accidentally wandered into a church. The black buildings loomed above him, tall and austere. A lantern hung above the street: it had been smashed, by some rebel or gamin or other. The windows were blank and lightless.

Javert’s eyes had the feline phosphorescence of birds of the night, so he could see in the dark. Otherwise, he would have been blind.

The realization that he had taken a wrong turn forced him to pause and consider his situation again— a horrible thing! Abominable! Torturous! Terrible! He refused to do it.

Yet he was forced to acknowledge he was committing an act of sedition against the government he had once served, and that this had apparently unsettled him so much that the world below was now as much of a mystery as the world on high.

The roads he once thought were straight and simple now suddenly bent in new directions. Those directions led to a maze, a Minotaur’s labyrinth, a cage in the heart of society for a wild beast that could not be permitted to exist at liberty. This confusion was a punishment for such an insurrection! For such a trespass against authority!

He halted like a dog reaching the end of its leash, feeling the collar around its neck pulled tight.

As he stood, in a sort of manic desperation, clutching at his whiskers and attempting to reorient himself in a city that had become unknowable and unfamiliar – he felt Jean Valjean mutter a prayer, fall into a faint, and slide out of his hands.

“No more of that!” he snarled; it was too late. He struggled to slow Jean Valjean’s fall; after a few moments the two of them were both on the pavement underneath a wretched looking apartment.

”Come, we are getting up,” Javert said.

Jean Valjean lay on his back in a deeply uncomfortable position. Javert shook him until he awoke. His eyes wandered vaguely; his lips, blue and trembling, appeared to be mouthing words, as if he were in some sort of horrible internal argument with himself. Every aspect of him breathed anxiety and uncertainty.

Jean Valjean had the air of a suicidal man considering whether he should make the leap. That made Javert feel an emotion, which he hated, because emotions were horrible.

“Here! We are getting– we shall find the proper direction!” Javert shook him again. “Get up, here, come!”

Jean Valjean stared at him with a fixed expression. He had the eyes of a hunted animal that had gotten its legs caught in a beartrap, that had lingered in the trap for hours in unbearable agony, and that now saw the approach of the hunter as a relief.

Javert trembled. His hands, which were in the process of clutching Jean Valjean’s sewer-stained shirt like terrible vises, suddenly lost their hold. He was struck with a sudden horror at himself.

He began to think—

“Come, no need for that!” Javert barked furiously, like a wounded dog barking at the air, and then clasped his head in his hands. “Damn thinking! How do men do it? Certainly men do not do this all the time? Certainly men do not ‘think’ every day? Useless! A fatigue! What torture it is!”

He turned to glare at Jean Valjean.

“Here you are; you have no business being dead. It is my coat that is too heavy. We will need to get rid of this— useless weight!”

Javert began to furiously unbutton his coat. His hands fumbled with the buttons, but they were too strong to be ripped out, so he lay on the ground furiously writhing and battling with them for some minutes. He cursed buttons for being rebellious, and then he cursed himself for rebelling against the buttons; he cursed this wretched anarchical society for inventing something as horrible and wretched as buttons; he cursed himself for cursing society; he took great care not to think about anything. Jean Valjean watched him as dispassionately as if he were observing the death throes of an insect.

“There!” Javert barked victoriously at last, breathing heavily and tearing himself out of his coat like a wolf escaping a difficult trap. He flung the coat aside, glaring at it and continuing to bark: “It is gone! There, it is done!”

Jean Valjean stared at him blankly.

Javert’s breathing was suddenly shallow; he recognized that he was being suffocated, that he could no longer breathe, that his lungs were paining him, that his breathing was restricted. He grasped at his neck and felt his leather collar. It was too tight, evidently, it was choking him.

“Come here, this too!” He snarled, lying on his back and clawing at it viciously, like a dog attempting to remove its collar with its paws. “Here, it is choking; here, see how it prevents one from doing his duty—“

His hands no longer seemed to obey him; they were numb, and the fingers no longer flexed on command. Rebellious hands! How fitting that his body should revolt against him! “So anarchy is true for the body of a man as well as the body of the government!” He snarled, and batted his hands at the collar buckle; they shuddered uselessly, and the fingers could not do the very simple task of unbuckling it. In a fit of anger he struck one hand repeatedly against the paving stones, with the haughty expectation that a punishment would teach it to behave properly— some fingers began to bend in wrong directions and his hand looked less like a hand; he smiled smugly, and then attempted to unbuckle his collar again. He was outraged when he did not succeed. The trembling clumsiness only intensified as he fumbled with the buckle again; he snarled a curse, and attempted to—

Then he felt Jean Valjean’s powerful hands seize him by the throat.

For a flash of a moment Javert deluded himself, with haughty joy and relief, that Jean Valjean had come to his senses at last and was finally going to strangle him.

“Well then, go on! Here, I am not proud,” He said pompously. He leaned into the touch, like a prey animal placing its bare throat into the jaws of a predator.

Then, as at the barricades, he realized with outrage and horror that the hands around his neck were gentle. They fumbled with the buckle around his collar. The fingers trembled.

Jean Valjean’s shadowed face and inscrutable expression became suddenly monstrous. Javert felt a sudden— rebellious ! Cowardly! Wretched!— desperation to crawl away, to flee, to hide, to cringe like a dog with its tail between its legs, a primal terror curbed only by his far greater knowledge that it was not his place to disobey a superior. After some agonizing moments frozen in Jean Valjean’s grip, in which he was scarcely able to prevent himself from thinking, the collar dropped to the ground.

Jean Valjean leaned back, with a melancholy look on his face. He had the air of a kind passerby who had just freed a stupid suffering animal that had gotten its head stuck in a fence.

Javert was humiliated. He was suddenly tempted to order Jean Valjean to put the collar back on again, like a dog picking up a leash that its owner had dropped and returning it to their hands. He propped himself onto his elbows, aghast, lips blue, quivering — he furiously opened his mouth to explain to Jean Valjean the wrongness of the thing, to explain things very clearly, as he had be explaining all night, how well he would explain—

Jean Valjean gently interrupted him.

“You have taken the wrong direction,” Jean Valjean said calmly, tranquilly, with an authority that conveyed he was not to be questioned.

Javert opened his mouth and stammered something — an apology?— and Jean Valjean motioned for him to be silent. There was restraint in all his movements.

“I understand it no longer pleases you to return me to prison, at the moment.” Jean Valjean continued, with a placidity under which there was an indescribable bitterness. “You wish now to go to the Rue de l’Homme Armé, No. 7.”

Jean Valjean was in a strange half-kneeling position that could not be good for his leg. His head was raised; his hair was very white; on his face he bore an expression of serene and celestial martyrdom.

“I must tell you, Inspector, that you have made a wrong turn. I know these roads very well. A robber knows all the ways to his bolthole, even in the dark.”

“I—“

“Once you assist me to my feet,” he interrupted, “I will tell you the way there.”

Javert, struck by the firm authority in his voice, fell silent and struggled to stand upright. He leaned against the stone of the building, exhausted, trembling, and pulled Jean Valjean up to a standing position.

Jean Valjean winced, as if struck by a wave of agony. He shuddered violently. His breaths became weak, as if he were on the point of sobbing. He had the air of a man allowing himself to be nailed to a crucifix.

Javert hesitated, uncertain. For the first time in a long life of dragging people to places where they did not want to go, of shutting himself off to any pleas or protests, of indifferently ignoring any expressions of discomfort or pain, Javert found himself asking the question:

“Here, is this— this hurting you?”

The idiotic words escaped his lips before he could stop them. His voice was stilted. He hardly knew what he meant by “this.” The question was useless and stupid and nonsensical; it had an obvious answer, which was yes; and then, the answer did not matter because things would proceed the same way in any case. The words hung in the air between them, meaningless and inane.

Jean Valjean responded by casting Javert a blank glance. His face was utterly expressionless.

“We are on the Rue de Piété,” he said icily. “You will proceed back to the Rue de la Verrerie. From there you will turn to the Rue des Billettes, and there to the Rue de l’Homme Armé.”