بخش 2 کتاب 5

BOOK FIVE

A MUTE PACK OF HOUNDS FOR A DIRTY HUNT

THE ZIGZAGS OF STRATEGY

HERE, IN RELATION to the pages you are about to read and others you will come across further in the story, an observation is necessary.

It has already been many years since the author of this book, who is forced, reluctantly, to speak about himself, has been absent from Paris.1 Since he left town, Paris has been transformed. A new city has shot up that is to him in some ways unknown. Needless to say, he loves Paris; Paris is his spiritual home. But through all the demolitions and reconstructions, the Paris of his youth, that Paris that he has carted around religiously in his memory, is now a Paris of bygone days. Let him be allowed to speak of that Paris as though it still existed. It is possible that where the author will lead his readers with the words, “In that street there is this house,” neither house nor street is there anymore today. Readers may check, if they wish to take the trouble. As for himself, he knows nothing about the new Paris and writes with the old Paris before his eyes, an illusion that he treasures. It is sweet for him to dream that there remains behind him something of what he used to see when he was in his homeland and that not everything has vanished. As long as you are busy bustling about in your native land, you imagine that you couldn’t care less about these streets, that these windows, these roofs, these doors, are nothing to you, that these walls are foreign to you, that these trees are any old trees, that these houses that you never enter are useless to you, that these cobblestones you are walking on are just stones. Later, when you are no longer there, you realize that those streets are dear to you, that you miss those roofs, those windows, and those doors, that those walls are necessary to you, that those trees are beloved trees, that those houses you never entered you entered every day, and that you left your blood and guts and your heart on those cobblestones. All the places you no longer see, that you will perhaps never see again, though you have hung on to their image, take on a painful loveliness, come back to you with the melancholy of an apparition, make the Holy Land visible to you, and are, so to speak, the true face of France; and you love them and you evoke them as they are, as they were, and you cling to them, and you don’t want anything to change, for you hold the face of your homeland in your heart as you would your own mother’s face.

Allow us, then, to speak of the past in the present tense. That said, we beg the reader to bear it in mind, and so we move on.

Jean Valjean had turned off the boulevard immediately and dived into the backstreets, changing his direction as often as he could, sometimes suddenly doubling back to assure himself that he wasn’t being followed.

This manoeuvre is peculiar to the hunted stag. On ground where footprints could be left, the manouevre has the advantage, among others, of confusing the scent for dogs and hunters, with one set of tracks covering another. In hunting, this is known as “a false return to cover.” It was a full moon that night. Jean Valjean did not mind. The moon was still very low in the sky and sliced the streets into great blocks of light and shadow. Jean Valjean could glide along the houses and walls on the dark side and keep his eye on the light side. Perhaps he failed to consider what that dark side might hide from him. But in the deserted alleys around the rue de Poliveau he felt reasonably sure no one was coming after him.

Cosette tagged along without asking any questions. The suffering of the last six years of her life had made her somewhat passive. Besides, and this is something we will have more than one occasion to come back to, she was already used to the man’s odd ways and the bizarre ways of destiny, without actually realizing it. Then again, she felt safe, since she was with him.

Jean Valjean did not know where he was going any more than Cosette did. He trusted himself to God just as she trusted herself to him. It seemed to him that he, too, was holding someone greater than himself by the hand; he thought he could feel a being guiding him, invisible. In any case, he had no definite idea, no plan, no scheme. He was not even positive that the man he’d seen was Javert, and then again, it could be Javert without Javert’s knowing that he was Jean Valjean. Wasn’t he in disguise? Didn’t people think he was dead? Yet for some days, things had been happening that were increasingly strange. He did not need any further signs. He was determined not to set foot in the Gorbeau house again. Like an animal driven out of its nesting place, he was looking for a hole to hide in, until he could find one where it was safe to stay.

Jean Valjean traced various labyrinthine paths through the Mouffetard quartier, which was already as sound asleep as if this were the Middle Ages and it was still under medieval regulations and the curfew was still in force; he tackled the rue Censier and the rue Copeau, the rue du Battoir-Saint-Victor and the rue du Puits-l’Ermite, mixing them up and scrambling his tracks in cunning strategic mazes. Around there, there are landlords offering furnished rooms, but he did not even go in, not finding anything that suited him. He could not be sure that if, by chance, they were on his trail, they had lost it.

As eleven o’clock rang out at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont,2 he was crossing the rue de Pontoise in front of the office of the chief of police, which is at no. 14. A few seconds later, the instinct we were talking about earlier made him turn round. At that instant, he distinctly saw, thanks to the police chief’s lantern giving them away, three men, who were following him quite closely and who filed past this lantern one after the other on the dark side of the street. One of the three men went down the path to the police chief’s house. The one walking at the head looked decidedly suspect to him.

“Come, little one,” he said to Cosette, and he quickly turned off the rue de Pontoise.

He took a circuitous route, went round the passage des Patriarches, which was closed at this late hour, went up the rue de l’Épée-de-Bois and the rue de l’Arbalète and plunged into the rue des Postes.

Here, where the Collège Rollin stands today, there is a square where the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève joins the rue des Postes.

(It goes without saying that the rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève is an old street and that not a single post chaise goes down the rue des Postes any more than once every ten years. In the thirteenth century, the rue des Postes was inhabited by potters and its original name was the rue des Pots.) The moon cast a bright light over this square. Jean Valjean dived into a doorway, calculating that if the men were still following him, he could not fail to see them very clearly as they crossed in the bright moonlight.

In fact, less than three minutes later, the men appeared. There were now four of them; all tall, decked out in long brown redingotes with round hats and carrying big truncheons. Their tall stature and their enormous fists were no less disturbing than their sinister stealth in the darkness. You would have said they were four ghosts disguised as bourgeois citizens.

They stopped in the middle of the square and formed a huddle as though conferring together. They seemed undecided. The one who looked like the leader turned round and strongly indicated with his right hand the direction Jean Valjean had taken; one of the others seemed to be pointing somewhat stubbornly in the opposite direction. The moment that the first man turned back, the moon shone full in his face. Jean Valjean recognized Javert perfectly.

IT IS A GOOD THING THE AUSTERLITZ BRIDGE TAKES VEHICLES

UNCERTAINTY WAS OVER for Jean Valjean; luckily for him, it went on for the men on his trail. He took advantage of their indecision; time lost for them, time gained for him. He came out from under the doorway where he had been hiding and pushed off into the rue des Postes in the general direction of the Jardin des Plantes. Cosette was beginning to tire, so he swept her up in his arms and carried her. There was nobody around and the lamps had not been lit because of the moon.

He picked up the pace.

In a few strides, he reached the Goblet pottery, on whose façade the old inscription was clearly legible by the light of the moon: THIS IS THE FACTORY OF GOBLET & SONS.

COME AND CHOOSE PITCHERS AND JUGS,

FLOWERPOTS, PIPES, AND BRICKS.

TO ALL COMERS THE HEART SELLS TILES.1

He left the rue de la Clef behind him, then the fontaine Saint-Victor, skirted around the Jardin des Plantes via the streets on the lower side, and arrived at the quai. There, he looked around. The quai was deserted. The streets were deserted. No one behind him. He took a deep breath.

He reached the pont d’Austerlitz.

There was still a tollhouse there at the time.

He marched up to the tollhouse and handed the man a sou.

“It’s two sous,” said the bridge-keeper, a returned soldier disabled by the war. “You’re carrying a child there who can walk. You pay for two.” He paid up, annoyed that his passage had attracted attention. All flight should be a smooth slide.

A huge cart was crossing the Seine at the same time he was, going over to the right bank just as he was. This was useful to him and he was able to cross the whole bridge in the shadow of the cart.

Halfway across, Cosette decided to walk since her feet had gone to sleep. He put her down on the ground and took her by the hand again.

Once over the bridge, he noticed a timber yard a little to the right and he headed for it. To get there, he had to risk crossing a fairly wide space that was open and well lit. He did not hesitate. Those who were hunting him had evidently been thrown off the scent and Jean Valjean felt he was out of danger. Searched for, yes; followed, no.

A little street, the rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, opened up between two yards enclosed by walls. This street was narrow and dark and looked made for him. Before he went down it he looked back behind him.

From the spot where he was standing, he could see the entire length of the pont d’Austerlitz.

Four shadows had just turned onto the bridge.

These shadows had their backs to the Jardin des Plantes and were heading for the right bank.

These four shadows were the four men.

Jean Valjean gave the shudder of an animal whose scent has been picked up again.

There remained one hope left to him; it was that the men had perhaps not yet stepped onto the bridge and so had not seen him as he crossed the big brightly lit square, holding Cosette by the hand.

In that case, if he dived into the little street in front of him and managed to make it to the yards, the marshes, the market gardens, the empty lots, he could get away.

It seemed to him that a person could trust himself to this silent little street. He took it.

SEE THE 1727 MAP OF PARIS1

AFTER ABOUT THREE hundred feet, he reached a point where the street forked. It divided into two streets, one veering off diagonally to the left, the other to the right. Jean Valjean had before him something resembling the two branches of a Y. Which one should he choose?

He did not dither, but took the right.

Why?

Because the left branch went toward the faubourg, meaning toward built-up areas, and the right branch toward the countryside, meaning toward uninhabited areas.

But they were no longer going at a good clip. Cosette’s pace slowed Jean Valjean down.

He picked her up and carried her again. Cosette laid her head on the good man’s shoulder and did not say a word.

He turned round now and then to have a look. He was careful to stick to the dark side of the street at all times. The street was straight behind him. The first two or three times he looked round he saw nothing, the silence was profound, and he went on walking somewhat relieved. All of a sudden, at a certain point, he turned round and he seemed to see something move, far off in the darkness, at the part of the street he had just come down.

He did not walk, he raced ahead, looking for some little lane he could escape through and so throw them off the scent once more.

He came to a wall.

This wall did not make it impossible to go any farther, though; it was a wall bordering an alley where the street Jean Valjean had taken came to an end.

Here again, he had to decide whether to take the right or the left.

He looked to the right. The alley ran past structures that were either sheds or barns, then petered out in a dead end. You could clearly see the back of this blind alley: a great white wall.

He looked to the left. The alley on this side was open, and about two hundred feet farther on it ran into a street of which it was a tributary. It was on that side that salvation lay.

Just as Jean Valjean was thinking of turning left to try to get to the street he glimpsed at the end of the alley, he saw at the corner where the alley met the street he was heading for, some kind of statue, black, immobile.

It was a person, a man, who had evidently just been posted there, barring the way, waiting.

Jean Valjean stepped back, startled.

The spot in Paris where Jean Valjean found himself, situated between the faubourg Saint-Antoine and La Rapée, is one of those that have been transformed from top to bottom by recent construction works, a desecration according to some, transfiguration according to others. The market gardens, the yards, and the old buildings are gone. There are now brand-new, great wide avenues and amphitheatres, circuses, racetracks, railway stations, a prison, Mazas: progress, as you can see, with its corrective.

Half a century ago, in ordinary everyday parlance, which is entirely made up of traditions and which persists in calling the Institut, Les Quatre Nations, and the Opéra-Comique, Feydeau, the precise point Jean Valjean had come to was called the Petit-Picpus. The porte Saint-Jacques, the porte Paris, the barrière des Sergents, the Procherons, the Galiote, the Célestins, the Capucins, the Mail, the Bourbe, l’Arbre-de-Cracovie, the Petite-Pologne, the Petit-Picpus—these are names from the old Paris, lingering on in the new. The memory of the people floats on this flotsam and jetsam, these wrecks of the past.

The Petit-Picpus, which scarcely existed in any case and was never more than a rough attempt at a quartier, almost had the monastic look of a Spanish town. Not many of the paths were paved, not many of the streets were built on. Except for the two or three streets we will be dealing with, it was all walls and vacant lots. Not a shop, not a vehicle; barely a candle burning in a window here and there; all lights out after ten o’clock, gardens, convents, timber yards, swamps; the odd low-lying little house and great walls as high as the house itself.

That is what the quartier was like last century. The Revolution had already treated it very badly. The republican bigwigs had demolished it, drilled into it, bored through it. Rubbish dumps had been set up in it. Thirty years ago, the quartier started to disappear under the new constructions, deleted. Today it has been completely erased. You won’t find a trace of the Petit-Picpus in any current map of Paris, but it is shown clearly enough in the 1727 map, published in Paris by Denis Thierry, rue Saint-Jacques, opposite the rue du Plâtre, and in Lyon by Jean Girin, rue Mercière, in the arrondissement known as La Prudence. The Petit-Picpus had what we have just called a Y-shaped fork, formed by the rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine splitting into two branches and taking the name of petite rue Picpus on the left and rue Polonceau on the right. The two branches of the Y were joined together at the top as though by a bar. This bar was known as the rue Droit-Mur. The rue Polonceau ended there; the petite rue Picpus went beyond it and climbed toward the Marché Lenoir. If you were coming from the Seine and reached the end of the rue Polonceau, you had the rue Droit-Mur on your left, turning sharply at a right angle, with the wall at the end of this street facing you, and on your right a truncated extension of the rue Droit-Mur that had no exit and that was known as the cul-de-sac Genrot.

This is where Jean Valjean was.

As we have just said, when he saw the black silhouette in the spotlight at the corner of the rue Droit-Mur and the petite rue Picpus, he leaped back. No doubt about it. This phantom was lying in wait for him.

What was he to do?

There was no time now to turn back. What he had spotted moving in the shadows some distance behind him a moment before was no doubt Javert and his squad. Javert had probably already reached the start of the street at the end of which Jean Valjean was standing. Javert, to all appearances, knew this little maze, and had taken the precaution of sending one of his men to guard the exit. These conjectures, virtually facts, immediately whirled, like a handful of dust whipped up by a sudden gust of wind, through Jean Valjean’s sore brain. He studied the cul-de-sac Genrot; that way was blocked. He studied the petite rue Picpus; that way lay a sentry. He could see the dark shape standing out in black against the white pavement flooded with moonlight. To go forward was to fall upon that man. To go back was to fall into Javert’s hands. Jean Valjean felt himself caught in a net that was slowly tightening. He looked up at the sky in despair.

TENTATIVE ATTEMPTS AT ESCAPE

TO UNDERSTAND WHAT follows, you need to get an exact sense of the Droit-Mur lane and in particular, of the corner you used to turn on the left as you emerged from the rue Polonceau to go down the lane. The Droit-Mur lane was almost entirely bordered on the right as far as the petite rue Picpus by shabby-looking houses; on the left by a single sharply angular building composed of several parts that gradually rose a story or two the closer they got to the petite rue Picpus, so that the building was fairly high at that end and fairly low at the rue Polonceau end. There, at the corner we mentioned, it dipped down so low that there was nothing left to see but a wall. This wall did not squarely abut the street; it was canted, with a cut-off corner set well back and shielded by its two angles from any observer who might be either in the rue Polonceau or in the rue Droit-Mur.

From these two angles of the cut-off corner, the wall ran along the rue Polonceau as far as a house bearing the number 49 and along the rue Droit-Mur, where it was much shorter, extending as far as the grim building mentioned above, intersecting with its gable and thereby making another inward-facing angle. The gable had a forlorn look; you could see only a single window or, more precisely, two shutters covered with a sheet of zinc and permanently shut.

The inventory of fixtures we are drawing up here is rigorously exact and will certainly stir up very precise memories in the minds of former residents of the quartier.

The cut-off corner was entirely taken up by a thing that looked like the colossal wreck of a door. This was a vast shapeless set of horizontal planks, the top ones wider than the bottom ones, held together by long transverse iron bands. To one side there was a normal-sized porte cochère that appeared to have been cut there no more than fifty years or so before.

A linden tree showed its branches above the cut-off corner and the wall was covered with ivy on the rue Polonceau side.

In the imminent peril Jean Valjean found himself in, this grim building had something lonely and uninhabited about it that tempted him. He quickly looked it over. He told himself that if he managed to get inside, he would perhaps be saved. Hope came to him with the idea.

In the central part of the front of the building on the rue Droit-Mur, there were old lead drainpipes at all the windows of the various floors. The various branchings of the conduits that ran from a main pipe to end in all these sill-like troughs underneath the windows traced a sort of tree on the façade. These tubular offshoots with their dozens of joints did a fair imitation of those old denuded grapevines that twist around and up the façades of old farmhouses.

This bizarre espalier with branches of metal and iron was the first thing that struck Jean Valjean. He sat Cosette down with her back against a boundary stone, urging her to be quiet, then ran to the spot where the main pipe met the ground. Perhaps there was a way to shinny up from there and get into the house. But the pipe was rusted and out of commission and was only just held up by its brackets. Besides, all the windows of this silent abode had thick iron bars on them, even the dormer windows in the roof. And then again, the moon shone fully on the façade and the man keeping watch at the corner of the street would have seen Jean Valjean scaling the wall. And, lastly, what would he do with Cosette? How could he get her to the top of a three-story house?

He gave up the idea of climbing up the drainpipe and crept along the wall to the rue Polonceau.

When he reached the cut-off corner where he had left Cosette, he noticed that no one could see him there. He eluded all eyes, from all sides, as we have just explained. And he was in shadow. And then, there were two doors. Perhaps they could be forced. The wall above which he could see the linden tree and the ivy obviously enclosed a garden where he could at least take cover, even though there were still no leaves on the trees, and spend the rest of the night.

Time was ticking away. He had to act fast.

He tried the porte cochère and could immediately tell that it had been boarded up on both sides.

He went over to the other big door, which looked more hopeful. It was unbelievably decrepit, its very hugeness making it less solid; the planks were rotten, the iron bands were rusted, and there were only three of them. It seemed possible to break through this worm-eaten obstruction.

When he looked closer, he saw that the door was not a door at all. It didn’t have any hinges, or braces, or a lock, or a slot in the middle. The iron bands crossed it without a gap. Through cracks in the planks he glimpsed the mounds of rubble and roughly cemented stones that passersby could still see there ten years ago. He was forced to admit to his dismay that what looked like a door was simply a wooden panel cladding a structure it backed onto. A person could easily tear off a plank, but you would only find yourself staring at a blank wall.

WHICH WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE BY GASLIGHT

AT THAT MOMENT a muffled and rhythmical noise began to make itself heard some distance away. Jean Valjean took the risk of sticking his nose out to look round the corner into the street. Seven or eight soldiers, in platoon formation, had just turned into the rue Polonceau. He saw their bayonets glinting. They were coming toward him.

These soldiers, at the head of whom he made out the tall form of Javert, were advancing slowly and carefully. They frequently stopped. It was clear that they were exploring all the nooks and crannies in the walls and all the doorways and alleyways.

It was, and here there was no guesswork involved, some patrol that Javert had met up with and requisitioned. Javert’s two acolytes marched in their ranks.

At the pace at which they were moving, and with the stops they kept making, they would need a quarter of an hour to get to the spot where Jean Valjean was. It was an awful moment. A few minutes separated Jean Valjean from this terrifying precipice that was opening up before him for the third time. And now, jail was no longer merely jail, it meant losing Cosette forever; that is, a living death.

There was only one way out.

Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, which we might describe as carrying two bags: In one, he had the thoughts of a saint, in the other, the formidable talents of a criminal. He fumbled around in one or the other as the occasion required.

Among other skills, thanks to his innumerable breakouts from the jail in Toulon, he was, as you will remember, a past master in the amazing art of climbing—without any ladders, without any crampons, through sheer muscle power, supporting himself by the back of the neck, the shoulders, hips and knees, barely making use of the odd relief in the stone in the right angle of a wall—if need be as high as the sixth floor. This is an art that has made the corner of the courtyard of the Conciergerie in Paris, where the prisoner Batte-molle escaped twenty years ago, so famous and feared.

Jean Valjean sized up the wall above which he could see the linden tree. It was roughly eighteen feet high. The bottom part of the angle it formed with the gable of the main building was filled by a triangular pile of masonry, probably designed to preserve this too convenient recess from the stops made by those dung beetles known as pedestrians. This preventive filling in of the corners of walls is very common in Paris.

The pile was roughly five feet high. From the top of the pile the space that had to be climbed to reach the top of the wall was only about fourteen feet, if that. The wall was capped by flat stone without any zigzagging chevrons.

The hard part was Cosette. Cosette did not know how to scale a wall. Abandon her? It never crossed Jean Valjean’s mind. There was no way he could carry her. A man needs all his strength to carry off these tricky ascents. The slightest burden would throw off his centre of gravity and he would fall.

A rope was what was needed. Jean Valjean didn’t have one. Where would a person find a rope at midnight on the rue Polonceau? Certainly, at that moment, if Jean Valjean had had a kingdom, he would have given it for a rope.

All extreme situations have their lightning flashes that sometimes blind us, sometimes illuminate us. The desperate gaze of Jean Valjean lit on the lamppost in the cul-de-sac Genrot.

In those days there were no gaslights in the streets of Paris. At nightfall they used to light lamps placed on posts at regular intervals and these lamps were lifted and lowered by means of a rope that ran from one end of the street to the other and that fitted inside the groove of the lamppost. The reel on which the rope was wound was housed beneath the lantern in a little iron box. The lamplighter had the key and the rope itself was protected up to a certain level by metal casing.

Jean Valjean, with the energy of some supreme struggle, bounded across the street, went into the cul-de-sac, broke open the lock of the little box with the point of his knife, and was back by Cosette’s side an instant later. With a rope. They don’t muck around, these grim finders of expedients, grappling with fate.

We explained before that the lamps weren’t lit that particular night. So the lantern in the cul-de-sac Genrot naturally was out like the rest and you could go past it without noticing that it was no longer in its place.

Yet the hour, the place, the darkness, Jean Valjean’s preoccupation, his odd movements, his comings and goings, all this began to make Cosette anxious. Any other child would have started screaming ages before this. She merely tugged at the bottom of Jean Valjean’s coat. The noise of the approaching patrol could be heard more and more distinctly.

“Father,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper, “I’m frightened. Who’s that coming down there?”

“Shoosh!” the poor man replied. “It’s mother Thénardier.”

Cosette gave a start. He added: “Don’t say a word. Let me handle it. If you yell, if you cry, mother Thénardier will spot you. She’ll come and take you back.” Then, without hurrying, but working deftly with a steady and rapid precision and swift movements all the more remarkable at such a time, when Javert and company could arrive at any second, he undid his cravat, wound it round Cosette’s body under the arms, taking care it would not hurt the little girl, then tied the cravat to one end of the rope using the knot that seamen call a reef knot, took the other end of the rope in his teeth, took off his shoes and his stockings and threw them over the wall, climbed on the pile of masonry, and began to lift himself up in the corner made by the wall and the gable as surely and steadily as if he had rungs under his heels and his elbows. He was on his knees on top of the wall in less than half a minute.

Cosette watched him, stunned and speechless. Jean Valjean’s request for silence and the name of mother Thénardier had chilled her to the bone.

All of a sudden she heard Jean Valjean’s voice crying out to her, though in a whisper again: “Lean back against the wall.” She did as she was told.

“Don’t say a word and don’t be frightened,” Jean Valjean went on.

And she felt herself being lifted from the ground. Before she had time to think, she was at the top of the wall.

Jean Valjean grabbed her, put her on his back, took both her little hands in his left hand, lay down flat and crawled along the top of the wall as far as the cut-off corner. As he had guessed, there was a building there and its roof sloped steeply downward from the top of the wooden cladding to just above the ground, on a fairly gentle inclined plane, just touching the linden tree. A stroke of luck, for the wall was much higher on this side than on the street side. Jean Valjean saw that the ground was far below him.

He had just reached the inclined plane of the roof and had not yet let go of the ridge of the wall when a violent uproar announced the arrival of the patrol. You could hear Javert’s voice thundering: “Search the cul-de-sac! The rue Droit-Mur is guarded, so is the petite rue Picpus. I say he’s in the cul-de-sac!” The soldiers stormed into the cul-de-sac Genrot.

Jean Valjean let himself slide down the whole length of the roof, supporting Cosette as he did so, and when he reached the linden tree he jumped to the ground. Whether out of terror or out of courage, there had not been a peep from Cosette. Her hands were a little grazed.

BEGINNING OF AN ENIGMA

JEAN VALJEAN FOUND HIMSELF in an amazingly vast, weird-looking garden; one of those gardens that seem made to be viewed at night, in winter. The garden was an oblong shape, with an avenue of huge poplars at the back, stands of tall forest trees in the corners, and a space with no shade in the middle, where a very tall tree could be seen standing alone, then a few fruit trees gnarled and bristling like overgrown bushes, square vegetable beds, a melon patch where bell jars shone in the moonlight, and an old drainage well. There were stone benches here and there that looked black with moss. The paths were lined with stiff little dark shrubs that shot straight up. Grass had invaded half of them and green mildew covered the rest.

Jean Valjean had next to him the building whose roof he had used to get down, a heap of firewood, and behind the firewood, right against the wall, a stone statue whose mutilated face was now just a deformed mask that dimly appeared in the darkness.

The building was a sort of ruin where you could make out stripped rooms, one of which seemed to serve as a shed and was full of junk.

The main building on the rue Droit-Mur, which wound back to the petite rue Picpus, threw two outstretched wings into the garden. These inner walls were even more tragic than the outside ones. All the windows were grated. No light was to be glimpsed in any of them. On the upper floors there were hoods over the windows like the ones used in prisons. One of the double façades cast its shadow over the other one, and it fell over the garden like a huge black sheet.

No other house could be seen. The bottom of the garden was lost in mist and in darkness. Yet you could dimly make out walls that intersected as though other things were growing over there, as well as the low roofs of the rue Polonceau.

You could not imagine anything wilder or lonelier than this garden. There was no one there, which was hardly surprising, given how late it was; but it did not look as though the place had been made for anyone to walk in, not even in the middle of the day.

Jean Valjean’s first concern had been to find his shoes and put them back on, then to get into the shed with Cosette. A person trying to escape can never be hidden enough for his own liking. The child, thinking always of mother Thénardier, shared his urgent impulse to curl up into as small a ball as possible.

Cosette was huddled against him, trembling. The tumultuous clamour of the patrol could be heard as they searched the cul-de-sac and the street, the noise of musket butts against the stones, Javert yelling to the spies he had planted, and his curses scrambled with words that could not be made out.

After a quarter of an hour or so, it sounded as if this approximation of a rumbling storm was beginning to move off. Jean Valjean did not breathe.

He had gently placed his hand over Cosette’s mouth.

In any case, the solitude he found himself in was so strangely calm that this appalling racket, so furious and so near, did not ruffle it in the least. It seemed as if the walls were built with the deaf stones the scriptures speak of.

All of a sudden, in the middle of this deep calm, a new noise sounded; a noise that was heavenly, divine, ineffable, as ravishing as the other had been awful. It was a hymn that came from out of the darkness, a dazzling fusion of prayer and harmony in the dark and terrifying silence of the night; the voices of women, but voices composed at once of the pure tone of virgins and the unsophisticated tone of children, the kind of voices that are not of this world and that resemble what the newborn hear, still, and what the dying hear, already. This song came from the black edifice that towered over the garden. At the moment that the uproar of the demons was moving away, you would have said a choir of angels was coming closer in the dark.

Cosette and Jean Valjean fell to their knees.

They did not know what it was, they did not know where they were, but they both felt—man and child, penitent and innocent—that they ought to be on their knees.

What was strange about these voices was that they did not stop the building from seeming deserted. It was like unearthly song in an uninhabited abode. While the voices went on singing, Jean Valjean no longer thought anything. He no longer saw night, he saw blue skies. It seemed to him that he could feel the spreading of the wings we all have inside us.

The song died out. It had perhaps gone on a long time. Jean Valjean could not tell. Hours of ecstasy are never more than a minute long.

Everything had fallen silent again. Nothing more in the street, nothing more in the garden. What had been threatening, what had been reassuring—all had faded away. The wind ruffled the dry grass on top of the wall and it made a soft and mournful sound.

THE ENIGMA GOES ON

THE NIGHT BREEZE was up, which indicated that it had to be between one and two in the morning. Poor Cosette did not say a word. Since she was sitting down on the ground beside him and had leaned her head against him, Jean Valjean thought she had fallen asleep. He bent over and looked at her. Cosette’s eyes were wide open and her thoughtful look gave Jean Valjean a stab of pain. She was still trembling.

“Are you sleepy?” said Jean Valjean.

“I’m very cold,” she answered.

A moment later she went on: “Is she still there?”

“Who?” said Jean Valjean.

“Madame Thénardier.”

Jean Valjean had already forgotten the means he had used to get Cosette to stay quiet.

“Ah!” he said. “She’s gone. There’s nothing to be frightened of now.”

The little girl sighed as though a heavy weight had been lifted from her chest.

The ground was damp, the shed was open on all sides, the breeze got fresher by the second. The good man took off his redingote and wrapped Cosette up in it.

“Are you a bit warmer like that?” he said.

“Oh, yes, father!”

“All right then, wait for me a moment. I’ll be back.”

He left the ruin and walked along the big building, looking for a better place to shelter. He came across several doors but they were closed. All the ground-floor casement windows had bars on them.

As he passed the inner corner of the building, he noticed that he had come to some arched windows and he could see light through them. He rose on the balls of his feet and looked in at one of these windows. They all opened on a fairly vast room, paved with great big flagstones, broken up with arches and pillars, where all you could make out was a dim glow and great shadows. The glow came from a night-lamp burning in a corner. The room was deserted and nothing stirred in it. Yet the more he looked, the more he thought he saw on the ground, on the flagstones, something that looked as though it was covered in a shroud and that had a vaguely human shape. It was stretched out flat on its stomach, face to the stone, arms out forming a cross, as motionless as death. It looked for all the world, from a sort of snake trailing across the flagstones, as though this sinister figure had a rope around its neck.

The whole room was bathed in that mist peculiar to dimly lit places that adds to their horror.

Jean Valjean often said afterwards that, though he had seen many mournful sights in his life, never had he seen anything more chilling and more terrible than this enigmatic figure accomplishing who knows what mysterious rite in this dismal place, only half-visible in the night. It was frightening to speculate that the thing might be dead, and even more frightening to imagine that it might be alive.

He had the courage to stick his forehead against the glass and watch to see if the thing moved. He stayed like that what seemed to him a long time, in vain; the prostrate figure made no movement. All of a sudden, he felt himself seized with an indescribable terror and he fled. He started to run toward the shed without daring to look back. It seemed to him that if he turned his head he would see the figure walking behind him with great strides, flapping its arms.

He reached the ruin, breathless. His knees gave way; sweat was running down his back.

Where was he? Who could ever have imagined anything like this sort of sepulchre in the middle of Paris? What was this strange house? A building full of nocturnal mysteries, calling souls in the shadows in the voice of angels and then, when they came, suddenly offering them this horrifying vision, promising to open the radiant gate of heaven and opening, instead, the horrible gate of the tomb! And it was indeed a building, a house that had its number in some street! It was not a dream! He needed to touch the stones it was made of to believe it was real.

The cold, the worry, the anxiety, the anguish of the night were giving him a real fever and all these ideas were crashing around in his brain.

He went over to Cosette. She was sleeping.

THE ENIGMA INTENSIFIES

THE CHILD HAD laid her head on a stone and gone to sleep.

He sat down next to her and looked at her. Little by little, the more he looked, the more he calmed down, and he regained his ability to think.

He clearly saw this truth, which was the whole basis of his life from that moment on: that as long as she was there, as long as he had her next to him, he would need nothing except her, would fear nothing except on her behalf. He did not even feel that he was really cold, having taken off his coat to cover her with it.

Meanwhile, through the reverie into which he had fallen, he had heard a peculiar noise for some time. It was like a little bell someone was jingling. The noise was coming from the garden. You could hear it clearly, if faintly. It was like the soft tinkling of cowbells in pastures at night. This noise made Jean Valjean turn round. He looked and saw that there was someone in the garden.

A being that looked like a man was walking among the bell jars in the melon patch, getting up, bending down, stopping, with regular movements, as though he were dragging or stretching something out on the ground. This being seemed to be limping.

Jean Valjean shuddered with the unconquerable tremor of the wretched victims of fate. To such people, everything is hostile and suspect. They distrust the day because it allows them to be seen and the night because it allows them to be caught unawares. A bit before this, he had shivered to see the garden deserted, now he shivered to see that someone was there.

He tumbled once more from chimerical terrors to real terrors. He told himself that Javert and his spies might not have gone, that they had doubtless left people in the street to keep watch, that if this man found him in the garden, he would cry thief and hand him over. He gathered the sleeping Cosette gently in his arms and carried her to the farthest corner of the shed, behind a pile of old furniture that was no longer in use. Cosette did not stir.

From there he observed the movements of the person in the melon patch. What was bizarre was that the noise of the little bell chimed in with the man’s every move. When the man came nearer, the noise came nearer; when he moved away, the noise moved away; if he made a sudden movement, a tremolo accompanied that movement; if he stopped, the noise stopped. It seemed clear that the bell was attached to the man; but, then, what could this mean? What was this man with a bell hung on him like some ram or ox? While he was posing these questions, he felt Cosette’s hands. They were frozen.

“Oh, God!” he said.

He called out in a low voice: “Cosette!”

She did not open her eyes.

He gave her a good shake. She did not wake up.

“She can’t be dead!” he said, and he sprang up, quivering from head to toe.

The most awful thoughts flashed through his mind in a jumble. There are times when hideous suppositions besiege us like a pack of furies, violently storming the compartments of our brains. When it comes to those we love, we come up with all kinds of mad things in our concern. He remembered that sleep could be fatal in the open on a cold night.

Cosette had fallen sprawling to the ground at his feet without stirring, white as a sheet. He listened for her breath; she was breathing, but her breathing seemed weak and fading fast.

How could he get her warm again? How could he rouse her? Everything else was banished from his thoughts. He hurtled out of the ruin, distraught. It was absolutely essential that before a quarter of an hour was up, Cosette be in bed in front of a fire.

THE MAN WITH THE BELL

HE WENT STRAIGHT up to the man he could see in the garden. He had in his hand the roll of money from his waistcoat pocket.

The man had his head down and did not see him coming. In a few bounds, Jean Valjean was at his side. Jean Valjean accosted him, shouting: “A hundred francs!” The man gave a start and looked up.

“There’s a hundred francs in it for you,” Jean Valjean went on, “if you give me shelter for the night!”

The moon shone right on Jean Valjean’s wildly frightened face.

“Good grief, it’s you, father Madeleine!” the man said.

This name, spoken in this tone, at this dark hour, in this unknown place, by this unknown man, made Jean Valjean jump back.

He was ready for anything, except that. The man talking to him was an old man, stooped and lame, decked out more or less like a peasant and wearing a leather knee pad on his left knee with a fairly big bell hanging from it. You could not make out his face, which was in the shadows.

Meanwhile the man had taken off his cap and exclaimed, trembling all over: “Oh, my God! What are you doing here, father Madeleine? How in Christ’s name did you get in? You must have fallen from the sky! It’s no mystery, if ever you do fall, that’s where you’ll fall from, that’s for sure. And just look at you! Where’s your cravat? Where’s your hat? Where’s your coat! Don’t you realize you’d have given anyone who didn’t know you quite a fright? No coat! God in heaven, have all the saints gone mad these days! But just how did you get in here?” The words tumbled out, one after the other. The old man spoke with the volubility of a man of the land and there was nothing disturbing about it. Everything he said was said with a mixture of amazement and simple good nature.

“Who are you? And what is this place here?” asked Jean Valjean.

“Hah! Hah! That’s a good one!” cried the old man. “I’m the man you got a job for and this place is the place you got me a job in. Heavens! Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me?” “No,” said Jean Valjean. “And how come you know who I am?”

“You saved my life,” said the man.

He turned and a shaft of moonlight lit his face side-on and Jean Valjean recognized old Fauchelevent.

“Ah!” said Jean Valjean. “It’s you? Yes, I recognize you.”

“That’s lucky!” said the old man in a tone of reproach.

“And what are you doing here?” Jean Valjean went on.

“What do you think? I’m covering my melons, of course!”

When Jean Valjean had accosted him, old Fauchelevent had, indeed, had in his hand a corner of a straw mat that he was busy laying over the melon bed. He had already laid a number of them in the hour he had been in the garden. It was this operation that had caused him to make the peculiar movements Jean Valjean had observed from the shed.

He went on: “I said to myself: The moon’s bright, there’s going to be a frost. What if I put coats on my melons for them? And,” he added, looking at Jean Valjean with a big guffaw, “it wouldn’t have hurt you to do the same! But how in God’s name did you get here?” Jean Valjean, seeing this man knew him, at least by the name of Madeleine, dropped his guard. He fired off questions. What was bizarre was the way their roles seemed to be reversed now. It was he, the intruder, who was asking the questions.

“And what on earth is this bell you have on your knee?”

“That?” replied Fauchelevent. “That’s so they can keep away from me.”

Old Fauchelevent gave a cheeky wink.

“Hell’s bells! There are only women in this house; lots of young girls. It appears I’d be dangerous to run into. The bell warns them. When I come, they go.” “What is this house, anyway?”

“Heavens! You should know.”

“I don’t.”

“Since you got me the job of gardener here!”

“Tell me as if I knew nothing.”

“All right, then, it’s the convent of Petit-Picpus!”

It came back to Jean Valjean then. Chance, meaning Providence, had thrown him precisely into the covent of the quartier Saint-Antoine where old Fauchelevent, maimed by the fall from his cart, had been accepted on his recommendation two years previously. He repeated, as though talking to himself: “The convent of Petit-Picpus!” “Ah, yes, but now,” Fauchelevent went on, “how the hell did you manage to get in here, you, father Madeleine? You may well be a saint. I know you’re a saint! But you’re a man and men don’t get in here.” “You’re here.”

“I’m the only one.”

“But,” Jean Valjean plowed on, “I must stay.”

“Oh, my God!” cried Fauchelevent.

Jean Valjean moved closer to the old man and said to him in a grave voice: “Father Fauchelevent, I saved your life.” “I remembered that first!” Fauchelevent shot back.

“Well, then, today you can do for me what I once did for you.”

Fauchelevent took Jean Valjean’s two robust hands in his old trembling wrinkled hands and it was some seconds before he could speak. At last, he said: “Oh! It would be a blessing from the good Lord if I could do something for you in return! Me, save your life! Monsieur le maire, this old boy is at your disposal!” A wonderful joy had seemingly transfigured the old man. Light seemed to stream from his face.

“What would you like me to do?” he went on.

“I’ll tell you. Do you have a room?”

“I have a solitary shack, over there, behind the ruin of the old convent, tucked away in a corner no one sees. It has three rooms.” The shack was indeed so well hidden behind the ruin, and so unobtrusive in its design, that Jean Valjean had missed it.

“Good,” said Jean Valjean. “Now I am asking two things of you.”

“What are they, Monsieur le maire?”

“First, you won’t tell anyone what you know about me. Second, you won’t try to find out anything more.”

“As you wish. I know you could never do anything that wasn’t honest and that you have always been a man of God. And then again, anyway, it’s you who got me a place here, it’s your business. I’m yours.” “All right, then. Now come with me. We’ll go and get the child.”

“Ah!” said Fauchelevent. “There’s a child!”

He did not say another word and followed Jean Valjean like a dog following its master.

Less than half an hour later, Cosette, all rosy once more in the glow of a good fire, was sleeping in the old gardener’s bed. Jean Valjean had put his cravat and his coat back on; the hat hurled over the wall had been found and retrieved. While Jean Valjean was putting on his coat, Fauchelevent had taken off his knee pad with the bell and it now hung from a nail next to a shutter, decorating the wall. The two men were warming themselves, leaning on a table on which Fauchelevent had put a lump of cheese, some greyish-brown bread, a bottle of wine and two glasses, and the old man was saying to Jean Valjean, putting his hand on his knee: “Ah, father Madeleine! You didn’t recognize me straight off! You save people’s lives and then you forget all about them! Oh, that’s bad! They remember you! You’re an ungrateful bugger!” IN WHICH IT IS EXPLAINED HOW JAVERT CAME UP EMPTY

THE EVENTS WE have just seen in reverse, so to speak, happened in the most straightforward way.

When Jean Valjean, the very night of the day Javert had arrested him by Fantine’s deathbed, escaped from the municipal prison of Montreuil-sur-mer, the police assumed that the escaped convict would have headed for Paris. Paris is a maelstrom where anyone can lose themselves and everyone disappears in the world’s great whirlpool just as they would do in the whirlpool of the sea. No forest can conceal a man the way the teeming multitude does. Fugitives of every stripe know this. They head for Paris in order to be swallowed up; you can be saved by being swallowed up. The police know this, too, and it is in Paris that they look for what they have lost elsewhere. They looked for the ex-mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer there. Javert was called to Paris to advise in the investigation. Javert was, in fact, of tremendous assistance in the recapture of Jean Valjean. Javert’s zeal and intelligence on that occasion were noted by Monsieur Chabouillet, the secretary of the prefecture under the comte Anglès. Monsieur Chabouillet had, in any case, already taken Javert under his wing, and he had the inspector from Montreuil-sur-mer transferred to the Paris police. There, in various ways, Javert made himself what we might call honourably useful, though the expression might seem misplaced for such services.

He no longer thought about Jean Valjean. For these dogs who are always on the hunt, today’s wolf eclipses yesterday’s wolf completely. Then suddenly in December 1823, Javert found himself reading a newspaper. Javert never read newspapers, but he was nothing if not a monarchist and he was eager to hear the details of the triumphant entry into Bayonne1 of the “generalissimo prince.” As he was finishing the article that interested him, a name, the name of Jean Valjean, leaped out at him at the bottom of a page. The paper announced that the convict Jean Valjean was dead and published this fact in terms so categorical that Javert was left in no doubt. All he said was: “That’s that, then. Good riddance to bad rubbish.” Then he threw the paper down and thought no more about it.

Some little time later it happened that the Seine-et-Oise2 prefecture sent the prefecture of police in Paris a notice about the kidnapping of a child, which had taken place, they said, in peculiar circumstances, in the commune of Montfermeil. A little girl, seven or eight years old, said the notice, who had been entrusted by her mother to an innkeeper of the district, had been stolen by a stranger; this little girl answered to the name of Cosette and was the daughter of a whore named Fantine, who had died in hospital, no one knew when or where. This notice passed under Javert’s nose and set him thinking.

The name Fantine was well-known to him. He remembered that Jean Valjean had made him, Javert, laugh out loud by asking him for a stay of three days so he could go and look for that creature’s offspring. He recalled that Jean Valjean had been arrested in Paris just as he was getting into the Montfermeil coach. A few things at the time seemed to indicate that this was the second time he had taken this coach and that he had already, the day before, made a trip to the outskirts of the village, for no one had spotted him in the village itself. What was he doing in the Montfermeil region? They had not been able to figure it out. Javert now understood. Fantine’s daughter was there. Jean Valjean had gone to look for her. Now this child had been stolen by a stranger. Who could this stranger be? Could he be Jean Valjean? But Jean Valjean was dead. Javert, without saying anything to anyone, took the rattletrap of a coach from the Plat-d’étain, in the cul-de-sac of La Planchette, and made the trip to Montfermeil. He hoped to find enlightenment there, instead he found a complete muddle.

In the first few days, the Thénardiers, greatly riled, had told all. The story of the Lark’s disappearance had done the rounds of the village. There were instantly several versions of the story, which had wound up being described as a case of child-snatching. Hence the police notice. But once his initial reaction was over, old man Thénardier, with his usual admirable instinct, swiftly realized that it is never helpful to stir up the crown prosecutor and that his complaints regarding the “kidnapping” of Cosette would have the immediate result of fixing the beady eye of the law on him, Thénardier, and on lots of shady dealings he had going. The thing owls most want not to see is a light shone in their faces. To start with, how could he explain the fifteen hundred francs he had received? He reined himself in, muzzled his wife, and acted amazed when they talked to him about a “stolen child.” He had no idea what they were going on about; no doubt he had complained in the heat of the moment about someone “stealing” that dear little girl from him so soon—out of tenderness he’d have liked to hang on to her for another two or three days—but it was her “grandfather” who had come for her, the most natural thing in the world. He had added the bit about the grandfather for effect. This was the story Javert had stumbled onto when he arrived in Montfermeil. The grandfather caused Jean Valjean to evaporate.

Yet Javert sank a few questions, like probes, into Thénardier’s story. What kind of man was this grandfather and what was his name?

Thénardier answered in a straightforward manner: “He’s a rich farmer. I saw his passport. I believe his name is Monsieur Guillaume Lambert.” Lambert is a solid sort of name and most reassuring. Javert went back to Paris.

“Jean Valjean is well and truly dead,” he said to himself, “and I am a mug.”

He was beginning to forget the whole thing when, sometime in March 1824, he heard talk of an odd character living in the parish of Saint-Médard and nicknamed “the beggar who gives alms.” This character was, it was said, a man with a private income whose name no one really knew and who lived alone with a little girl of eight, who herself knew nothing, except that she came from Montfermeil. Montfermeil! That name kept coming back, and it made Javert prick up his ears. A snitch of an old beggar, a former beadle, to whom this character had given charity, added a few extra details: This man of means was an extremely antisocial character, who only showed himself at night, never spoke to anyone, except, sometimes, to the poor, and never let anyone anywhere near him. He wore a horrible old yellow redingote worth several millions, since the lining was stuffed with banknotes. This definitely piqued Javert’s curiosity. So as to get a very close look at this fantastic millionaire without scaring him off, he borrowed the beadle’s castoffs one day and took over the spot where the old snitch used to crouch every night whining prayers while he did his spying.

The “suspicious individual” did indeed come to Javert thus disguised and gave him alms. The moment he did, Javert looked up, and the shock that Jean Valjean had received thinking he recognized Javert was the same as the one Javert received thinking he recognized Jean Valjean.

But the darkness could have deceived him; Jean Valjean’s death was official. Javert still had doubts, serious doubts; and when in doubt, Javert, scrupulous as he was, never collared any man.

He followed his man right to the Gorbeau house and got the old woman to talk, which was not too hard to do. The old woman confirmed the story about the redingote lined with millions, and she told him about the episode with the thousand-franc note. She had seen it! She had touched it! Javert paid for a room. That very evening, he set himself up in it. He went and listened at the door of the mysterious tenant, hoping to hear the sound of his voice, but Jean Valjean had seen his candle through the keyhole and thwarted the spy by keeping quiet.

The next day Jean Valjean had decamped. But the noise made by the five-franc coin he dropped was noted by the old woman who, hearing the movement of money, suspected he was about to make a run for it and rushed to warn Javert. That night, when Jean Valjean went out, Javert was waiting for him behind the trees in the boulevard with two men.

Javert had asked the prefecture for backup, but he had not told them the name of the individual he was hoping to nab. That was his secret, and he had kept it for three reasons: first, because the slightest indiscretion could put Jean Valjean on his guard; next, because getting your hands on an escaped convict reputed dead, a condemned man that the annals of justice have classified once and for all time as “among the most dangerous kind of malefactors,” would be a glorious coup that the old boys on the Paris police would definitely never allow a newcomer like Javert to score, and he feared they would take his galley slave away from him; last, because Javert, being an artist, had a taste for surprise. He couldn’t stand those much-trumpeted successes that are spoiled by being talked about long in advance. He like to work on his masterpieces in the shadows and then unveil them suddenly to a general gasping.

Javert had followed Jean Valjean from tree to tree, then from street corner to street corner, and had not lost sight of him for a single instant. Even in those moments when Jean Valjean felt most secure, Javert’s eye was on him.

Why didn’t Javert arrest Jean Valjean then and there? Because he was still in doubt.

It must be remembered that, at the time, the police were not exactly at ease; they were hampered by a free press. The song and dance over a few arbitrary arrests, denounced by the newspapers, had been heard all the way to the Chambers and made the prefecture timid. To attack the freedom of the individual was a grave matter. The officers were afraid of getting things wrong, for the prefect put the blame on them; a mistake meant dismissal. Imagine the impact that this short paragraph, reproduced in twenty newspapers, would have had throughout Paris: “Yesterday, an old white-haired grandfather, a respectable man of means, was out walking with his eight-year-old granddaughter when he was arrested and taken to the prefecture, where he was locked up as an escaped convict!” We repeat that, on top of this, Javert had his own scruples; the dictates of his conscience were added to the strictures of the prefect of police. He really did have his doubts.

So Jean Valjean turned on his heel and walked off into the dark.

Sadness, anxiety, anguish, despair, the fresh burden of being forced to disappear into the night once again and search for a refuge willy-nilly throughout Paris for Cosette and himself, the necessity of adapting his pace to the pace of a child, all this, even without his realizing it, had changed Jean Valjean’s gait and given his physical bearing such a stamp of senility that the police themselves, incarnated in Javert, could be fooled, and were fooled. The impossibility of getting too close, his getup as an old emigrant tutor, Thénardier’s declaration that made him a grandfather, finally, the belief that he had died in custody, added further to the uncertainty that coagulated in Javert’s mind.

He momentarily entertained the idea of asking him for his papers. But if the man was not Jean Valjean, and if the man was not a good old honest man of means, then he was probably some cunning old shyster up to his neck in the obscure web of Paris crime, some dangerous gang leader, giving alms to hide his other talents—the oldest trick in the book. He would have his accomplices, his sidekicks, his bolt-holes where he could no doubt go to ground. All the detours he was taking around the streets seemed to indicate that he was not a simple sort of man. To arrest him too soon would be “to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.” Was there any harm in waiting? Javert was perfectly certain that he would not get away. And so, he walked on, in some perplexity, putting dozens of questions to himself about this enigmatic character.

It was not until quite late, in the rue de Pontoise, that thanks to the very bright light streaming from a pothouse, he definitely recognized Jean Valjean.

In this world there are two beings who are thrilled to the marrow: a mother when she finds her child again and a tiger who catches up with its prey. Javert experienced that profound thrill.

As soon as he recognized Jean Valjean, the fearsome convict, beyond a doubt, he remembered that there were only three of them and he asked for reinforcements from the prefect of police in the rue de Pontoise.

Before you grab a stick with thorns, you put gloves on.

The delay and stopping at the place Rollin to consult with his officers made him lose the scent. But he quickly realized that Jean Valjean would want to put the river between himself and his pursuers. He bent his head and thought hard, like a bloodhound putting his nose to the ground to pick up the right trail. With his powerfully direct instinct, Javert went straight to the pont d’Austerlitz. A word with the toll-keeper brought him up to speed: “Have you seen a man with a little girl?” “I made him pay two sous,” said the toll-keeper. Javert reached the bridge in time to see Jean Valjean on the other side of the water, leading Cosette by the hand across the space lit by the moon. He saw him go into the rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine; he thought of the cul-de-sac Genrot laid out there like a trap and of the single way out of the rue Droit-Mur into the petite rue Picpus. He “put out beaters,” as hunters say, and sent one of his men to run round by a detour to guard this exit. Since a patrol was going back to its post at the Arsenal, he requisitioned it and brought it along. In such games, soldiers are trumps. Besides, it is the rule that, to overcome a wild boar, you need both the science of the master of the hounds and the strength of the hounds themselves. These qualities being brought together, feeling that Jean Valjean was caught between the impasse of the cul-de-sac Genrot on the right, his officer on the left, and himself behind, Javert took a pinch of tobacco.

Then he began to amuse himself. He had a ravishing and diabolical moment when he let his man get ahead of him, knowing he had him but wanting to draw out the moment when he arrested him, happy to see him free, knowing that he was trapped, and gazing longingly at him with the rapture of a spider letting a fly flit about or of a cat letting a mouse run around free. Claws and talons have a monstrous sensuality; it is a terrible pleasure, the obscure struggle of the animal caught in their grip. How delicious to snuff them out!

Javert was in seventh heaven. The mesh of his net was foolproof. He was sure of success; all he had to do now was close his hand.

Reinforced as he was, the very idea of resistance was out of the question, no matter how energetic or vigorous or desperate Jean Valjean might be.

Javert advanced slowly, poking around and scouring every nook and cranny in the street, like the pockets of a thief, along the way.

When he reached the centre of his web, the fly was gone.

You can imagine his frustration.

He questioned his sentinel guarding the rue Droit-Mur and the rue Picpus; this officer, who had remained steadfastly at his post, had not seen the man go by.

It sometimes happens that a stag crashes through cover headfirst, in other words, escapes, even though he has the pack at his heels, and then the most experienced hunters are lost for words. Duvivier, Ligniville, and Desprez are at a loss. In a disappointment of the kind, Artonge cried: “That’s not a stag, it’s a sorcerer.” Javert could easily have uttered the same cry.

His disappointment had the taint of despair and fury for a moment.

It is certain that Napoléon made mistakes in the war on Russia, that Alexander made mistakes in the war on India, that Caesar made mistakes in the war on Scythia, and that Javert made mistakes in this campaign against Jean Valjean. He was perhaps wrong in hesitating to recognize the former galley slave. That first glance should have been enough for him. He was wrong not to apprehend him without further ado in the old slum. He was wrong not to arrest him when he recognized him positively in the rue de Pontoise. He was wrong to consult with his aides, in full moonlight, in the place Rollin; certainly, advice is useful, and it is good to know and to question those hounds that have credibility. But a hunter can’t be too careful when he is hunting nervous animals like a wolf or a convict. Javert, by being too anxious to set the bloodhounds of the pack on the right trail, alerted the beast by giving him wind of the move and so caused him to bolt, and with a head start. He was wrong above all in playing this dreadful and puerile game of holding him by a thread at arm’s length and keeping him dangling, once he had found the scent again on the pont d’Austerlitz. He thought he was stronger than he was, thought he could play the mouse with a lion. At the same time, he thought he was weaker than he was when he judged it necessary to team up with reinforcements. A fatal precaution, a loss of precious time. Javert committed all these mistakes, yet was no less one of the smartest and ablest spies who ever existed. He was, in the full force of the term, what is known in hunting as “a wise hound.” But nobody is perfect.

The great strategists have their off days.

Great blunders are often made, like great ropes, out of numerous strands. You take the rope, thread by thread, take separately all the decisive little motives, and you break them one by one, and you say, “That’s all it is!” Weave and twist them together and it is monumental; it is Attila hesitating between Marcian in the East and Valentinian in the West; Hannibal hanging back in Capua; Danton falling asleep at Arcis-sur-Aube.3 Whatever the case may be, even at the moment when he saw that Jean Valjean had eluded him, Javert did not lose his head. Certain that this convict who had broken out could not be far away, he posted watchdogs, he set traps and ambushes and combed the area all night long. The first thing he saw was the streetlamp that had been tampered with, its rope cut. A precious clue, it still led him astray by deflecting all the search efforts to the cul-de-sac Genrot. There are some pretty low walls in this cul-de-sac enclosing gardens that end in a vast tract of uncultivated land at the back. Jean Valjean obviously must have escaped that way. The fact is that, if he had only gone a bit further into the cul-de-sac Genrot, he probably would have—and he would have been finished. Javert went over the gardens and wastegrounds as though searching for a needle in a haystack.

At daybreak, he left two bright men to keep watch and went back to the prefecture of police, shamefaced as a snitch who has been caught out by a thief.