‘Now we’ve got that straight,’ said Fauchelevent, ‘perhaps you’ll tell me, Père Madeleine, how the devil you managed to get in here? You may be a saint but you’re also a man, and men aren’t admitted.’
‘But you’re here.’
‘I’m the only one.’
‘All the same,’ said Jean Valjean, ‘I’ve got to stop here.’
‘Lord preserve us!’ exclaimed Fauchelevent.
Valjean drew close to him and said in a grave voice:
‘Père Fauchelevent, I once saved your life.’
‘I’ve just reminded you of it.’
‘Well, now you can do as much for me.’
At this Fauchelevent clasped Jean Valjean’s powerful hands in his own gnarled and wrinkled ones and for a moment was too moved for speech. Then he burst out:
‘I thank God if I can repay something of what I owe you. To save your life! Monsieur le Maire, I am at your service!’ His face was transfigured, and it was as though a light shone from it. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I’ll tell you. Have you a room?’
‘I have a sort of cottage beyond the ruins of the old convent. No one ever comes near it. There are three rooms.’
The cottage was in fact so well hidden beyond the ruins that Valjean had not noticed it.
‘I must ask two things of you,’ he said. ‘First, that you will tell no one what you know about me. And secondly, that you will not seek to know more than you already do.’
‘As you please. I know that you will do nothing dishonourable and that you have always been a God-fearing man, besides which, you got me my employment here. Your affairs are no business of mine. I am yours to command.’
‘Thank you. Now I will ask you to come with me. We must fetch the child.’
‘Ah,’ said Fauchelevent. ‘So there’s a child.’
He followed Jean Valjean without another word, like a dog following its master.
Less than half an hour later Cosette, rosy once more in the warmth of a good fire, was asleep in the old gardener’s bed. Jean Valjean had put on his cravat and coat and retrieved the hat which he had thrown over the wall. While he was doing so Fauchelevent had removed his knee-pad with its bell, and it now decorated the wall, hanging on a nail by the fireside. The two men sat warming themselves with their elbows on a table on which Fauchelevent had set a morsel of cheese, bread, a bottle of wine, and two glasses. Laying a hand on Valjean’s knee he said:
‘So, Père Madeleine, you didn’t recognize me at once. You save men’s lives and then forget them. That’s bad. They don’t forget you. You are ungrateful, Père Madeleine!’
X
Which tells how Javert drew a blank
The events of which we have witnessed the reverse side, so to speak, had come about in a very simple fashion.
When Jean Valjean escaped from the prison in Montreuil-sur-mer, on the evening of the day when Javert arrested him at Fantine’s bedside, the police had supposed that he would make for Paris. Paris is a whirlpool in which all things can be lost, sucked into that navel of the earth like flotsam into the navel of the sea. No forest can hide a man so well as its teeming streets, a fact well known to all kinds of fugitive. It is also known to the police, who scour Paris for what they have lost elsewhere. Javert was summoned to Paris to assist in the search for Valjean and had played an important part in his recapture. His zeal and energy on that occasion attracted the notice of M. Chapouillet, the secretary of the Prefecture under Comte Anglès. M. Chapouillet, who had interested himself in Javert in the past, had him transferred from Montreuil-sur-mer to Paris, where he rendered useful and, inappropriate though the word may appear in connection with such a calling, honourable service.
He thought no more about Jean Valjean (to a hound for ever on the scent, today’s wolf causes yesterday’s to be forgotten) until in December 1823 he saw his name in a newspaper. Javert was not a reader of newspapers, but as an ardent monarchist he was interested in the account of the landing of the ‘prince generalissimo’ at Bayonne. Having read this, he glanced over the rest of the paper and his eye fell on a paragraph at the bottom of a page reporting the death of the convict Jean Valjean. The statement was so positive that he had no reason to doubt it, and reflecting that it was a good riddance, he dismissed the matter from his mind.
Some time after his transfer a report was received in Paris from the Prefecture of Seine-et-Oise concerning the abduction of a child under peculiar circumstances in the commune of Montfermeil. The child, a girl of seven or eight, had been entrusted by her mother to a local innkeeper and had been ‘stolen’, in the words of the report, by a stranger. The child was named Cosette, and the mother was a woman named Fantine who had died in hospital, details not known. The report came Javert’s way and it made him think.
He had not forgotten Fantine; nor had he forgotten that Jean Valjean had caused him to burst out laughing by asking for three days’ respite so that he might go and fetch the woman’s child. He recalled that Valjean had been arrested in the act of boarding the coach for Montfermeil. Moreover, there had been grounds for suspecting that this would not have been his first visit to Montfermeil and that he had been in the neighbourhood of the village on the previous day, although he had not been seen in the village itself. No one had understood at the time what had taken him to Montfermeil, but this was now clear to Javert. He had gone there for Fantine’s child. And now the child had been abducted by a stranger. Could the stranger be Valjean? But Valjean was reported dead. Without saying anything to anyone Javert took the coach to Montfermeil.
He had gone there expecting enlightenment and had found only mystification.
In their first disappointment the Thénardiers had talked, and the story of ‘the Lark’s’ disappearance had gone round the village. Various versions had circulated, culminating in the tale of abduction. Hence the police report. But after recovering from his sense of grievance Thénardier, with his admirable instinct of caution, had been quick to realize that it is never wise to attract the notice of Authority, and that a formal complaint about kidnapping would cause the eagle-eye of the Law to be turned upon himself and his many dubious transactions. The last thing an owl wants is to be examined by the light of a lamp. How, in particular, was he to account for the fifteen hundred francs he had accepted? He promptly changed his tune, put a gag on his wife, and expressed great astonishment when people talked as though the child had been stolen. He had been upset at the time by the speed with which she had been taken away; he would have liked, from sheer affection, to keep her a few days longer. But the gentleman who had come for her was her grandfather and it was only natural that he should want to have her. This was the story Javert heard when he arrived at Montfermeil. The ‘grandfather’, which was Thénardier’s happy thought, eliminated Jean Valjean.
Nevertheless Javert tested the story with a few questions. Who was this grandfather and what was his name? Thénardier replied with perfect candour: ‘He’s a wealthy landowner. I saw his passport. I think his name is Monsieur Guillaume Lambert.’ Lambert is a highly respectable name. Javert went back to Paris. ‘Valjean is dead,’ he said to himself, ‘and I’m an ass.’
He was beginning to forget the whole affair when, in March 1824, a story reached him about an eccentric individual living in the parish of Saint-Médard who was known as ‘the beggar who gives alms’. The man was said to be a person of independent means living with a small girl who knew nothing of their circumstances except that she herself came from Montfermeil. The name caused Javert to prick up his ears. An elderly beggar, a former beadle who was now a police-informer, supplied further details. The man was a very queer customer, never went out except at night, never spoke to anyone except occasionally to the poor, and never let anyone come near him. He wore a wretched old yellow overcoat which was probably worth millions because its lining was stuffed with banknotes … All this was decidedly interesting to Javert. In order to have a look at the queer customer he borrowed the ex-beadle’s
outer garments and the use of the pitch where he huddled every evening, intoning prayers and keeping his eyes open.
The ‘suspect’ duly appeared and gave the bogus mendicant money. Javert looked up as he did so, and Jean Valjean’s shock when he thought he recognized the policeman was no greater than Javert’s when he thought he recognized Jean Valjean. At the same time Javert realized that in the darkness he might have been mistaken. Valjean was officially dead. There was serious room for doubt, and Javert, scrupulous in all his dealings, did not lay hands on a man without being sure of his ground.
He followed his man to the Gorbeau tenement and got the old woman to talk, which was no difficult matter. She confirmed the detail of the overcoat lined with millions and told him about the thousand-franc note which she herself had handled. Javert rented a room in the tenement and occupied it that same evening. He listened at Valjean’s door, hoping to hear the sound of his voice; but Valjean, seeing the light of his candle, foiled him by keeping silent.
Jean Valjean fled the next day; but the sound of the five-franc piece he let fall on the floor was overheard by the old woman, and hearing the chink of money she guessed that he intended to leave and hastened to warn Javert. When Valjean left the house that evening with Cosette, Javert was waiting for him, hidden with two men behind the trees along the boulevard.
Javert had applied to the Prefecture for full authorization but he had not disclosed the name of the person he hoped to arrest. He had kept this to himself for three reasons. First, because the least indiscretion might serve to warn Valjean; secondly, because to arrest an escaped convict who was believed to be dead, and whose record in the official files was that of a ‘highly-dangerous criminal’ would be a tremendous feather in his cap which would be resented by the old hands of the Paris police-force, who might try to rob him of the credit; and finally because Javert, being an artist, had a taste for the dramatic. He had no fondness for the kind of triumph that is robbed of its lustre by being proclaimed in advance. He liked to elaborate his masterpieces in secret and unveil them with a flourish.
He had followed Jean Valjean from tree to tree and from street-corner to street-corner, always keeping him in sight. Even in those moments when Valjean thought himself most safe Javert had had an eye on him.
Why, then, had he not at once arrested him? The reason is that he still had doubts.
We must remember that at that time the Paris police were not in a happy state, being much harassed by the free press. A number of arbitrary arrests, denounced in the newspapers, had led to questions in Parliament, and the Prefecture was nervous. To infringe the liberty of the subject was a serious matter. A major blunder on the part of a subordinate policeman might lead to his dismissal. It is not hard to imagine the effect of a news-item on the lines of the following, reproduced in twenty papers: ‘Yesterday a white-headed grandfather, a respectable rentier out walking with his eight-year-old granddaughter, was arrested and taken to Police Headquarters as an escaped convict.’! … Besides which, we must repeat, Javert was a man of principle. To the voice of the Prefect was added the voice of his own conscience. He had genuine doubts. He had seen only Jean Valjean’s back as he vanished into the darkness.
Valjean’s acute anxiety and distress at this fresh disaster which had driven him to flight and forced him to seek haphazardly for a new place of refuge for Cosette and himself, his responsibility for the child and the necessity to accommodate his footsteps to hers, all this, without his realizing it, had so altered his gait, lending an impression of senility to his whole bearing, that even the police, in the person of Javert, could be misled by it. The impossibility of examining him closely, his shabby attire resembling that of an elderly schoolmaster, Thénardier’s statement that he was the child’s grandfather and finally his reported death, these were added elements of uncertainty.
Javert thought for a moment of going up to him and peremptorily demanding to see his papers. But if the man was not Jean Valjean, and not a respectable rentier either, then there was every likelihood that he was a villain deeply involved in the Paris underworld, possibly a dangerous gang-leader, at present keeping under cover for reasons of his own. In that case he would have contacts, accomplices, emergency hide-outs where he would eventually go to earth. His general behaviour and the circuitous route he was following suggested that he could scarcely be an honest citizen. To arrest him too soon might be to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. What harm was there in waiting? Javert was confident that he would not escape.
So he continued tentatively to follow him until, some time later, by the light outside a tavern in the Rue Pontoise, he had a clear view of him and knew positively that this was Jean Valjean.
There is a kind of thrill known to only two creatures on earth – the mother who recovers her child and the tiger who recovers its prey. This was Javert’s sensation at that moment. But simultaneously, being now assured that it was the formidable Jean Valjean, he realized that he had only two men with him, and he therefore applied to the police-post in the Rue Pontoise for assistance. Before grasping a stick of thorn we put on gloves.
This delay, and the pause at the Rollin crossroads to confer with his men, nearly caused him to lose the scent; but he quickly realized that Valjean would want to put the river between his pursuers and himself. He stood with his head bent, pointing like a hound, and then, with his customary sureness of instinct, made straight for the Pont d’Austerlitz. A word with the toll-keeper told him what he wanted to know – ‘Have you seen a man with a little girl?’ … ‘I charged him two sous.’ Javert was on the bridge in time to see Valjean cross a moonlit space with Cosette. He saw him enter the Rue de Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine and at once he thought of the Cul-de-sac Genrot, which was a trap in itself, and the Rue Droit-Mur, of which the only other outlet was into the Petite Rue Picpus. Fanning out his beaters, in hunting parlance, he sent a man promptly by a roundabout route to close that end. Encountering a military patrol on its way back to the Arsenal, he commandeered it and took it along with him. In games of this sort the military are a trump card, and it is in any case axiomatic that in dealing with a wild boar one needs both the cunning of the hunter and a strong pack of hounds. Having thus completed his depositions, and knowing Valjean to be enclosed between the impasse on his right, the police agent on his left and the main party coming up behind him, Javert took a pinch of snuff.
Then, with a demonic and sensual pleasure, he settled down to enjoy himself. He played his man knowing that he had him, deliberately postponing the climax, granting him a last illusion of freedom, relishing the situation like a spider with a fly buzzing in its web or a cat letting a mouse run between its paws – the ecstasy of watching those last struggles! His net was shrewdly cast, he could close it when he chose, and Valjean, desperate and dangerous though he was, could not hope to resist the force arrayed against him.
So Javert moved slowly forward, methodically searching every nook and cranny of the street as though he were going through the pockets of a footpad. But when he reached the centre of his net he found that the fly had vanished. The impasse was empty, and the man posted at the end of the Rue Droit-Mur had seen no one.
Javert’s fury of exasperation can be imagined. It happens sometimes that a stag breaks cover with the whole pack upon him and miraculously contrives to escape, leaving even the most experienced huntsman confounded. In one such situation Artonge exclaimed, ‘It isn’t a stag, it’s a wizard!’ Javert might well have said the same.
It is undeniable that Napoleon blundered in the Russian campaign, Alexander in the Indian war, Caesar in Africa, Cyrus in Scythia; nor was Javert guiltless of error in his campaign against Jean Valjean. He was wrong, perhaps, in hesitating to recognize him at the beginning: that first glance should have sufficed. He erred in not arresting him at once in the tenement, and again in the Rue Pontoise, when he had definitely recognized him. The conclave under the moon at the Rollin intersection was a mistake. To take counsel is prudent, but the huntsman mus
t be on the alert when he is dealing with such wary animals as a wolf or a convict. In his over-anxiety to set his pack on the right scent Javert allowed his prey a moment of respite. Above all he was wrong when, having again sighted him, he allowed himself to indulge in the childish satisfaction of toying with a man of that calibre. He thought himself stronger than he was, able to play with a lion as though it were a mouse. And at the same time he under-rated his strength when he wasted precious times in seeking reinforcements. He was guilty of all these errors and yet he was one of the most shrewd and able detectives that ever lived – in the full sense of the hunting term, ‘a wise hound’.
But who among us is perfect? Even the greatest strategists have their eclipses, and the greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, ‘That is all there was!’ But twist them all together and you have something tremendous – Attila hesitating between Marcians in the east and Valentinians in the west, Hannibal delaying too long in Capua, Danton slumbering in Arcis-sur-Aube.
Nevertheless, when he found that Jean Valjean had escaped him Javert did not lose his head. Convinced that his prey could not be far off, he posted watches, set up traps and ambushes, and scoured the district throughout the night. The first thing he noticed was the displaced street-lamp of which the cord had been cut. It was a valuable clue but a misleading one since it led him to concentrate the search on the Cul-de-sac Genrot. The blind-alley was partly enclosed by comparatively low walls flanking gardens beyond which lay wide stretches of uncultivated land. He concluded that Valjean must have gone that way, and the fact is that Valjean would probably have done so had he gone a little further into the blind alley, and he would then have been lost. Javert combed the gardens and wasteland like a man looking for a needle in a haystack.
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