In the middle of the last century, a magistrate of the Paris parlement built a small house on a lonely street for a woman he was seeing in secret. That street is today’s Rue Plumet. In front of the two-storey pavilion lay a wide garden behind an iron railing, and behind it a narrow yard and a low back lodge of two rooms. A hidden door in the lodge opened onto a paved path that wound between two high walls. Tucked away among other people’s gardens and fields, the path came out through another hidden door at the far end of the distant Rue de Babylone.
The magistrate came and went that way. Anyone following him would never have guessed that a man heading for the Rue de Babylone was going to the Rue Plumet. After the Revolution the house stood empty for years, crumbling around its old furniture. On the railing hung a faded yellow sign, to let, that had been there since 1810.
In October 1829 an elderly man rented the whole house. He had the two hidden doors opened again, had the place quietly repaired, and moved in with a young girl and an old servant. He seemed less like a man entering his own home than one slipping into it. The name he gave when he took the house was Fauchelevent, a man of private means. He was Jean Valjean, and the girl was Cosette. The garden Éponine had spied on through the railing before sending back her biscuit was the garden of that very house.