Jean Valjean laid Marius down on the riverbank. They were out. The stench and the darkness were behind him, and clean, cool air wrapped around him. The sun had set, but the sky was still bright. The river lapped at his feet, and from the elms of the Champs-Élysées came the sound of birds settling for the night.
For a moment Valjean let himself be carried away by that calm and gazed up at the sky. Then, as if remembering something, he bent down, scooped river water in his palm and let a few drops fall on Marius’s face. Marius did not open his eyes, but he was breathing through parted lips. As Valjean reached for more water, he had the familiar sense that someone was behind him.
When he turned round, a tall man in a long frock coat stood a few paces back with his arms folded. The man gripping a lead-headed club in his right hand was Javert.
The bait
He was the man who had followed the ragged figure along the bank that afternoon. Freed so unexpectedly at the barricade, Javert had gone straight to police headquarters, made a brief report to the prefect, and returned at once to his assigned duty. It was to keep an eye on the riverbank by the Champs-Élysées. There he had spotted Thénardier and trailed him, and he had been waiting at the very gate through which Thénardier disappeared.
That was why Thénardier had opened the gate so obligingly. He could smell that Javert was outside. That hound needed a bone. If he sent out a murderer in his place, the police would be busy taking him and let Thénardier slip away, with thirty francs earned on top. Valjean had escaped one reef only to strike another.
Javert did not recognise Valjean, who, covered in mud and blood, no longer looked like himself. Without unfolding his arms, he asked briefly and calmly, Who are you?
Myself.
Who is myself?
Jean Valjean.
Javert put the club between his teeth, bent his knees, and seized Valjean’s shoulders in both hands like a pair of vices. He brought his face so close that the two almost touched, and only then did he know him. Valjean held still, like a lion letting itself be gripped by a lynx’s claws.
Javert, you have me. In fact, since this morning I have thought of myself as your prisoner, and I did not give you my address in order to get away. Take me, only grant me one thing.
Not yet
Javert seemed not to hear, and only stared at him. Then he let go, drew himself upright and took a firm hold of the club again. As if in a dream he murmured, Why are you here, and who is that with you? He was still not speaking down to Valjean.
Valjean’s voice seemed to wake him. It was this man I wanted to speak to you about. Do with me as you please, but first help me take him home.
Javert’s face tightened, as it did whenever anyone seemed to expect a concession from him. But he did not say no.
He bent down again, wet his handkerchief in the river and wiped the blood from Marius’s forehead. This man was at the barricade. He was the one they called Marius. Even tied up and awaiting death, he had been watching and listening to everything. He took Marius’s hand to feel for a pulse.
He is wounded, said Valjean, and Javert replied, He is dead. Valjean spoke again. No, not yet.
Valjean took out Marius’s notebook, opened it at the first page written in pencil and handed it to Javert. Javert, with eyes as sharp in the dark as a night bird’s, read the lines and muttered, Gillenormand, number six, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Then he called for the cab. It was the same one that had been waiting since the afternoon.
Inside the cab it was as quiet as ice. Marius slumped in a corner with his head on his chest, Valjean was like a shadow and Javert like a block of stone. Each time they passed a street lamp, the inside of the cab flashed white as if by lightning. A corpse, a ghost and a statue sat facing one another.
Number six, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire
At every jolt of the cobbles, a drop of blood fell from Marius’s hair. It was full night when the cab reached number six. Javert got down first and struck the heavy iron knocker hard. A porter half emerged, sleepy, with a candle in his hand.
When Javert asked whether a man called Gillenormand lived there, the porter said yes and asked what was wanted. We have brought him his son.
His son? the porter repeated blankly, and Javert said, He is dead. Behind him, Valjean in his rags shook his head to say no. The porter understood neither Javert’s words nor Valjean’s gesture.
He went to the barricade and this is how he came back; go and wake his father. When the porter did not move, Javert hurried him and added one remark. There will be a funeral at this house tomorrow.
The household let the grandfather sleep. The servants carried Marius up to the first floor, laid him on an old sofa, went for a doctor and brought out linen for bandages. Meanwhile Javert touched Valjean on the shoulder. Valjean understood and followed him down the stairs.
Back in the cab, Valjean asked for one thing more. Let me stop at my home for a moment, and then do what you like with me.
Javert sat silent for a time with his chin sunk in the collar of his frock coat, then lowered the front window and told the driver, Number seven, Rue de l’Homme-Armé.
I will wait here
Neither said a word the whole way. Valjean meant to tell Cosette where Marius was, and if he could, to put a few last things in order. As for himself, he considered it finished. Javert had him, and he had no intention of resisting.
The Rue de l’Homme-Armé was too narrow for a carriage. The driver complained that the new velvet of his cab was stained with the murdered man’s blood and the murderer’s mud. That was what he had understood. Javert paid him eighty francs in gold, including more than seven hours’ waiting, and sent the cab away.
Valjean supposed Javert meant to walk him to a nearby police post. They came to number seven, Valjean knocked, and the door opened.
All right, go up, said Javert, and added with a strange expression, as though forcing the words out, I will wait here.
Valjean looked at Javert. It was not like him. But Valjean took it for the kind of freedom a cat allows a mouse, as long as its claw. He went into the house and climbed the stairs.
On the first-floor landing he paused. The window was open, and the lamp opposite lit the short street from end to end. To catch his breath, he leaned out. The street was empty. Javert had gone.
The grandfather
At that hour, in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, the doctor was examining Marius’s wounds. Nothing inside the chest had been hit. One bullet, stopped by the notebook, had glanced along the ribs, and the broken collarbone had been wrenched further out of place on the way through the sewer. The head wounds were the worst worry. They were what had made him faint, and from a faint of that kind one does not always wake.
A door at the back of the room opened, and a tall pale figure appeared. It was the grandfather, woken by the commotion. Seeing the bloody young man on the bed, he shook from head to foot and murmured, Marius!
He went to the barricade, sir, and they have just brought him back, said a servant, and the old man cried out in a terrible voice that he was dead, the scoundrel!
He threw the window wide and shouted into the night. The boy knew I was waiting for him. He knew I had his room made ready and kept his childhood portrait at the head of my bed. One word, it’s me, and he would have been master of this house. Instead, he cried, the boy had gone off to die out of hatred for him. He called his grandson a murderer and a villain, and said that since he had died so heartlessly, he would not even grieve for him.
Just then Marius’s eyelids slowly lifted, and his clouded gaze came to rest on the old man.
The old man cried out. Marius, my little one, my son, you’ve opened your eyes, you’re looking at me, you’re alive, thank you!
And the old man fainted.
Two roads
Javert walked slowly away from the Rue de l’Homme-Armé. For the first time in his life he walked with his head bowed, and, also a first, with his hands clasped behind him. Until then, the only posture he had known was folded arms, the sign of a decision taken. Hands behind the back, the posture of a man in doubt, had been unknown to him.
He went to the river and stopped at the corner of the Pont Notre-Dame, not far from the police guardhouse on the Place du Châtelet. Between the two bridges there, the river runs fast and swirls. It was the spot boatmen dreaded most; whoever fell in there did not come up again. Javert rested both elbows on the parapet, cupped his chin in his hands, and sank into thought.
For some hours now Javert had ceased to be a simple man. Two roads lay before him. Both were straight, but they ran in opposite directions. All his life he had known only one straight road, and this terrified him. Which was the true one?
He had owed his life to a criminal, accepted that debt and repaid it. He had been told to go, and had told the other man to go in turn. He had abandoned his duty for personal reasons. Yet within those personal reasons he sensed something larger and wider than duty itself. That was what was breaking him.
To hand Valjean over was wrong. To leave him free was wrong too. Handing him over would put the man of the law beneath the convict; leaving him free would put the convict above the law. Either way, he fell.
There was only one proper thing to do: go straight back to the Rue de l’Homme-Armé and have Valjean locked up. He knew it. And he could not. Even in the cab he had reached out twenty times to seize him by the collar. Each time his hand dropped as if pressed down by a great weight, and from deep in his mind came a strange voice. Go on, hand over the man who saved you. Then send for Pilate’s basin and wash your claws.
Something beyond duty
He questioned himself. That convict, whom I hunted to the point of persecution, had me under his foot and could have taken revenge. For his own safety he ought to have done so, and yet he let me live. What did he do; did he do his duty? No, it was something more than that.
And I, who let him go, what did I do; did I do my duty? No, it was something more than that.
“Il y a donc quelque chose de plus que le devoir?” Is there, then, something beyond duty? (Part 5, Book 4, Chapter 1)
There he grew dizzy. His scales broke apart. One pan dropped into the abyss and the other flew up into the sky. The one that rose frightened him as much as the one that fell.
He had a superior: the prefect of police. He had scarcely ever thought about the other superior above him, God. Now that this new chief made himself felt so suddenly, he did not know what to do. He knew that an inferior must always bow, and that one who cannot obey has no course but to resign. But how does one hand in one’s resignation to God?
What Javert had aimed for, Hugo writes, was not to be humane or great, but to be beyond reproach. And he had just failed. Judges were men, the law could err, and when the code had spoken, not everything had been said. He had to admit all that. For him it was like seeing a crack in the great blue glass of the sky.
There were only two ways out of that state. One was to go straight to Valjean and send him back to prison, and the other.
Some remarks for the betterment of the service
Javert left the parapet and, this time with his head up and a firm step, went to the guardhouse with the lantern at the corner of the Place du Châtelet. He gave his name to the officer inside, showed his card, and sat down at the guardhouse table where a candle was burning. On the table lay a pen, a lead inkwell and paper for reports. He took up the pen and wrote at the top: Some remarks for the betterment of the service.
He numbered them one by one. Prisoners coming back from questioning stand barefoot on the stone floor while they are searched. Many of them come down with coughs as a result, which costs the infirmary money. When tailing a suspect on important occasions, at least two officers should keep each other in sight. That way, if one should for any reason fall short in his duty, the other can watch him and take his place.
At the Madelonnettes prison, he wrote, prisoners are forbidden to have a chair even if they pay for one, and no reason for this can be found. Prisoners who call others to the visiting room charge two sous to shout a man’s name clearly, which is theft. Gendarmes gossiping in the prefecture yard about what examining magistrates asked suspects is a serious disorder. There were ten points in all.
He wrote them in his calmest, most correct hand, leaving out not a single comma. At the bottom he signed: Javert, inspector first class, at the Place du Châtelet post, 7 June 1832, about one in the morning. He blotted the ink, folded the sheet like a letter and sealed it, addressed it on the back as a note for the authorities, and went out leaving it lying on the table.
He crossed the square diagonally and went back to the river. There, at the very spot he had left a quarter of an hour before, on the same stone of the same parapet, he leaned on his elbows in the same position. He looked as if he had never moved.
It was the dead of night, past midnight. Clouds hid the stars, and the houses of the Île de la Cité across the water showed not a single light. The river, swollen by the rain, could be heard but not seen. Javert gazed down into that darkness for some minutes. Then he took off his hat and set it on the parapet. A moment later, a tall black figure stood up on the parapet, leaned towards the river, and dropped straight down into the dark. There was a dull splash.
Today, before two roads
That day Javert twice loosened his grip in front of Valjean. Once was at the sewer’s mouth, when he let go of the shoulders he had seized and granted the request to take the wounded young man home. The other was at Valjean’s door, when he said he would wait and then turned away. To the end, he could not account for either of them within himself.
What he left behind was neither a confession nor a farewell letter. It was a note on official business, about prisoners coughing as they stood barefoot on stone, and prisoners paying two sous to have their names called.
Has someone ever done you a kindness that weighed on you for a long time, because you did not know how to repay it?