Chapter Text
If Rue de l’Homme Armé had not been so deserted and old Toussaint not so deaf, the singular cry of “Cosette!”—a primal howl that roared louder than the most violent clap of thunder—would have chilled the very heart of any soul unfortunate enough to understand the desperation behind such a sound. Jean Valjean screamed not only as a parent who had lost his child, but also as a man who until an hour ago had resigned himself to being forever parted with the light of his life. Fate could not have been more pitiless than to dangle the promise of a family reunited before Jean Valjean, whispering a freedom unfettered from future threat of separation, only to then snatch it away in utter cruelty.
He slipped downward, like a marionette cut free of its strings, slumping onto the ground. In truth, Jean Valjean very much felt like a soul cut loose from God’s favor at the moment, leaving him staring into the worst future imaginable: a future without Cosette. Was this the punishment for his sins after all, a punishment agreed upon between the Almighty and the Inspector, so grave were his offenses that simply returning him to Toulon would be but a mockery to Law and Justice?
How long did Jean Valjean remained on his knees, huddled into himself and body seizing with violent sobs, he did not know. A small part of his mind berated his weakness, of wasting time on tears when not a further minute must be lost to commence his search for Cosette. But grief and panic did not obey reason and, for what must have been hours, Jean Valjean wept bitter tears until no more would come, adding exhaustion upon his already weary body.
At length, the form of an old man rose on feeble legs, arms waving about to the front and sides in attempt to regain balance, to find his way in the dark. He stumbled out of the bedchamber. Reluctant as he was to pause to don his hat and outer coat and to pull on his boots, Jean Valjean did all he could to make himself presentable as a gentleman of France. Had he not given away his National Guard uniform at the barricades, he would have put it on in favor of the workman’s clothing hidden beneath a fine but modest-looking coat. He needed help from the authorities to find Cosette, and the convict in him was determined to hide his identity for as long as possible to ensure Cosette would have a chance to be found.
-
Lantern in hand, Jean Valjean hurried down Rue de l’Homme Armé and onto a wider street. Having spent years avoiding the police, he now knew precisely which streets to walk toward for the express purpose of encountering a gendarme. He walked with an air of intention unknown to the convict inside him; there was determination in his steps.
It did not take long for him to run into two young gendarmes patrolling in an area not far from one of the barricades destroyed but hours ago. Debris decorated the grim path, with the night sky offering what small mercy it could to disguise splashes of blood as merely darker hues of the stones.
“Halt!” one of the gendarmes shouted at the same time Jean Valjean took his cap in hand and bowed, uttering a respectful, “Officers.”
Outwardly, his voice was steady and his bow carried the practiced ease of a man of respectable origin who had both received and rendered gestures of respect since the days of his youth. Inwardly, however, Jean Valjean trembled at being in such proximity with not one, but two, officers of the law. He kept his eyes downcast, taking in a slow breath to steady himself, to keep his body from recoiling out of instinct.
The other gendarme, eyeing Jean Valjean and ascertaining that the old man was neither a scoundrel nor a threat, addressed him in a milder tone: “Monsieur, the streets are not safe at this hour, nor, I presume, for the next several days. What are you doing strolling about the streets, when most of Paris is asleep?”
Jean Valjean raised his eyes then, and noted in the lantern light dancing across the visages of the boys—for that was who they were—that there were dark circles under their eyes. The gendarmes looked weary, gaunt. If the revolution had worn even youths into shadows, then he must seem to them like a specter that could be stretched so thin as to become part of the night, leaving his lantern mysteriously dangling through the streets in midair. No, the past day had not been kind to anyone, not even to his precious Cosette.
At the thought, his heart clenched as if responding to a stake being driven through it.
“Officers, I must beg for your help, for my daughter is lost. She was in the house when I left her—I had an errand to run earlier in the day, you see. When I returned, she was gone! This is why I am wandering about tonight. Please, assist me to find her. I would be most grateful.”
The gendarmes looked at each other. One shook his head as if in a warning; the other shrugged his shoulders.
“Monsieur,” the more compassionate one spoke, “I am sorry for your loss. But Paris is in chaos and you are not the only one with a missing relative. There are missing person reports flooding the Prefecture even now. Give us a description of your daughter and we will keep our eyes out for her. But beyond that, I’m afraid we cannot offer more help.”
“Officers –” Jean Valjean began, but one look at the debris on the street provided all that he needed to know. The city was—and would be—recovering from hundreds of lives lost and bodies missing for the weeks to come. The disappearance of a young girl, not associated with the revolution, did not warrant the dispensing of additional police resources.
Oh Cosette, what has happened to you!
Resigned, Jean Valjean provided a description of Cosette to the gendarmes. “She is an angel,” he did not hesitate to add as a conclusion, “the most innocent and beautiful mademoiselle you will cast your eyes upon. Please, Messieurs, tell me what I should do, how I can find her.”
“Monsieur…”
“Fauchelevent,” he supplied. After so many years, the lie of his identity rolled easily off his tongue.
“Monsieur Fauchelevent,” the kinder officer said, “we will help as much as we can. After all, we will be patrolling the streets for the next day. Since your daughter disappeared in this area, it is likely that she will run into us if she hasn’t gone far from here. Where is your home, so we might send you word should we find Mademoiselle Cosette?”
Jean Valjean hesitated. Yes, his freedom had already been forfeit when he disclosed the same information to Javert several hours ago, but this did not mean he would fall willingly back into the galleys…
“Rue Plumet, No. 55.”
The sterner gendarme nodded, signifying the end to their exchange. Jean Valjean cast them a final pleading look. Please, his very countenance shouted. Anything to find Cosette.
This earned him a sympathetic smile from the kinder gendarme. “I regret we cannot offer you more help, Monsieur. Police resources are low, you see. Perhaps you can seek help from the police station near the Place du Chatelet. The Prefecture has sent many officers there to await further orders. At least you can file a report directly with one of the inspectors on duty. With an open case, the station would be obliged to investigate until a conclusion can be reached.”
They did not wait for Jean Valjean’s final bow and “thank you” before continuing on their patrol. Weariness had slumped both youths’ shoulders, but at the moment, it was Jean Valjean’s body who stooped lower, his hand trembling as he placed his hat back onto his head, his heart praying for a renewed bout of strength that would not come. Dragging one heavy foot in front of another, he headed for the police station house, another place he had fastidiously avoided since he first arrived Paris. He did not miss the irony that he was now offering himself like a slaughtered lamb into the mouths of wolves. Would Javert be there? Would he permit him time to speak, to make his supplication—when he had already asked so much of the inspector to delay his arrest—before he would have to face the unavoidable moment of a wrathful flame engulfing this pitiful sacrifice?
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
Cosette was worth a thousand prison sentences. Steeling his resolve, Jean Valjean forged on.
-
If the streets of Paris were in chaos, then the disarray of the station house was worse. Inside the Place du Chatelet police station, the sergeant of police who was supposed to guard the entrance was nowhere to be found, leaving an empty desk and chair by the unguarded entrance. Lamps fixed on the wall spanned the interior of the building, giving the illusion that it was still daytime—Lady Justice was blind, but she did not sleep. A door separated the visitor’s area from the officers’ workstations. Jean Valjean approached and gave it a tentative push. The door wasn’t locked. He could hear tired voices snapping at each other inside, the sound of agitated footfalls, the rustling of too many stacks of paper. Nobody seemed to pay attention to a stranger hesitating by the door, the gentleman’s appearance not sufficient to cloak the slight tremble of his body and the tense set of his shoulders. No eye saw the pressing of his lips into a thin line, for chewing on his lower lip would be too unseemly, too revealing. Even inside, not a single officer looked his way when Jean Valjean, fugitive from the law with a life sentence dangling like a noose over his head—a man far from the upright courtier Daniel—invited himself into the lion’s den.
He scanned the room quickly, schooling his face into the impassive blandness of M. Madeleine. His pretense was rendered more perfect by his utter invisibility.
Javert was not here.
In fact, most of the ranked officers were not present, if an almost roomful of deserted workstations was evidence of his observation. The few officers that remained, all on one side of the room, were arguing about whom from nearby police stations they could borrow for a time to send out into Paris’s streets. Several poor souls who appeared to be clerks were surrounded by impossible mountains of files and documents, and Jean Valjean did not need to see their miserable expressions to know how overwhelmed they felt by a seemingly endless stream of new cases and reports to be filed.
Distancing himself from the occupied side of the room, Jean Valjean walked through the workstations. He reached the far end of the room before returning, unsure of what he was looking for. Still no one stopped him. He paused in his pacing, brows furrowing. The post-barricade chaos made it abundantly clear that no one in the station house would be willing or able to tend to his request. But if the police couldn’t help, then who could? He slipped a hand into his coat pocket and wrapped his fingers around several gold coins. He could ask a few of the gamins he knew well if they had seen Cosette. But if she didn’t leave the house willingly and had been forcibly taken, then no sight of her would have been seen by either police or street boys.
As his mind swirled with musings that only muddied his options and left him more helpless, Jean Valjean let his eyes wander. The gendarmes were still too busy arguing among themselves to notice him, the clerks too busy to lift their eyes. He looked toward the door, his heart beating at a quickening pace. He should leave before he was discovered. Yes, his arrest would be delayed for another day, for God had heard his prayer and had allowed him to search for Cosette before he would lose her forever. Offering a quick thanks heavenward, Jean Valjean turned to face the door, his eyes sweeping over a humble table with a straw-seated chair that was located toward the entrance.
Something on that workstation caught his eyes: an envelope sitting atop the impeccable surface, the ink forming the intended recipient’s name not yet fully dried under the faint, heatless light of several torches on the far wall. The letter, for that was what M. Madeleine had seen thousands of times, was addressed as “a note to the administration,” likely a missive meant for the Prefect himself, waiting to be either discovered or delivered.
He at once recognized the sharp, angular handwriting.
“Javert,” he whispered. The familiar fear burst through his veins like the shattering of a cannon that had always been buried somewhere deep inside his heart. Was this his condemnation at last, the inspector’s report to the Prefect detailing the way Jean Valjean was to be tracked down, surrounded, and arrested?
A day ago, he had resigned his fate into the hands of the inspector. But now, with the whereabouts of Cosette still unknown, he refused to remain a sitting duck awaiting the hunter’s fatal shot.
He approached the desk, careful to keep his steps measured and his posture upright, like M. Madeleine walking the length of his factory searching for diligent workers to praise. His heart skipped a beat when he thought a gendarme had lifted his head to look at him, but when he chanced a sideways glance at the group of working men, all heads were once again focused on some map laid out on a table. He let out a held breath. Five more steps, four, three. He was almost there.
When a gendarme finally realized a stranger had entered the officers’ work area and demanded how he could help the good Monsieur, Jean Valjean was leaning with one shaking arm planted on the workstation, his other hand buried inside a pocket that now held Javert’s letter of condemnation; his breaths were quick and labored. The gendarme needed no convincing to believe the panicking father’s tale of a missing daughter. A file was quickly drawn up and added to the towering pile of paperwork for the poor clerks to process. A final word of reassurance that sounded hollow even to Jean Valjean’s ever optimistic heart, and he was once again left alone.
Jean Valjean left the station house at the Place du Chatelet more lost than when he had first entered, having become none the wiser on how to search for Cosette. The calm that he had been forcing upon himself was beginning to unravel, the crumbling of his current state of mind exacerbated by the nervousness that he barely managed to hold at bay during his visit to the Prefecture. As he descended the steps of the building, his legs almost gave out, fueled on only by the very same nervous energy that he could no longer suppress.
He had survived a visit to the police station.
He had no destination in mind; anywhere but home, anywhere where Cosette might be found. Traversing the plaza diagonally—for that seemed to be the shortest path to take the convict away from the light of Law and Justice and back into the night, Jean Valjean allowed the growing roar of the Seine to add to the cacophony of his tumultuous mind.