For Marguerite, who will appreciate how shamelessly I'm riffing on Kierkegaard.
I
It was dusk in December when Jean Valjean entered Montreuil-sur-Mer to find the town hall on fire. A mother nearby was screaming that her babies were trapped inside. Thinking quickly and avoiding the crowd, he dropped his sack, ran towards the blaze and burst through a window into the building.
Inside was purgatory. He paused just inside the window frame. There was still time for him to run out, to find another town to begin anew, but he knew that this was the moment for which the Bishop had saved him. Either he would save the child or children, or he would die in the attempt, or perhaps both. He would either live a hero or die clean. And surely the life of a convict was worthless compared to the lives of the innocent. The silver that had bought him a second chance was tin compared to them. He crossed himself, and plunged onward.
He bellowed, and young screams answered him. They were on the second floor; he ran up the burning staircase. The door to the room was blocked by flaming timber; he kicked through it. The two children, a girl and a boy, were huddled together in the middle of the room, their hands clasped in prayer but their eyes streaming with tears, their mouths gaping but now silent in shock. He scooped them up, one in each arm, and ran back out. The stairs had collapsed, but there was a window at the top of them. He smashed it with his thorn stick, told the children to cling to his back, and scaled down the wall just as he had done at Toulon.
He was now in front of the crowd – they were cheering. The mother and father ran forward and grabbed the children off his back. Still holding the little boy and girl, they pulled him into a tight embrace, sobbing with joy. He began to sob as well. The Bishop had forgiven and God had judged; he would now live a just man.
II
It was dusk in December when Jean Valjean slunk into Montreuil-sur-Mer, plotting how he could enter its society without papers. The one thing he had learned in Toulon was that men must make their own luck. He could not wait for a disturbance or opportunity to gain their trust; one had to be created.
The town hall, inexplicably, had a pile of dry hay piled against its southern wall, away from the main square. It struck him as being extremely flammable. There was a single candle flame in the window of a room on the second story that, even as he watched, was snuffed out. He watched for most of the night, but the building remained black and silent. He snuck back out into a field to sleep.
He returned again at dusk the next day. The same candle flame disappeared; the same silence reigned all night. The third night was the same.
On the fourth night, after the candle had gone out but before the sky was completely dark, he set fire to the pile of hay, then ran away to wait. The building caught, there were soon shouts, a crowd began to gather with buckets of water. He stood from behind the bushes where he hid and began to jog towards the villagers, confident that, in the confusion, no one would ask or care who he was. He would help extinguish the flames, and afterwards, he would claim that he must have had lost his passport in the process of lending a hand. In a single stroke, he would gain their trust and recreate his identity. The convict had committed a final crime and was now burning to death in the flames.
It was at that moment that he heard an unearthly scream from within the building that was burning much more rapidly that he had expected. There was someone inside. Fate had conspired to turn the careful arsonist into a murderer. The fire was now inside his brain.
Not caring who saw him – God was watching now, what did men matter? – he barreled through the crowd and into the hall. He flew up the stairs and towards the noise – how much louder the screams echoed inside! – bursting through flame and smoke and doors, eager to descend to a deserved hell.
The sight of the faces of the two children, framed by flames, was like a scene from the Book of Revelations.
III
It was dusk in December when Jean Valjean entered Montreuil-sur-Mer to find the town hall on fire. Approaching from the back of the hall, on the opposite side from the crowd watching it burn, no one saw him arrive. He did not know why he came to the burning building; he was drawn to it as the moth to flame, as the apple to Earth. He heard a little girl's cry from the upper story of the building and the same impulse that once drove his fist through a pane of glass to take bread for a starving child surfaced from within his convict's brain and sent him rushing into the flames. His actions were not those of a man who did not care about the consequences – disfigurement, death, discovery, capture – for consequences were not something he even considered. He was as much angel as human, as much human as animal.
Later, he would not remember the inferno, how he found the girl and boy, what their faces looked like upon seeing him. He would not remember the cries of shock from the villagers at seeing a stranger burst through the flaming front door, a child enfolded in each massive arm. Nor the parents' tears of relief and gratitude. Nor the way he collapsed on the ground as soon as he handed the children to them.
He awoke again in a warm bed, surrounded by warm voices. His eyes, when they open, fell upon a smiling woman dressed in white. Was he in heaven? No, he was still on Earth. His gaze on the woman was uncomprehending but some deep instinct within him began to sense that, from that same impulse from which everything had first fallen apart, the world had once again righted itself.