Je suis une femme, mi-lune mi-homme
Une anagramme, un erratum
On me dessine, on me façonne
Je vous fascine, ça vous étonne...
It has been said that I had no parents, that I sprang up from the streets like a nymph in the mist, but this is nonsense. A mortal babe could not survive without the intervention of adults, and I can assure you that I am as mortal as anyone. Those poets who saw me running barefoot through the streets of my childhood must have used my image to build a fantasy, but they did so without seeking knowledge of my history, making use of the idea of me rather than acknowledging the truth of a human life.
Indeed, I had parents, and though they were gone when I was yet very young, I heard enough stories from the innkeeper who raised me to summon a memory that may not have been my own: the features faded over time, but the auburn-haired woman with the white smile in my mind's eye matched Servane's description well enough to convince me that it was my mother.
My mother, I am told, was born in Paris, that great city which is the heart of our country and our history. She was still young when the fighting began: as Servane tells it, she had been married hardly a fortnight, and had yet to unpack most of her dresses in her new townhouse when the soldiers dragged her husband away to the guillotine. Like so many others, he was condemned not for blood spilled by his hand, but by the blood that ran peacefully through his veins.
My mother traded frocks with a kitchen maid and fled Paris, passing the walls at the bottom of a cart laden with rotting food on its way to a trash heap to the north of the city. She was discovered by the driver and left on the side of the road there, where she had no choice but to continue on foot, nothing in her pockets but one of the maid's handkerchiefs, her common dress stained and stinking.
Servane will not tell me what happened on my mother's journey; I only know that she came at last into Montreuil-sur-Mer some years later, a very different creature to the wide-eyed bride who had had the presence of mind to escape a city under attack by its own inhabitants. Whatever cunning she had had at that time had blossomed on the road out of necessity, and Servane says that that is all I need know.
What I do know is that the thought of England, a country free of peasant revolts, was what bore my mother onward, and that a journey that should have lasted less than a week stretched over nearly a decade. I also know that when she arrived at last in this little town near the sea, so close to her destination, my life had begun inside her.
The inn that I could have called my home is located on the southern road, just near the outskirts of Montreuil-sur-Mer. On the first year of the new century Servane's grandmother commissioned a heavy wooden sign that portrays a shadowy battle scene and, behind it, the walls of the city thrown into relief against a sunrise. The name of the inn is scrawled across the black ramparts in white lettering, or so she tells me. The old woman died soon after the new sign was in place, and the inn fell to Servane's management. It was in that year that my mother arrived, and on her first night in the inn Servane caught her trying make off with another guest's luggage. They were of an age, Servane tells me, and somehow through this encounter the two became friends.
Though I thought of the inn as my home during my childhood, I have recently encountered bewildered gazes upon describing my daily routine. I was allowed to sleep on the hearth before the fire if I was willing to assist Servane with her duties, and if I washed the dishes I could eat any scraps left on a guest's plate. Servane was kind, but she was not my family and did not seek to become it.
Sometimes, when she had had too much brandy, Servane would motion for me to sit at her feet and, eyes red with drink and tears, she would tell me in a low, raspy voice that she let me stay on because my mother had given her life for mine. When I was a child, her stories left me believing that a babe cannot be born lest she suck away her mother's life and take it as her own, for this is what I did when I came into the world. I was born on the very hearth where I slept, and when my mother expired, so too did the one person Servane had cherished.
I don't remember her fostering me, or teaching me to speak and walk. I am not sure that she did. My earliest visions are of the narrow streets of Montreuil-sur-Mer disappearing beneath my bare feet, the flesh of my toes so covered with dirt that they matched the ground beneath them. I assembled my own clothes from castoff scraps, and in the summer I slept wherever I had been standing when I first choked back a yawn. I kept to myself through it all, making wide arcs around groups of children my age. It is with no self-pity that I say that I had no friends. I sought none and needed none. When I played, it was alone. My own imagination was my treasured companion, and I was never bored.
Servane must have been in her thirties at the time, and though she was a small, thin woman, to me she was a giant. I do not think she loved me, though sometimes I would catch her staring at my face with a strange intensity. I must have resembled my mother, though I had no looking-glass to see what this might mean. I knew that my hair was blonde because it refused to be contained by the strings with which I occasionally attempted to bind it, and always fell into my eyes. As for the rest of my appearance, I could only vouch for what I saw above my earth-stained feet. I did not work so hard that my skin chafed, and I did not eat enough to hide the shape of my ribs.
I fell once from a great height. I hardly remember the circumstances now, though I think I had climbed into a tree to investigate a bird's nest. I remember the sound of a twig snapping and a feeling of pure terror as I lost my grip, then the shuddering crash as I landed on the rocky ground below and a sensation that my lungs had closed forever. When at last I was able to draw breath I tried to stand and discovered that I had broken an arm; I got myself as far as the road before I fainted at the pain.
I remember regaining consciousness the way a log floats to the surface of a murky pond, and I remember seeing the changes in the sky each time I opened my eyes. A child though I was, I remember the moment I realized that I would die soon, and the gift of my mother's life would be wasted.
I don't know how much time passed in that way, but at last a shadow fell over me and I recognized the familiar face of Servane. Clucking her tongue and muttering irritably, she wrapped me in a blanket that had been draped over her arm and carried me home. It was the only time I ever saw her leave the grounds of the inn. She laid me on a table that evening and found a doctor amongst the guests who was willing to tend to me without charge. He wrenched the bones of my arm into alignment and bound them that way.
Servane did not look at me for weeks following the injury, but there was a plate of food on the hearth each evening, and I daresay I have never eaten better than I did during my convalescence. The moment I was healed, everything went back to normal without another word about any of it.
I shall never know whether Servane came to fetch me that day out of a reluctant affection for me or through a sense of duty toward the mother who had borne me, but I suspect it was the latter. Though my mother and I never met, and though I was brought up on charity rather than in a family, I never felt homeless.
Throughout it all, Servane never spoke my mother's name. She only called me "Enfant", and over the years that became Fantine.