Standing in the warm draft of the half-open window, Valjean moved the candle up and down slowly.
He felt as defeated and empty as he did after accidentally discovering the imprint of Cosette's love-letter to Marius in her blotting-book. In that moment a month and a half ago, - a lifetime ago! – he had felt his life's purpose desert him. He saw then that Cosette had grown up and found a lover to dote on; he, who had hitherto been everything to her, was now only a father – an obstacle to her happiness and not its object.
Now, looking out from Javert's sparsely furnished apartment on the fourth floor of a shabby tenement building into the deep shadows of the quiet and well-lit streets of the Saint-Gervais quarter, he sensed something else slipping away. This time, it was not something he had and cherished, like Cosette's love and undivided attention, but something that he seemed on the verge of attaining. And it was moving away from him, as inexorably as Javert was disappearing into the depths of the dark city.
The only human being in the whole world who knew him entirely, both as the beastly convict and as the saintly philanthropist, - though he smirked at the former and sneered at the latter – was leaving him.
Valjean had no doubt that Javert was in mortal danger. The feeling was a plant fed by an extensive system of roots: the memory of Javert bound to the post in the tavern at the barricades; Vidocq's tirade earlier that evening about Javert's perverse inclination to suicide; the helpless self-loathing he saw flash in Javert's eyes as he had come to after his second attack at the desk.
The fact that he had gone out unarmed.
Specters of the masked bandits of Patron Minette rose before his eyes. Valjean saw Javert subdue them once with a few well-chosen phrases, but as a representative of the city police, armed with a massive lead-headed cane and protected by a squadron of officers of peace. Now he was facing them as a man, armed with a pen-knife and protected by a small strip of leather sewn into his collar.
Valjean cursed the timid, guilty part of himself that still shrank in Javert's presence and let itself be silenced and dominated. He should have not allowed that stubborn ass walk out the door unaccompanied.
A sudden gust of wind suddenly fluttered the candle flame, and Valjean tried to shield it with his palm as he shut the window. But the candle had already gone out.
He grabbed the box of lucifer matches from the mantelpiece, but the candle would not relight. After going through four matches without success, Valjean cast his eyes around for something more readily flammable. His eyes alit on the waste paper basket.
Valjean pulled out of it a wad of paper, straightened it out, tore off a corner, lit it with a match and then relit the candle from it. He did not even know why he bothered – the watch he placed before him onto the windowsill told him that five minutes had already passed from Javert's departure, and he was free to stop the signaling. But he felt he ought to leave the candle burning in the window anyway – if for no other reason then as a beacon to Javert, a sign that someone was awaiting his safe return.
Valjean was about to re-crumple the paper and toss it back into the basket when he noticed that his sooty thumb had left a smudge on the sheet.
In the smudge, thin white letters stood out clearly.
This was the sheet Javert had scratched at impotently during his fit with a dry metal pen.
Grabbing a pinch of ash from the fireplace, Valjean coated his fingers and began carefully rubbing the sheet from edge to edge, bringing out more and more impressions of letters. Javert had been contemplating his brother's secret message before the onset of the fit – perhaps in these scribbles, some hint lay of the instructions the note contained. He had failed to follow Javert, but if he knew where the agent went off to, he could at least provide reinforcements.
When the entire sheet was dark gray, Valjean read the first line:
Hier wird keinem das silbernes Messer in den Rücken gesteckt.
And underneath it stood in French:
No one gets struck in the back with a silver knife here.
Uncomprehending, Valjean read further:
Hier werden keine silbernen Messer in die Rücken gesteckt.
And underneath:
No silver knives are stuck into backs here.
These lines covered half a page, the last one breaking off at "silbernes." Having read them start to finish twice and finding no sense in them, Valjean set the sheet aside with a renewed feeling of pity for Javert's condition. Perhaps these lines held some secret meaning to him, or perhaps they were nothing but ravings set to paper, but it chilled Valjean to think of the strange forces in Javert's head that compelled him to sit down once a week to his desk, blind and deaf to the world, and write out lines in French and German like a schoolboy.
The page holding no answers to where Javert had gone, Valjean crumpled it back up and switched his attention to the page with doodles left by Javert on the table.
The contours of the drawings were more visible now that Javert had drawn over them in coal pencil. There was a Sun with six asymmetrical rays; to its right, a childish sort of attempt at a rose; between and underneath them, a little bird sitting atop of a heart pierced with an arrow. A fish swam below, away from a wolf. Underneath them was a book. There was a rifle also on the page, in the bottom left hand corner, and a horse right by it. That was it.
Of all the drawings, only the figure of the wolf, which was seated and had its maw extended upwards in an apparent howl, was a familiar one. Valjean pulled from his pocket the card he received in the mail inviting him to the Surete meeting and compared the drawing with the printed figure on the shield. They were clearly the same.
Valjean looked at the heraldic beast of the Surete, then at the fish, then at the wolf again. Something about Christ, perhaps? Or sin, guarding against sin?
Meleus in umbra pugnabimus. The Spartan motto. 'We shall fight all the better in the shadow.'
So intently did Valjean study the drawings that he did not notice his fingers smudging them until he saw a fresh streak of soot between the Sun and the flower, connecting them by extending the thickest ray and merging it with one of the petals.
Valjean looked and looked at the smudge. Now more than ever, the drawing reminded him of something. Something so familiar and so obvious that he was clearly a ninny for not seeing it. Something that Javert had gotten after only several minutes, despite being initially baffled.
The fish swam away from the wolf, under the Sun and the flower, above the book and the rifle and the horse...
Nonsense, thought Valjean. No, I shall never get it like this. Come! of what did Javert speak when he was contemplating these drawings?
Of my passage from Orion through the Alps to Paris.
But why was he talking of the escape route from Toulon? Surely Javert and his brother did not leave town tonight…
'So it goes,' Javert had said. And then again: 'So it goes.'
And how does it go? The fish swims. The Sun shines. The wolf howls. The flower grows. So it goes. And Valjean's own hand had inadvertently connected the flower to the Sun.
The Sun…
Valjean felt himself on the verge of discovery – or of madness, perhaps. This must have been how Galileo had felt before realizing, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it was the Earth that moved and not the Sun in the sky, and the Sun was really fixed, like the stars.
Hang on, thought Valjean. Was it the drawing of the Sun or simply of a very big star?
Well, the Sun is a star, he told himself. At least, the astronomers and natural philosophers think so. Descartes had even written about it.
Valjean looked some more at the six thick rays reaching out in every direction, the rightmost one touching the flower.
And just like that, everything fell into place.
"Place d'Etoile!"
No longer did Valjean see the fish, the flower, the wolf, the rifle or the bird. Now he saw the river's flow, the Tuileries gardens, the Surete headquarters on Ile de la Cite, Champs de Mars - and Javert's brother, Moineau*. The sparrow sat in the middle of Champs Elysees, - if the drawing was located correctly, somewhere between Chemin de Versailles and Cours de la Reyne.
And what of the heart with the arrow through it atop which he sat? What did that signify?
Valjean thought back to the few strolls he had dared take with Cosette in the Elysian Fields over the years. What was there besides trees and crowds?
Why, there was only one thing it could be, he thought.
A tavern.
*Moineau, fr. - literally, "sparrow."