Valjean was not a man given easily to tears. He wept going away to Toulon in his youth; he wept at the realization of his own wickedness after robbing Little Gervais; he wept as he forced himself to face losing Cosette to Marius. But outside of such cataclysmic upsets, there was little that could wring a tear from Valjean's now tranquil, now melancholy, now sullen, but mostly dry eye.

Yet that night, he came close to weeping.

Valjean had caught a cab from the intersection of Rue de Paradis and Rue de Temple, instructing the driver to take him to Place de la Madeleine. Halfway there, he changed the destination to the intersection of Rue de la Madeileine and Rue St. Honore, in a desperate and silly attempt to shave a minute or two from his travel time and get to Javert that much faster.

An extra franc added to the fare bought Valjean those two minutes. However, no amount of money could buy back the interminable eons he then lost on the Cours de la Reine.

Traversing the park northward for the first time, Valjean was ready to break into a run as his eyes searched for a tavern signboard exhibiting a pierced heart.

Traversing it southward on his way back, he walked slower, examining every shadow and bush on suspicions of being a drinking house.

He had arrived back at the place where he first set foot in the park without having found either a signboard or any building. The small, tidy taverns of Cours de la Reine ended well before that part of the map where he began his search. And yet the heart had been situated here – at least so Valjean recalled, and his recollection was all he had now. He could not consult the note again; he left it at the apartment for fear of compromising Javert and himself with it.

Now, starting out to travel along Cours de la Reine for the third time and still seeing nothing but huge shadowed elms and fragrant grass in the light of the gibbous moon, Valjean felt like five kinds of fool. Whatever had given him the idea that the drawings added up to a map? Perhaps if he had been a proper criminal, a pedigreed and guild-approved resident of the underworld, he might've known better what to make of all those secret signs. But he was just an imposter, an unlucky peasant who never learned any secret languages because he never shared his secrets with any brotherhood.

Having failed in his mission to find and protect Javert, Valjean felt drained. He stood now about halfway into the park. Walking it to the end for the third time would have been a waste of time; going back to Javert's apartment would have meant defeat. Bereft of any sensible courses of action, Valjean simply lay down on the grass and closed his eyes.

The breeze was picking up as the night air grew colder, carrying with it a richness of sound of the night park. Elms rustled soothingly in the wind. A bird cooed something in the branches above Valjean's head. Some nameless critter croaked and murmured far away in the grass, its voice barely carrying. Soon, another of its kind joined in. Valjean could not discern what sort of animal made the noises; he imagined, dreamily, a toad and his plumper, brighter-colored lady friend calling out to each other and wondered how come they 'spoke' more in turns than in typical anuran concert.

Valjean was falling into a doze when suddenly he heard the first toad rumble discernibly:

"Tonnerre."

Valjean rolled up into a sitting crouch covered in cold sweat. He was still alone. The voices had fallen silent. Had he dreamed them?

Then he heard the oath again, and a few more after it. They were coming straight out of the grass ahead and to the left of where Valjean lay. The earth itself seemed to be disgorging them.

Shuddering, Valjean got up and walked cautiously towards the sound.

"Well, then I don't know…I mean, really!" It was now a woman's voice.

"What, and I should know?" countered the first voice, a man's. "Let the bosses deal with him, they ought to know what's what. That's why they're the big-time fanandels – they know things. Babet doesn't pay me to know things; he pays me to cosh people."

"Well, he pays me to cook, and not to keep tally of visitors."

Valjean stopped and looked around again reflexively. The park was deserted. It was as though he were eavesdropping on two arguing fleurs-de-marie, if one could imagine flowers talk about cooking and coshing people.

Valjean dropped to the ground to listen closer.

"Leave him to himself. If he's due here, he's here. If he's not due here, he'll get shown the way out soon enough."

Valjean heard steps and what sounded like a door creaking and then being shut.

"Fine! let him sit here," said the woman. "No skin off my nose." The door creaked and was shut again.

Now on his belly, Valjean moved forward in a crawl, feeling the grass and earth before him, until his hand swept ahead and found air.

He was at the edge of a large ditch, which had been hidden from his sight by the gentle sloping of the ground. Across from where he lay, barely daring to breathe, two small out-buildings leaned against the mud of the excavated hill – a henhouse and a firewood-house, as far as he could discern in the darkness. Practically under his chin, there was a vine-covered trellis arcade - from a distance, it had resembled a low boggy patch in the ground. If he raised his head slightly, Valjean could spy the edges of a long wooden table and bench that the arcade covered. Next to it, he saw a stairway cut almost perpendicularly into the loam of the hillside.

And to his right, at the other edge of the ditch, was the tavern itself: a miserable dilapidated shack whose smokeless chimney he had taken twice for an elm stump in the dark.

Valjean had arrived at Coeur Percée, one of the last subterranean drinking houses on Champs Elysees.