note: a) I own nothing to do with Les Mis; Florine is my creation. b)this was written a very, very long time ago, back when I had first read the book and was most obsessed with Javert. I know others have used the same trick I use here. Parallel evolution. Please R&R and give me ideas for what happens next?
No Ransom to be Paid
Watch night falling over reddened Paris: a hot night, a mist-vague, wet night in early June. Watch, as the figure of a man makes his slow way from the lamplit Rue de l'Homme Arme, through the shadowed streets and thoroughfares echoing with burning barricades and the shouts of war, through the cobbled alleyways puddled with rain, to the empty Place du Chatelet.
Observe him. He walks slowly, stiffly, as if lost in thought; his head is down, his hands clasped bloodless behind his back. His long steel-colored hair lies irreproachably in a sleek queue, his boots are spotless, his coat buttons magnificent. Yet his entire air is one of a man sullied, made impure and lowered in worth and status. He is no longer that which he has been. He is tall and well-built, as unyielding as the stone walls he is walking beside; yet he is shivering as if the mild night wind is blowing through his bones.
He pauses at the corner of the Place, as if deciding something; a long pause. He straightens and walks with a purposeful stride towards the lighted window of the police post on the corner.
"Javert," said Javert to the sergeant on duty at the post, who nodded and returned his gaze to the document he was reading. He went through to the small room that functioned as an interrogation chamber and a booking facility, and sat down at the small table in the center of the room. Paper, ink, wax and candle awaited the night reports of duty officers. For a long moment he sat staring at the official seal of the police force, as if attempting to make sense of it, and then with decisive force took a piece of paper and began to write.
The forces at war within him made it difficult to hold the pen steady, let alone write legible words: but, with the implacable iron self-control he had always lived by, he forced the words out of his swirling mind and onto the paper. His fingers were white, bloodless, on the quill.
He had made his decision already, on the walk from the Rue to this post. What he found difficult was the use of his name connected to what he was writing, and the words he had used. At length he could think of little more to say, and signed his name in ponderous copperplate. Javert, inspector of the 1st class; at the post of the Place du Chatelet, June 7, 1832, about one o'clock in the morning.
He noticed that drops of perspiration were slipping down his face like tears. Inspector of the First Class.
He folded the paper, sealed it with the official seal, and left it lying parallel with the two quills and the block of wax, in perfect geometrical alignment.
The air outside was hot and damp against his face, hard to breathe. He closed his eyes for a long moment. Valjean's face swam before him, the expression on his features serene, almost beatific: at peace. Valjean had spoken of God, and in God, he said, there was true satisfaction in subordination and order. The whore Fantine had called on God, spoken of Heaven...
Like any respectable man Javert was nominally Christian, had probably been christened by the questionable poorhouse authority; like most, he was not moved by any particular belief in God beyond the need for obedience and justice. Now, along with all the other tenets of his personal universe, that particular lack of belief was cracked, and letting in water fast. With that thought the malaise which had possessed him all night grew stronger, heavier, and he was aware that tonight would be bad, worse than he had felt in a long time...
The heavy throbbing behind his eyes had become a pulse of bright pain, irregular and full of malice, and the image of Valjean the saint with his green cap and his halo was replaced by the scintillating herringbone patterns of migraine. He forced his leaden limbs to move, began to walk towards the Seine, towards the corner of the quai and the Pont au Change. The air pressed heavily on him, slowing his progress; he moved as if struggling through thick syrup, the white sheeting agony in his skull precluding thought. His reaching hand found the moist stone of the quai's parapet at last, and he leaned heavily against the wall, looking down into the water. He stood directly above the Chatelet rapids of the Seine, well known to be the most dangerous area of the river. Swollen by the rains, the black flood below pulled inexorably at the stone, great liquid muscles shimmering in reflected gaslight, sickening, hypnotizing. He could see the impartial shapes of the Palais de Justice and Notre Dame standing livid against a yellowish sky; could see, too, the quai and the bridges were deserted. Mists swirled below the bridges, now and then obscuring the torrent. The dank smell of wet stone rose out of the abyss.
Javert's headache was blinding, the pain rising in crescendoes to echo his heart's rush. Already the terrible sickness was rising in him, awoken by that relentless throb. His fingers pressed desperately against his face, a protective cage to keep his skull from bursting. Moving like a man delirious or dead drunk, he struggled to the parapet and stood breathing in slow gasps for a minute, two minutes, staring with blind eyes to the bilious sky, to the stars beyond which he could not see through clouds and pain, to the vault of the world he had known for fifty-two years. Slowly, horribly, a smile grew on his face, a bitter, jealous, mad grin, mocking and appalling and full of pain. Then, with his arms outstretched in unconscious imitation of the crucifix, he sprang out into space.
The iron dolphins which had regarded his last moments remained impassive and unchanging. No one had seen him fall; no one heard the faint splash, no one noticed the dark form of his hat left carefully on the parapet. The Paris he had served for so long took little note of his passing. He would not have been surprised.
The shock of the frigid water brought him halfway back to lucidity. Instinctively he struggled towards the surface, hindered by the weight of his dark greatcoat; he ripped it off in a frantic surge of energy and rose towards the air, but the relentless currents caught him in the few feet below the surface and whirled him down again and away, helpless as a leaf. For some time he struggled, trying to hold on to the air which filled his lungs; at last his strength was gone, and the icy water rushed into him. He shuddered in helpless convulsions, briefly, before succumbing to the inevitable.
Water is a comforting medium. Now that he no longer struggled, the river cradled him, bearing him swiftly along. He breathed in and out, in and out, the water in his lungs feeling as painless as air; he slid away from consciousness, at peace, falling into sleep. His eyes closed in the dimness, his long hair, freed from its tie, floated in the current like seaweed, like lace.
One person, it seemed, had heard his fall. Out of the shadows under the bridge, a river-barge, draped in black, slowly emerged. A young man dressed in stained and tattered clothes ran out on the deck and spoke urgently with the woman who followed him. The youth pulled off his boots and dove beautifully and skilfully into the black river.
Moments passed, and he came up for air, seal-sleek, and just as swiftly was gone beneath the surface. When he came up for the second time, he raised an arm, and the woman maneuvered the barge closer. Together they pulled an inert form from the water, and stood a moment regarding the fallen Inspector: then the woman knelt beside him and turned him over, pressing the water from his lungs. His rescuer untied the barge from the quai completely, and let it be taken by the current; sliding smoothly over the black water, the three passengers were borne out of Paris into the dawn.
The woman found a lifebeat at last in his throat, but he was blue-white, and he was not breathing. She tilted his head back and placed her mouth over his, lending him her breath and her life and her strength. At length Javert's body shuddered, and he retched, convulsively, suddenly, and began to cough. There was something terrible in the helpless way he was shaken by the spasms, not in possession of himself, without control. She was suddenly aware that he was after all a man, not some kind of grim automaton dressed in severe flic-fashion dark blue, and it seemed to her a kind of revelation.
His hair lay over his face, disheveled by his struggles; she smoothed it away. He was only half conscious, exhausted, his breathing not easy. She called for the young man, who left the tiller and helped her to carry him below and lay him on a bed. Together they looked down at the man half of Paris feared and hated and the other half ignored; still drifting half unconscious, exhausted, weak, he presented no threat to anyone except himself.
Feuilly turned away, his own ghosts grinning, and found the woman waiting for his need. He slid, helpless, to his knees and pressed his face against her belly, embracing her slender waist as if he clung to a lifeline. She rested her hands on his head, her fingers gentle, smoothing his dark-gold hair, saying nothing. She too had been at the barricade where Enjolras had died, had found Feuilly sitting alone beside his friend's body, amidst the smoking ruins of the street. She had helped to build the breastwork and had helped defend it; she knew that the greatest goal of the A B C club, besides the liberation of the masses, was to die honorably for Enjolras, the god, the master, the lover; and Enjolras had caught the bullet meant for Feuilly, and died ignobly, retching blood. She knew Feuilly had a lot to hate.
"We were going to kill him," he said, his voice quivering, his lips hardly moving against the stained linen of her corset. "We caught him spying for the national guard; we tied him to a pillar, and the old man said that he would shoot him....He must have fired in the air..."
"He was doing what he thought was his duty," said the woman; neither of them knew whether she was referring to Javert, Valjean, or Enjolras. Nor did it matter, much, anymore.
"I think we all envied him," said Feuilly at last, some of the bitterness fading from his voice. "He was so sure of his own righteousness, so completely devoid of vacillation or self-indulgence or second thoughts of any kind....He was like a god. He cared for nothing but the law, he believed completely in the law, he was the law; he was immune to corruption. We all wanted some of that knowledge that we were definitely doing right, that we would be vindicated in the end, that we were nothing but servants of a higher cause, and that we were satisfied in that service..."
He trailed off, and remained silent for a long time: and then he drew a deep breath, and resolutely kissed her, standing tall, almost as tall as Javert.
"Times change," he said softly. "We cannot always serve the past."
She took him by the hand and led him to the other side of the partition, silently aware of the primal, eldest way she could help. He took her with a kind of anguished fury, and spent a little of his bitterness: she held him in the throes of catharsis, prolonged the moment, clearing away in pleasure a little of the pain she felt as well as he. Exhausted, they slept at last in each others' arms, and did not dream, for once.
Early light woke the woman. She was merely the woman; she had no name that anyone knew, and she was either already a whore or on the way to being one. She had appeared one night among the women of the A. B. C., requiring nothing beyond permission to work for them. She was capable and strong, and a pair of hands, and they had never taken the trouble to find out any more than that. Somehow she had come through the barricade's fall, and been there to bandage the wounded with whatever was at hand, including the blouse and skirt she wore, and returned to the fight in corset and petticoat, carrying dead mens' guns. She was slender and brown-haired and filthy and relatively untouched by disease. Feuilly had known her all of a month, and in all that time she had never broken down and needed him. She was the first woman he'd met who had not thrown herself, weeping, into his arms at the first sign of danger.
She made her way silently back to where Javert lay. He was sleeping fitfully, his face lined with pain, and his skin was damp and hot with fever. She touched his cheek, and he came awake, coughing, his hand to his chest. She helped him sit up in the bed, which eased his breathing somewhat. His eyes were brilliant, their slate-grey darkened to black with pain.
"Where....am I," he croaked, and coughed again, harder this time.
"Hush,"she said. Her voice was low and rough and kind. "Don't try to talk. You're ill. You're on a barge heading out of the banlieue.
"Javert, listen to me. You are among friends...no, I suppose you've never had friends. Among those who respect you. Please try to rest. There is a difference between corruption and self-discovery, and you are needed. There is good you can do."
"You should have...let me die....." he gasped, fixing her with a scowl that should have reduced her to whimpering fear. She regarded him steadily.
"No. No, we should not, Javert. You have never done wrong; you have merely exercised your responsibility to the law. Whether that law is God's or man's, your record seems exemplary." She paused, noticing the purple shadows under his eyes, the way he clearly had to remind himself to breathe. "But you must rest. When you recover there will be time for soul-searching. Believe in God, Javert; he is cruel, but he is capable of the most astonishing grace you can imagine."
Javert's coughing slowly subsided, leaving him exhausted and limp. He could not remember ever having felt so dreadful, not even when the cholera came to Toulon; each breath he took was agony, burning in his chest as if he was breathing in pure fire, his throat felt raw, tattered; he was dizzy and sick like a man with vertigo. He was very much aware that he was being nursed by a woman for the first time in his adult life, and that it felt strange and embarrassing and new. The fever sang redly in his ears, and the room and the girl's voice approached and receded in great sickening waves. Yet, somehow, he felt her cool fingers on his burning forehead, heard her voice murmuring words he could not understand but nevertheless somehow found reassuring, and the world began to recede as he slipped away again into darkness, into sleep.
She felt some of the tension in his frame relax as sleep claimed him; it took her a few careful minutes to reduce the sudden ache of tension in her shoulders before she could rise and leave the room. She had seen enough whores die of pneumonia. She knew the signs.
Feuilly was awake when she returned. "How is he?"
"He's ill," she said quietly. "We need to find a doctor."
They came to a small town late that afternoon, the golden sunlight stretching long shadows over the meadows. Feuilly, who had found another shirt in the stolen barge's hold and looked more wholesome than she, went into town to find a doctor, and returned several hours later with a monocled gentleman in a dark frock coat who carried a reassuring black bag.
"This is Monsieur Heidelmann,""he announced, "a scientist and doctor with the highest credentials available."
Despite the situation, the woman laughed wryly. "What are you doing in these provincial parts, M. le docteur?"
"I have little love for city life," said Heidelmann, and smiled. "I find the life in small-town France far more reasonably paced."
Something in the doctor's manner made both Feuilly and the woman feel that he could be trusted, and would trust them, unsavory as they must seem. She smiled; though she was unaware of it, the act transformed her face from attractive to beautiful, even with the grime in her hair and the whiteness of exhaustion and shock in her cheeks. "Well, monsieur, we are lucky that you find it so, and that you are here. We have on board a man who is suffering from pneumonia, probably brought on by half-drowning last night. Can you help him?"
Heidelmann's answer was his decisive entry into the cabin where Javert lay. He examined Javert quickly and thoroughly, and knelt a moment regarding the obvious struggle to breathe.
"He's certainly got pneumonia. You say he nearly drowned?"
"Yes. He....he tried to kill himself. It's a long story, but he's a better man than he thinks, and he can't be allowed to die, not yet, not while he is needed," said Feuilly haltingly. "He threw himself into the Seine. He was underwater for perhaps five minutes."
"How did you get him to start breathing again?" said Heidelmann, interested and concerned at the same time.
"I pressed some of the water out of him," said the woman. "He still wasn't breathing, so I breathed for him."
"And that worked?"
"Eventually."
"You are a remarkably resourceful girl, Miss...er...."
"I don't have a name."
Feuilly looked down in amusement. He was too tired to think much; the world had become a kind of dream to him. "Call her Florine," he said. "Florine, flora, florin: the flower of great price."
She snorted in derision, good-natured derision, and curtseyed. "Messieurs, je m'appelle Florine maintenant, alors. But what of Javert?"
"Javert," repeated Heidelmann thoughtfully.
"You don't...by any chance know him?" Feuilly said. Of course. Who wouldn't?
"I have heard of him. Suffice it to say that we must get him into a real bed in a real house as soon as possible."
"We have no money," said Florine. Heidelmann smiled sharply.
"You will. You, Mademoiselle Florine, will aid me in my practice: and you, Monsieur Feuilly, will work in my library, which badly needs cataloguing. In return for which I will feed, clothe and house you and do what I can for Monsieur Javert."
There was silence for a moment. Heidelmann had some of that magnificence in that space of time which had characterised Jean Valjean and, before him, the Bishop of Digne. The woman Florine and Feuilly looked at one another.
"How can we ever thank you," she said quietly.
"No need. Your help will be invaluable, both of you."
They arranged to have Javert carried to Heidelmann's house. Feuilly tied the barge up at the town dock and left it, knowing somewhere in the cynical part of his mind that if it got stolen, they could always appropriate another. Yet that thought was beginning to have an alien tinge of immorality....
The sick man lay raving in a high white bed, as the days turned. Florine was always there at night, supporting and soothing him when he could hardly breathe for the terrible hacking cough, bathing his forehead and chest with cool water to reduce the raging fever, holding tight to his hand when he cried out from the pain in his chest. Heidelmann could do very little for him beyond opium to ease some of the pain, extract of willow for his fever, and soothing syrups for his cough. Javert was delirious, wandering in his mind from place to place and time to time. What Florine learned in the nights she sat up with him awakened a new and seemingly boundless sympathy, not pity, for the man of stone. Javert murmured cutting stories of self-loathing and disgust, of resentment towards the place which had spawned him, of long years of endurance and discipline. She learned also of the hunt for Valjean which had spanned more than a decade and obsessed Javert to the point of near-insanity. She listened, and learned, and kept silent: she was very much aware that he did not know he was giving her this gift, and she accepted it quietly and without comment, but with respect.
She worked during the day with Heidelmann, nursing patients and assisting the doctor; she slept a few hours now and then, curled in a chair like a child. Feuilly saw the speed with which she drove herself, and said nothing, but attacked his own travail with more intensity. She was sensible: she knew her limits.
Two weeks, three weeks went by with tension scraping at all their nerves. At last, very late at night, the crisis of Javert's illness came, and for four hours, they had to use all their combined strength to hold his soul fast in his body, so eager was it to slip away....
Florine woke, cold. She lay in a chair by Javert's bedside, wearing only the corset and petticoat she had kept on the night before when she was summoned from her undress to come and save Javert's life. The window which had been flung open in the burning summer room stood wide and grey with morning light: stiffly she rose and closed it, surprised at the pain in her hands until she remembered how the sick man had clung to them, as if he could never let go...
She whirled back to the bedside. Javert lay so still she felt a cold splash of fear shoot through her blood: yet this stillness was not that of death, but merely that of peaceful, dreamless sleep. His skin was cool, his breathing easier, without the dreadful catch at the end of each breath, as if each was the last. He was alive. He would recover. She stood looking down at his countenance, peaceful and oddly attractive. They had shaved his sideburns to make it easier to bathe his face: his high cheekbones were sprayed lightly with pockmarks, not so much unsightly as fascinating. His hair, disarrayed by his feverish tossing, was spread in silver-grey skeins over the pillow, spiderwebs, gossamer. She regarded that face for a long moment, before the hectic pace of the past weeks finally caught up with her, and she crumpled bonelessly to the floor.
"She is a pearl of great price," remarked Heidelmann to Feuilly. "Where did you meet?"
"I....we....that is, during the insurrection, we found ourselves fighting side by side; we hardly spoke, but when I crawled away in search of a different city, she was there, and she came too. I have not known a woman with such strength."
"She was a prostitute," Heidelmann said, half-inquiring.
"Probably. I don't know; most of the women there were washerwomen, seamstresses, whores and scullery-drudges. All swept up in our high moral crusade to make the world a better place."
"Do not be so bitter," Heidelmann said warmly. "It is done: the dead are dead, and the living must continue their lives, for the sake of the dead if not for themselves."
"Moving." Feuilly drained his brandy glass. "Quite honestly, I don't want to remember it any more than I have to."
"You will have to," said Heidelmann quietly, and it seemed almost as if he was not speaking to Feuilly at all, but someone a long way away, and a long time ago. "What were you before? A student with a white ruffled shirt and Laforgue boots...?"
"Something like that," Feuilly said, and the words sounded like cursing. "Oh, and I had books, too, The Classics, Plato, Socrates, the Res Gestae in a French translation. They were very pretty in their red leather covers, and they set off my earnest pale face to perfection."
"You didn't happen to know a young man who called himself Favand? Marcel Favand?"
"I don't think so," Feuilly said, having been neatly switched from one subject to another almost without noticing. "Favand....Favand..Yes, yes, there was a Favand who came to the meetings from time to time. He was shortish, dark-haired....shared Grantaire's wine without him noticing....Why?"
"Never mind," Heidelmann said, and Feuilly looked at him sharply: the man seemed to have aged ten years, and lost all joy, in the space of three minutes. He was drunk enough not to ask awkward questions, though, and the moment passed.
They sat in Heidelmann's study, a roaring fire sending skittering sparks up into the mysteries of the chimney system, fascinating, like dreams. Florine lay exhaustedly asleep in her own room, and Javert was stable, sleeping sound. They had been drinking since late afternoon, on and off. It was now seven o'clock.
"You know," said Feuilly, as if attempting to cover up and ignore an ugliness which had been inadvertently revealed, "we ought to sleep it off or we'll be useless tomorrow," and he set the glass firmly down on a table and regarded the doctor with very blue eyes.
"Sensible, sensible! Young man, I applaud you. May I suggest...."
Feuilly was already asleep in the chair, his dark-gold hair escaping from its tie. Heidelmann half-smiled to himself, as the twilight darkened outside to night, and the juddering call of a faraway nightjar sweetened the air.
It rained in the night. The torrid heat of the past weeks seemed washed away in the thunderstorms' wake: the air itself was washed clean and smelled of forgiveness and wet grass, cool and fresh and breathable.
Watch as the woman in white flings wide the great windows on the morning mist. She moves slowly, as if in dreams, her long hair flowing in chestnut cascades down the back of her gown. Her hands are smudged with bruises, and her eyes are dark with lack of sleep; but there is a smile on her fair weary face, a smile of one well satisfied with the work of her hands. She stands as a statue before the window, her eyes half-closed against the mist-laden breeze which jewels her lashes and bedews her hair. Far off across the fields, a whitethroat is singing, on and on, like tears.
Watch as the man in the bed stirs, sleeping, drowned, recalled to life.
"Fantine.....?"
Florine moved slowly to the bed. His huge grey eyes found hers, slid into focus, catching the light.
"No," she said softly. "My name is Florine."
He sighed, closing his eyes again, as if exhausted by that brief action. "No," he said tiredly, "of course not. Fantine died."
"In a way," Florine murmured. "She is still here. She always will be."
He nodded briefly, his eyes still closed. "Where am I?"
"A small village several miles outside of Paris."
At the word "Paris" he began to cough, helplessly: she slid an arm underneath his shoulders and helped him sit up, leaning forward slightly. Still, the fit went on for far too long, and when at last he could take his handkerchief from his lips and lie back against the pillows, he had gone greyish-white with exhaustion.
"How ironic," he gasped. "I meant to end myself, and am saved from a relatively painless death by water for this---" he waved the crumpled handkerchief---"slow death on land." Even this short speech was enough to bring on another, shorter fit of coughing, and this time when it let him go he didn't open his eyes. She sighed, reached for the glass of water on the nightstand, helped him drink. After a long moment he parted his lashes and pinned her with a direct steel-coloured gaze.
"Who are you?" he muttered. His voice was a whispery ruin.
"Just another citizen of the gutter," she said softly. "Does it hurt to talk?"
"A little. I could swear I've seen you before..." he added, narrowing his eyes.
"Probably. I've seen you before. By the way, how do you feel?"
"Very weak," he said sourly, "and my chest pains me. How long have I been here?"
"Four weeks. You were delirious most of the time."
"Four weeks," he repeated, and raised a hand to his face. "What happened?"
"What's the last thing you remember?"
"I am not sure. I left Valjean at the Rue de l'Homme Arme, and walked towards the river," he paused, his face tight, "and I went to the Place du Chatelet and wrote down some observations for the benefit of the Service. I had a migraine coming on, and I do not believe I was completely lucid...I'm not entirely sure what happened next. I was determined to put an end to my life; it seems I failed at that too...."
"You are needed," she told him. "You will always be needed." She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. Somehow it was easier than meeting that expressionless grey gaze. "You threw yourself from the quai by the Pont au Change. Feuilly and I had survived the Saint-Denis barricade, and we were taking a river-barge to escape Paris; we happened to be moored beneath the Pont Neuf, and we saw your fall. Feuilly saved you. He has a lot to hate: his whole ethos was based around Enjolras, and the honor to die for Enjolras, and Enjolras died for him.....He was the only survivor that I know of... In any case, we brought you back to life, and you were so ill from the water that you frightened us, and we found the nearest doctor we could, and here you are." She finished in a hurry.
He was looking particularly thunderous. "You should have let me drown," he told her. "It was my right to die."
"Certainly. But it is the world's right to keep you, to have you live as an example of virtue and decision. We need you, as does all of France. The country is in flux. No one knows right from wrong, and prostitution and thievery and sleaze is rising. I know, Javert. I am from the gutter. Can you really argue that your presence is not needed in this world?"
He closed his eyes, patiently, waiting for her to stop.
"And besides," she said quietly, "I think I love you."
His eyes snapped open. She would not meet their gaze. With a finger he reached out and tipped up her chin so that she was forced to look at him. Crystal tears glimmered in her eyelashes.
"What did you say?"
"You heard me, Javert. Make of it what you will."
He looked at her for a long moment, inscrutable, stone-faced, silent, and closed his eyes again. "You do not know what you say," he concluded, quietly, still regarding the insides of his eyelids. "You cannot. Your head has been turned by too many Victor Hugo novels, you see romance in every sordid shadow...Ministering-angel you may be, but consider yourself no more than that."
"It is not my choice," she whispered. "Nevertheless, I will not speak of it again." She straightened suddenly, with the air of one who has made a decision at last. She closed the windows against the cool air and drew the gauze curtains, filtering the grey light as if through moonstone. Without a word she left the room, moving with the studied quiet of the trained nurse or the spy, and shut the door behind her.
Feuilly was waiting in the hall. He saw the brightness in her downcast eyes, the little self-deprecating smile, and tossed away the questions, taking her in his arms and providing support and comfort in one embrace; he felt her crumple, and knew she would have fallen. At length she raised her face from his chest and presented him with a regard once more under control, and a guileless smile.
He carried her down to the study and set her down on the red leather chaise longue. She was again Florine, quiet and competent, but he had felt her shoulders shivering in that moment before the door to the sick man's room, and knew what strength she had had been sorely tried.
"How is he?" Feuilly asked at length, warming his hands round a cup of cafe au lait. She raised an eyebrow, staring into her own cup, watching the swirl.
"He'll survive, though he's not happy about the prospect," she said. "He's still in pain, and still very weak, and still coughing in a terrifying sort of way, but he's got no fever, and he's about as lucid as he's going to get. I think what we do now is wait, and try to figure what we're going to do with him once he's well."
"Yes," Feuilly mused, "what indeed. Maybe he should go down south to Avignon or Nice or somewhere, and start being a police officer again. Too many people know him here."
"Well, the point is: is he going to show that old Javert determination and do what he was designed for, or is he going to throw himself off the first bridge he can find once he escapes from here?"
"I don't know," Feuilly said sadly. "We all need to remember, I think, what it was that we were doing before the putative liberation of the peoples, and why we were doing it, and then consider what we can do now."
"It's pointless to dwell in the past," she said dryly. "Yes, I know, there is a grief that can't be spoken, and a pain that goes on and on, without end, without salvation, but perhaps there is a choice underneath the barricade, and the screams...We can live in the pain and the grief and the memory of someone else's gun barrels, and the streets sticky with blood; or we can try and do something for the ones who fell, since we are still alive, unfairly so, and we can still speak for the dead. I don't know. I..."
"You dream of little children dancing till the bullets cease to fly, cease to hold them up, and they fall to the pavement, and their eyes fill up with rain from the greasy clouds...? You wake screaming because there is no one left to die, and the Guard have taken back the ten square feet which cost fourteen peoples' lives, and your mother's face is trodden on by a muddy boot, and the skyline is sheared by bayonets, and columns of smoke, and the screams of people dying...Your friend for whom you secretly hoped to die is lying painted scarlet red with the blood he vomited at your feet, and you have no choice but to reach into his side and find the musket ball that took his life, and push it slippery with blood down the throat of your own gun, and try to hold the barricade one more minute, one more, one more, until help comes..."
He trailed off, and looked up at her with eyes in which the fires of the Quartier Latin still danced. She met his gaze steadily and without recoil.
"You stitch together the fraying satin on your last good dress for the last possible time, the last way it can be any use at all, and pinch your lips to turn them red, and wander all night long in the stinking alleys, your feet bare beneath the tattered petticoat, your hair greasy and drenched from the rain that won't stop falling, and find a customer at last, and keep quiet, though you know you're bleeding again, because he is rougher than any you have known for weeks, and you are in pain as you stumble away, and use the three sous he threw at you to buy an end of bread, and soak for hours in filthy water in someone else's washtub to try to ease the pain in the center of you, but it won't go, and you are cold....You watch so many others paint themselves to try to hide the sores, shiver and cough and spit in the urine-stinking room you share with four other whores sunk as low as you.....You hold their shrunken hands as they rave in delirium, you help carry them one by one to the river, ease them in with a benediction whispered through cracked lips, and go back to the streets for another job, and another, and another, because there is nothing else, and you cannot live without the crusts that being mauled by strangers five to nine times a day brings in..."
Her own eyes were half-closed, expressionless, her voice without rancor, stating the facts. Feuilly's face had gone whiter than normal, and he regarded the slim woman sitting opposite him without a word.
"Don't look at me like that," she told him. "I'm not asking for your tears: they won't do anyone any good. You were a rich student, an idealist of the sort who has never been a member of your oppressed masses and therefore quite frankly has no idea what they're talking about....and you, out of perhaps forty of your fellows, were one of the lucky ones, and made it through the night. I was the daughter of a seamstress who was raised by anyone throwing crusts to the beggars on the street, I turned to whoring at twelve because there was no other way to live, not there, not in the wharf-rat alley country. Our stories are different, and we have different horrors to avoid: but, Feuilly, we are both people, and we can both survive the world...."
"What are you trying to say?" he inquired.
"I'm not sure. I'm saying that there may be other places for both of us, somewhere far away from Paris, where we can stop thinking about the smell of someone else's death.... and perhaps we should make an effort to find them."
"And Javert?"
"Javert must make his own way," she said evenly. "He is still Javert, no matter what that old man did to him, no matter what kind of mess the world around him is in...."
Days passed, slowly, unnoticeably. Heidelmann told them that Javert would make a full recovery, at least in body: he could not speak for the other man's soul. Javert, for himself, was silent and passive: he would answer questions put to him, but would volunteer nothing, nor initiate a conversation. He was regaining strength, slowly, reluctantly; his cough remained as frightening as ever, and seemed not to be loosening its hold. Florine had begun to show no face but her pleasantly impassive bedside mask, no matter whom she spoke to. Summer was fading, and the skyline was grey: Feuilly felt in his bones the need to move on, seek out another place, and another, and another....
Beyond that horizon, he knew, farther west than he could see, lay the Channel and the cliffs of Dover, and Britain, another world: south, the crushed-sapphire waters of a Mediterranean he had never seen, and the old wealth of Spain. All roads led back to Paris eventually, he knew, and it was only a matter of time before he returned to the city which had seen his birth and his rites of passage to several different kinds of manhood, and the death of complacency and joy. He knew he would lose the woman, as he had known from the first night on the barge before they found Javert: but they had need of each other then, and did still, though they were growing like strangers to one another, and to their worlds.
Heidelmann did not speak of the man Favand again, though Feuilly saw the same faraway look in his eyes many times. He could not recall much about Favand except for the darkness of his hair, and that he was as overenthusiastic as any of them could possibly have been; he would lead chants and sing songs of revolution, and many times he would say to them all how overjoyed he was to be directly involved here in the liberation of the people. He had thought of Favand as perhaps more idealistic than Enjolras, but naive, if he had thought of him at all. But, he wondered now, his gaze roaming over Heidelmann's library walls, what was Favand to Heidelmann? His son was the most likely guess.
What must that be like? he wondered. To lose a child first to another city, and then to another idealism, and then, finally, to a National Guardsman's bayonet? For the first time in his life Feuilly realized how close he himself had come to death; how utterly random his own survival had been. It made him feel small and worthless and guilty.
He turned his mind with a conscious effort to the world outside Heidelmann's walls. The English had harbored the aristos, back in his father's day, and a young scarred French idealist fresh from the barricades would be less than welcome in that island. To Spain, then? South to the Mediterranean, and to Spain, or Italy, or Africa? He had to get out of France, at least. That much was decided on.
It was as if when he dived from the barge on the Seine his entire life had undergone a change. Nothing was the same after he had pulled Javert's lifeless body from the dark waters; nothing would ever be the same again. Whether or not he could live with that was something still to be seen. Before, he had lived for a cause, and when that cause came to pass, he did not consider life after it had passed; and when he escaped from the barricades at St. Denis he was still living in the world of the revolutionaries; but when he stood with Florine on the deck of the barge, looking down at Javert's white closed face, he had outgrown the ABC. All at once the world was a great deal more complicated, and the problems he faced could not be solved by making stirring speeches or stockpiling musketballs. Much later, he would call it growing up, the change in him that happened on the river that night; but for now he merely knew that things had grown difficult and intricate, and he was no longer sure of what was right and what was wrong.
Autumn was in full colour when Javert left Heidelmann's house for the last time, taking only the food they pressed on him and the laudanum for the cough that still racked him after many months. They did not try to stop him; they knew that they could not. Florine watched him go with no expression on her face, and it was not until Feuilly came upon her by surprise, much later, that he heard her weeping.
She left the next week, wandering. Feuilly did try to stop her from going, but he had underestimated the strength of her will; his arguments were borne aside on the indomitable tide of her purpose, and she gave him a look that said clearly Thank you, but you cannot go where I am going. The road would be unspeakable, and he would lose his way.
She came to Toulon at the end of October, her eyes already mirroring the winter on its way. She talked; she bought drinks; she caught eyes on the streetcorners and turned tricks, and after a long time she found who she was looking for.
When Javert had been stationed at Toulon as adjutant of the guard on the prison galleys, he had lived with the other guards in the barracks hard by the harbor, except when his turn came to keep night watch on the ships. Most of the men who had been there when he had were gone; dead, transferred, vanished. One at least remained.
Jacques Dubigny had been Javert's immediate superior during the years he had spent at Toulon. Dying now of consumption, like so many of the prison guards, he spoke to her from his narrow bed in the Toulon hospital. Florine sat by his bed, not unlike the bed she had watched by night after night in late July, and watched the light drain from the harbor outside the window.
"He had many enemies," he said meditatively, remembering. "So many times he'd have an opportunity to make a little extra money, to look the other way while someone smuggled in snuff or brandy, to let something slide. He never did. He would report these transgressions where a...well, where another man would have allowed them to pass, even encouraged them. Time after time he was tempted, and he never gave in. During all the time he was there, not a single violation was listed against his name. It was unnatural."
Florine dropped her gaze."Did he have any friends at all?"
"Friends?" Dubigny laughed, a dry sound like leaves rattling. "No, mademoiselle, Javert did not have friends. Colleagues, perhaps; superiors and inferiors. But not friends." He paused, looking at her with shiny black eyes. "Why is it you ask?" he demanded, suddenly. "What do you want to know?"
"What sort of a man was he? And was there anyone there who might have known him better?"
"He is....magnetic, is he not, mademoiselle?" Dubigny asked shrewdly, looking at her with those birdlike eyes. "Fascinating. But I am afraid you will find him as unchanging as a stone."
"He tried to kill himself," she murmured. Dubigny frowned at her, drew breath sharply, began to cough. Scarlet flowers bloomed on the counterpane before he could regain control, and Florine moved to leave, having tired him enough, but his hand shot out like a claw and closed over her wrist, too hot, too thin.
"Are you sure?" he hissed.
"I was there when it happened."
"Then something has changed in him. Something vital."
"What are you saying?"
"I am saying, mademoiselle, that he may need somebody's help."