"It is always wise to begin with a mystery"
Susan Griffin

Javert awoke the following morning and, while it could hardly be called light, it would get no lighter. He lay there on the unmade bed for a moment, covered by his carrick, and listened to the church bells tell the hour: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six. "All well," he thought, throwing back the coat and sitting up: Seven, Eight "Dammit"

Still, it was a Sunday and his first holiday since . . . it might as well have been his first holiday for all he knew what to do with it. Should he go to Mass? It was Sunday after all. A brief memory passed through his mind as faintly and unpleasantly as the sudden taste of yesterday's dinner at the back of the throat. This fleeting vision was of the monumentally dull and seemingly interminable services given at the chapel of the Orphan's hospital in Montreuil. No, he would not go to Mass. But what to do?

He stood up, padded to the window – despite being a big man this he did as silently as a cat – and opened the shutters. He leant out the window with his elbows resting on the sill, looking down into the street. At length he remarked: "Tiens, ma belle, it is time for us to get reacquainted."

With that he left the window and began to get undressed, removing the excess stockings, the multiple waistcoats and the surplus shirt of the day before. He then arrayed himself 'en dishabille' as he did when he wished to become anonymous. It was not an easy thing for Javert to pass unnoticed, but many of his acquaintances would have walked past him 'en dishabille' in simple disbelief that this picture of semi-genteel squalor could have anything to do with the usually irreproachably neat inspector.

His ensemble was thus: a shirt of the coarsest muslin, so frayed that it would have taken the most skilled seamstress to make anything of it; a wretched waistcoat and breeches that competed to be worse; coarse boots many times resoled; a green kerchief knotted about his throat in place of a cravat, and a cap the horrors of which shall not be entered into here for want of space.Its crowning glory was a coat that might once have been brown, and might once have been fashionable, and within living memory too, but which was certainly neither of those things now.

Normally Javert would have tied his hair back from his face but that morning he let it fall forwards about his face in a grey curtain stopping just short of his shoulders. He looked wholly unlike himself and cut a vaguely pitiable figure in which something of the rogue, the poet and the poor rentier ruined by an unwise financial speculation were mingled. And yet he strode out the door with the cheerful confidence of a young man of fashion going to meet his mistress.

The one item that he did retain of his everyday attire was his heavy cane, which he tucked under his arm in a deliberate, energetic movement as he shut the door.

Turning around to face the landing, he met with a woman coming up the stairs with a pile of shirts in her arms. In dress and figure she was unremarkable, drab even, in her cap and plain seamstress's gown, and yet she had a face that was striking in that it seemed to belong to another age entirely, having that sharp, pale, slightly disturbing quality found in portraits of the Sixteenth Century. At first glance Javert thought her rather ugly.

She fixed him with a look that was not exactly insolent, but certainly bold, and yet also timid, putting him in mind of a feral animal.

"Good morning," he said, because he could be polite when he chose.

"Good morning, Monsieur"

" – l'inspecteur," Javert added, thinking that there had been a question in her voice, and she made a little "hah" sound through her nose that could have signified anything from comprehension to fear to surprise that he was telling her, of all people. Then, making a little gesture that caused the bundle of shirts to slip dangerously in her arms, she said simply, "Viau" and, shrugging the shirts back up into a comfortable position, walked off.

The odd flavour of the meeting almost matched that of the night before's encounter with the freckled youth and Javert began to wonder if everyone in the house was a little peculiar. Shrugging, he crossed his arms, continued downstairs and stepped out into the street. It was a fresh sort of morning and he wondered where he should go. The thought of paying a visit to the cottage at Saint-Dennis passed momentarily through his mind but he dismissed it. He reflected that it would be sensible to familiarise himself with the area so that he could start on Monday knowing what he was about. But, he decided, he would cross over the river and take a walk on the Right Bank first.

Javert was a man usually deeply suspicious of his own pleasures, and was rather conscious not to indulge them, but even he could find no harm in that most Parisian of diversions, the stroll. We have said before that he left his apartment that morning like a young man going to meet his lover, and we might add that to walk along the Quai aux Fleures or in the Jardin des Plantes (something which always put a vague smile on his broad face) was perhaps the closest approximation in Javert's life to that sensation.

And so this is what he did: made his way to the river and stood on the Pont Neuf watching the urchins beg for food to see if the vendors of pommes frites had grown more generous since his day (they had not); next he turned towards the "Boulevard du Crime", glancing with an appraising eye at the gaudy theatre posters and the tops of the old trees waving in the mounting wind; then to the building site that as the Madeleine and the Louvre, full of treasures but also of things that no-one was quite sure what to do with, and separated from the Tuileries – where Buonaparte had once lived – by a ghetto of tall and ugly houses, all with a more or less dilapidated and slatternly aspect. Javert felt, for some reason, that he should go into the museum of the Louvre itself and try and absorb some culture. This was the same unaccountable prompting that made him sit up reading everything from De Maistre to De Stael in his spare moments, even when he gained no particular pleasure from it. However, it was already after lunchtime and he wished to explore his won patch before he lost the light. Breathing a sigh of relief, he headed back towards his own quartier.

As the reader will doubtless have established, Javert's new lodgings were on the Left bank, rue Millepierres being equidistant between the Pantheon and the rue Mouffetard. It was a narrow street – we have mentioned that it was only just wide enough to admit the entry of a fiacre – set in a tangle of narrow streets laid out much as if a housewife had thrown a plate of vermicelli or a skein of wool haphazardly onto the floor in a fit of temper. At the end of the quartier nearest to the river there were things that could perhaps be considered splendid, but as one came away from the Seine and towards the horrid false countryside surrounding Paris it became more and more dilapidated. By and large it was a deprived district, the atmosphere was one of surly indifference, shot through and coloured, like a particularly ugly opal, with seams of feverish, consumptive gaiety and vicious and ardent revolt. As a habitat for crime and, consequently, as a hunting ground for Javert, it was rich and sure to provide not only bread and butter but meat, milk, coffee and chocolate: its criminal population ranged from the vaguely pitiable individuals who skimmed clothes off washing lines to serious gang members, as well as a large population of grisettes and students, two groups very easily led astray, the first by poverty and the second political convictions and the innate rowdiness of the young.

All this Javert noted along with the layout of the little winding streets, committing it all to memory along with the faces of the people he meet. But he began to feel a tingling on his back andgrew troubled. He had an obscure, instinctive feeling that he was being followed and yet could make nothing of it. Certainly he had seen that young man standing on the corner of the street – suspiciously and obnoxiously handsome with his blond curls – too many times for coincidence, and the old crone who had just gone into the bakers also felt familiar. Annoyingly, there was nothing more tangible than that and, unwilling to turn hunter on so slight a scent, he turned back to the rue Millepierres.

It was just growing dusky but the corner house looked to him unduly dark, even from the outside. It must once have been a rather nice building, but now it was unkempt, tall, thin and looking as if it were due a bad case of subsidence some point none too distant. His main criteria in taking the lodgings had been to find somewhere in the correct section the he might occupy within the week. He had paid no attention to any considerations but these, and it only occurred to him as he was opening the door that he could have afforded something better. But then, why would he have wanted to? He was not a man to feel confident living amongst bourgeois neighbours, and a lodging of that kind could have taught him nothing about the district. Anyway, he never spent as much as he could afford on anything, not because he was mean but simply out of long force of habit.

He stepped inside and shut the door, finding the hall to be almost pitch black. A voice called out from somewhere in the mysterious regions of the first floor: "Is that you now, Sophie? You've been a good deal of time!"

"No, Madame," replied Javert, "It's your new tenant. Excuse me."

"Ah, Monsieur Prevert! Do come in to see me – first door on your left."

Javert did as he was bid, stepping into the shabby parlour, which was occupied by three women seated around a table and three men, lounging in various attitudes of boredom on the outskirts of the room. All these shall be introduced in their turn.

"Javert," he said simply, wishing to correct the Madame without giving undue offence. All in the room turned to consider him with a mild curiosity and he felt conscious that the clothes that had allowed him to pass unnoticed in the street might have the opposite effect here.

"I didn't know we'd taken to renting to beggars, ma," drawled a voice from the corner, which Javert recognised as belonging to the freckled youth of the night before, now leaning nonchalantly against the windowsill, and clad in a sort of shabby and pretentious Sunday best.

Javert bristled visibly at the insult and must have looked rather dangerous since the eldest of the women, a stout matron making up for in nose what she lacked in chin, raised her hand and said: "Hush, Émile! Is that any way to address an Officer of the Peace? My son, Monsieur Prevert – very high-spirited boy! – Please to forgive! – Highly intelligent! Hem, one hopes your journey was not too tiring. You're lucky to have caught us all together – " and she closed a small book and placed it on her lap, causing Javert to realise that it was the first Sunday of the month and what he had initially taken for a gathering of pleasure must, in fact, be a settling of accounts.

"You'll let me introduce you to everybody?" the woman continued, "Do sit down! You'll have some tea? Nana, pour Monsieur Prevert some tea!"

The young woman he had encountered that morning rose from her seat at the other end of the table with an expression that was as far from sullenness as it is possible to be without exhibiting any other classifiable emotion.

"It's quite alright – " Javert said, stepping forward. The matron misinterpreted his gesture as meaning he would fix his own and laughed.

"No, no, Monsieur Prevert! I insist! Nana can do it!"

"You mistake me, Madame," said Javert with the cold gravity that he was accustomed to adopt with those he was uncomfortable with, especially women, "I do not want any tea."

The good landlady laughed again but fixed the little seamstress with an irritated look. The girl herself looked at Javert and contracted her thin eyebrows and Javert became conscious that she was far from as ugly as he had first thought, but much more peculiar.

"Well Monsieur Prevert, let me see . . . I am – "

"Madame Genevieve Moulin," said Javert tersely, asserting his authority over the gathering.

"Yes! Quite!" said the good woman, laughing again and plainly disconcerted: "Monsieur Claude-Michel Fameuil" gesturing to a thin, blonde fellow leaning against the mantle who had paint on his frock coat, "And his wife, Madame Joséphine Fameuil."

Here she gestured to the third woman at the table, sat next to the seamstress, with whom she could not have presented more of a contrast. Both women were of a height, pale and slightly thin, but La Fameuil's pallor was emphasized by dark hair hanging in limp ringlets and dark liquid eyes with blue circles under them. Everything about her was drooping and lymphatic and put Javert in mind of a piece of salt cod – grey and uninspiring.

"This, continued Mme Moulin as she indicated an unkempt youth of about twenty with a suspiciously red waistcoat, who was playing at patience at a small card table near the fire, "Is Monsieur Bahorel, a medical student, and that – " she said with a gesture to the seamstress, "is Nana Viau"

"Did I hear you say you were an officer of the peace?" enquired the young M Bahorel.

"No – " began Javert

"Because I'll tell you something, " continued the student in an rather aggressive accent that was more southern than even Javert's, who could at least become Parisian when he chose, "Now, I've learnt a few things about the Law, I have friends – "

Mme Fameuil and Mlle Viau looked at each other and Mme Fameuil raised an eyebrow as far as she could while still remaining wholly languid.

" – now, what I firmly believe about justice is this – "

"Do you ever stop saying boring things, old boy?" drawled Émile.

"It's that rascal of a first minister if you ask me!" exclaimed M Fameuil

Javert heaved a deep sigh, as if regretful of having to leave such a fascinating discussion, bowing stiffly to the company and excused himself on account of having matters of administration to attend to.