"…de la Condamine… de Bougainville… and Dampier – and Cook - do I sense a theme? Getting restless in your old age, Valjean? Brantome… d'Aubigny – both him and Brantome, eh? The two sides to the Huguenot story… Vely's History…Beccaria – oh!"
Javert's voice faded in and out like the flame of a weak-burning candle. With great difficulty, Valjean opened his eyes and realized that he was laying once more on the bed, on top of Cosette's clothing. Across the room, Javert was looking over his bookshelves with the quick, dismissive eye of an academician.
"What's this, then? Hamlet? In the original English?"
Javert's quick fingers plucked from the shelf a neat volume in octavo, opened it in the very middle then flipped back several pages.
"What is it that excellent advice that Polonius gives in this? "To thine own self be true"? Or is it Horatio?"
"I don't know," said Valjean, surprising himself with the evenness of his voice. "I never got past the first scene."
Looking suddenly confused, Javert snapped the volume shut and inserted it carefully back into its place. Then his fingers pulled another, much slimmer book from Hamlet's vicinity.
"Ah!" Javert's mouth widened in a grin. "That explains the milk in the coconut!" he exclaimed, displaying to the man stretched out on the cot his trophy: a treatise on famous phrases from the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, ostentatiously titled by its author "Margaritas ante porcos." Valjean had purchased it from a quay-side bookseller for ten sous, not because he was particularly curious about the ponderous Anglophobe's estimation of the pearls of English drama, but because the book-seller's little wife looked so terribly cold sitting on her stool in that ragged skirt and those miserable sabots. He had since skimmed the book once or twice.
"I imagined you as more of a Goethe person," remarked Valjean, who was now calm with the dreary calm of a man realizing that he is having a bad dream.
Javert gave him a humored look, then pressed his left hand to his breast and recited with quiet pathos:
"Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust - die eine will sich von der andern trennen..."
He interrupted himself. "Sound familiar?" he asked Valjean.
"A bit," said Valjean.
"'A bit'! Rubbish! Of course you know this. If I know it, you know it."
"You give me too much credit."
Javert looked at him closely. "I don't think so," he said with a frown and continued the stanza in a different voice, a dreary, ponderous monotone. No matter how much Valjean strained to understand, his ears plucked out only distinct words but could not string them together into coherent sentences. When Javert finished and looked at him inquisitively, Valjean could only shrug.
"It sounded like gibberish to me," he admitted.
Javert smiled briefly again. "Well, then it must've been gibberish," he conceded easily, and turned his attention back to the bookshelves again.
For some reason, Valjean was no longer certain that he was asleep. "Was the article in the Moniteur false, then?" he asked hesitantly.
"Apparently," muttered Javert. Something about the spines on Valjean's next shelf – a collection of property law volumes – seemed to displease him.
"But why are you here now? Why didn't you come not six months ago?"
Javert's back stilled under his coat as he paused in his inspection. Then his face turned ever-so-slightly, so that Valjean could only see the hint of a piercing grey eye skewed towards him and the thin, disapproving line of the mouth.
"That I should be asking you, Valjean," he said slowly. "Why am I here? It seems as though you'd been doing just dandy without me for the past six months" – Javert nodded almost imperceptibly towards the law books. "Dug up your treasure, invented your girl a family, killed it all off, married the girl to that dolt of a barrister - wonderfully crafty and illegal things."
"I never signed their marriage certificate!" protested Valjean.
"Yes, thank God for small favors," uttered Javert sarcastically, turning all the way towards Valjean and fixing him with an unblinking owlish gaze.
Valjean felt himself starting to sweat in disproportion to the warmth in the room.
"How did you get in here?" he asked quietly.
For several long seconds, Javert simply stared.
"Through the door," he answered finally in a voice reasonable to the point of mild idiocy.
"How did you do that?"
"How did I get in here through the door?" Javert sounded amused. "It's not an entirely impossible trick, walking through doors. How do you manage it?"
"With a key," said Valjean in a hollow voice, pulling the latch-key from the pocket of his trousers and showing it to Javert on an extended palm. "With this key. Of which there is only one and which I keep on my person at all times." He swung his legs from the bed and, fighting a sudden sense of vertigo, assumed a sitting position. "H-how did you get in?"
Javert took a long look at the key, then walked up to the bed and pulled an identical key from the left pocket of his greatcoat.
"'Wherever you may hide away, I swear to you, I will be there,'" he said in a peculiar cadence and tossed the key onto Cosette's gown.
Valjean considered the double key with bafflement and wiped beads of cold sweat from his forehead.
"Is this a trick…?" he whispered.
Javert waited patiently. His light grey eyes seemed to phosphoresce in the dusk of the room.
"Am I forgetting something?" asked himself Valjean out loud. "It sounded like you were repeating a promise… An oath, even."
Javert said nothing.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Just trying to ascertain the extent to which old age has affected your memory," said Javert. "You seem to have forgotten a good deal about me."
"I… I never knew that much about you to begin with."
Something flashed in Javert's eyes for a split second, rendering his face almost frightening.
"You are mistaken," he said in a very low voice. "You know everything about me."