Toward the fall of afternoon, Sergeant Javert resumed his appointed rounds through the narrow streets of Dauphiné, his shadow keeping pace upon the cobblestones. Among his several duties, none weighed more constantly than the vigilance he maintained over the bakeries and bread-stalls encircling the Luxembourg Palace—eight fixed shops and fifteen itinerant barrows, each a fragile outpost in the city’s daily struggle against hunger. Their loaves must be counted, their prices observed, their measures tested, and all reported before dusk.

  The October storm had left Paris half-starved and trembling. Under the glare of public rage, Mayor Bailly had sworn before six hundred thousand citizens that every four-pound loaf of brown bread—commonly called black bread—should be sold at a fixed rate of 8 to 10 sous, or 2 to 2.5 sous the pound, and be made available between seven in the morning and five in the afternoon, to those alone who could present their bread certificates.

  At the close of the eighteenth century, a common labourer earned 30 sous a day—the value of 1 livre. A skilled artisan, a coppersmith or a printer, might earn twice that sum, perhaps 3 livres at most. Yet once rent was paid, and candles, wine, oil, clothing, and fuel accounted for, bread consumed nearly half the household’s means. Thus, to ensure supply and restrain price had become, in 1790, the foremost enterprise of the H?tel de Ville. Flour must be drawn in greater measure from the southern provinces, imports secured from Poland, Bohemia, even from Russia. Merchants must be checked from hoarding or mixing sawdust into their loaves; vagrants must be restrained from pilfering, swindling, or raising tumult in the markets.

  Acting upon the advice of the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture of Police created a hundred new patrol posts for the capital’s forty-eight districts. Paris, whose uniformed police had once numbered but three or four hundred, would at last be strengthened. Javert, then thirty years of age, found himself singularly fortunate: from a prison guard on the verge of dismissal, he had been raised to the rank of patrol sergeant.

  From gaoler to policeman—it was a leap toward the heavens. A man who had once kept watch behind iron doors now found himself clothed in state livery, drawing pay from the public purse, and entrusted with authority. At first, Javert had imagined some act of kindness from his former governor at the prison; but soon he dismissed the thought.

  When he presented himself at the Prefecture, Captain Pierre, his new superior, had smiled in a peculiar way and asked whether he was acquainted with some great man at the Palais de Justice. For the list of patrolmen had, at the last moment, been enlarged by several dozen names, and Javert’s was among them.

  “A great man?” Javert had been bewildered. He was no more than the son of a bankrupt merchant of Reims, a man who had come to Paris eight years before and found employment as a warder by virtue of his strength and silence. Save for a widowed sister and her children in Reims, he was alone in the world.

  The sergeant had shaken his head with honest simplicity. The captain had given a faint smile and said only, “Then you had best remember the favour. There are men who would pay 1,000 livres to stand in your place. If ever you should meet the one who procured it, give him my compliments.”

  At year’s end the H?tel de Ville, pleading poverty, struck half the posts from the budget. The Director of Police raged but could not prevail—until the Palais de Justice intervened, rallying deputies of the Assembly, and the full number was restored. Who the unseen hand was that had guided the decision remained a mystery, even among the higher officers.

  Thus, in January 1790, Paris beheld a new spectacle: men in tricorn hats, with three-folded swords at their sides, dressed in black tailcoats and leather gaiters, a military cast in every detail. It was, perhaps, the first uniformed, salaried, professional police force not only in France but in the world.

  Having found the grain market quiet and prices steady, Sergeant Javert was granted an hour of rest. As was his habit, he stepped into a small café at the corner where Dauphiné meets the Cordeliers—a modest house so plain that its owner had given it no name but the Street-Corner Café.

  The hour was early still; the air within smelled of warm milk and damp wood. Only three or four patrons sat along the narrow tables, speaking in low voices. When Javert entered—his face set in the habitual austerity of command, grey hair pressed flat against his temples—the murmurs ceased as if cut by a blade. The men rose, fumbling for coins, and hurried to the counter. A few sous clattered upon the wood, and they slipped away without looking back.

  The innkeeper, a middle-aged man with anxious eyes, was relieved. Had Javert not entered, the fellows would likely have gone without paying, or worse, extorted him for drink.

  “A large cup of cocoa—from Santo Domingo, milk, no sugar?” he asked. The sergeant gave a curt nod. Since taking his post, Javert had made this his daily refuge.

  He laid his tricorn hat and sword upon the table by the window, from which he commanded a view of both streets. Bread was not his only charge; order itself was his jurisdiction—the prevention of crime, and the immediate chastisement of minor offences. For a time, all seemed tranquil. He had just lifted the steaming cup to his lips when he became aware of a stranger opposite—a young man who inclined his head with an easy smile.

  The youth was strikingly handsome, perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four, with clear blue eyes and golden curls that caught the light. A black cloak enveloped him; beside his chair rested a brown leather case, and upon the table a powdered wig, lightly perfumed, had been set aside.

  Javert, wary by instinct, gave the briefest nod. He had seen the man before—a lawyer, young yet already familiar in the cafés about the Left Bank. And though Javert’s schooling had been little more than two broken years at a parish school, life had taught him an iron certainty: that lawyers, for all their delicate hands and fine manners, were among the most dangerous of men.

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  In the Prefecture’s training courses it was often repeated: avoid disputes with the men of the Palais de Justice; steer clear of lawyers altogether. They meddled in appointments, inserted their clients into the administration, and in the Assembly they wrote laws to their liking, binding even the sceptre of Louis XVI within their speeches.

  Some among them possessed a power that bordered upon sorcery. It was said that when Camille Desmoulins spoke beneath the trees of the Palais-Royal, every leaf had trembled at his words, and the next day Paris had stormed the Bastille. Danton, hideous in countenance but colossal in will, had summoned the women of Paris to arms and led them to Versailles.

  Javert wanted no part of such men. 10 livres a week, with a modest allowance besides, sufficed for bread and silence—and for a small remittance to his widowed sister in Reims.

  Yet the lawyer rose and crossed the room. Javert stiffened, uncertain whether to stand, but the young man laid a hand lightly upon his shoulder.

  “Do not rise,” he said, in a tone that left no room for refusal. “The time has come for us to meet.”

  He beckoned the innkeeper, who instantly withdrew, closing the door and hanging a small board that read Closed for the present.

  “You need not be alarmed,” the lawyer continued, with that careless assurance which belongs only to the truly powerful. “This house owes me gratitude. I once saved its owner from ruin in a contract dispute and defended his right to keep the café. He promised me, in return, a quarter of an hour’s privacy when I should require it. That hour is now.”

  Javert’s hand twitched toward his sword. “What is there to speak of? I am no one.”

  The young man smiled faintly, touching the sergeant’s sleeve as though appraising the cloth. “Your coat, your sword, the very enlargement of your patrol—all were born of a word I spoke in the ear of a certain great man at the Palais de Justice. Yet the fools of the Prefecture, blind and vain, clung to their borrowed military ranks and rejected the insignia I designed for them. They called my proposal for whistles ‘vulgar, too shrill for Parisian dignity.’ Dolts! They forget that order, not ornament, is the true language of the law.”

  Javert kept his silence. Such quarrels belonged to men who governed the world above him.

  “Perhaps,” the lawyer went on, smiling to himself, “I am too far ahead of my time. A single step beyond one’s age makes a genius; two steps, a madman. Life, Sergeant, is a lonely march through the snow. But enough of that. Let us speak of you.”

  He paused, studying Javert’s impassive face before continuing. “Perhaps it is because we are both of Reims that I have watched you. Since last November, I have observed your conduct more than once. You are upright, severe, incorruptible. You showed a heart of stone to the guilty, yet a secret compassion to the innocent who suffered beside them. You aid your sister and her children. Do not mistake me—I mean you no harm.”

  “At the Palais,” he said quietly, “a certain person entrusted me with the addition of several names to the Prefecture’s roll. I slipped yours among them. The result, as you see, has been remarkable. In a fortnight the streets about the Luxembourg are quieter; thieves and brawlers have vanished; sedition sleeps. Men speak of Javert—the tireless, solitary, austere sergeant who knows no indulgence and no corruption.”

  “Captain Pierre himself praises you. But I would see you go further. A patrol sergeant is but the threshold. The next step is inspector—if you are willing to trust me with your future.”

  Confusion, gratitude, and unease stirred in the sergeant’s heart. He longed to thank the man yet feared such favour must come at a cost. But the lawyer’s tone had changed—calmer now, deliberate.

  “I do not seek your gratitude,” he said. “Money corrupts both men and women. I am a lawyer today; soon I shall be a prosecutor—perhaps a judge, perhaps higher still. What I need is not flattery but an ally: a man of strong character, tested ability, and loyalty that cannot be bought.”

  He leaned closer. “Your captain, Pierre, is narrow, ambitious, eager for applause, ready to betray when the wind shifts. I cannot rely on him. With you, it is different. Between us there will be no servitude, only mutual aid. And if ever you find me straying beyond the law, you may withdraw from me without reproach.”

  Javert hesitated, then inclined his head. He had no real choice. The man who had lifted him could as easily cast him down; his sister and her children in Reims were hostages to fortune. Among five or six hundred patrolmen, many would gladly climb over the shoulders of their fellows. Severity and incorruptibility were armour, but not protection.

  The lawyer seemed satisfied. “Two days past,” he said, “a Marquise was murdered in the Rue, and her husband, the Marquis de Denormesnil, has been arrested for it. But the true culprit is her brother, Coller. Tonight, at eight, in a gambling den at Number 5, Rue de Sèvres, he will pawn her jewels for his play. Go there with your men; see him for yourself. Ask nothing more. Only remember—Denormesnil was guarantor when your Captain Pierre entered the service. Draw your own conclusions.”

  He gathered his papers and cloak, then paused at the threshold. The candlelight touched the pale edge of his powdered wig as he turned back.

  “Forgive me, Sergeant Javert. I had almost neglected a formality. My name is André—André Franck. For the present, I am engaged at the Palais de Justice.”

  The door closed softly behind him. Javert sat motionless, his hands folded upon the table, watching through the glass as the tall figure vanished into the pale distance of the street.

  Note: The Louis d'or was a gold coin, valued at 20 to 25 livres.

  The livre—sometimes rendered as livre tournois or, in certain texts, as li—was a French silver coin, soon to be supplanted by the franc; its value was broadly equivalent to the latter. The sou was a copper piece, with 20 sous to the livre.

  The Louis d'or (gold), the livre (silver), the franc (silver), and the sou (copper) will be the four principal currencies referred to in the narrative. As for the older French coins—the écu in its large and small issues, the pistole, the réal, the denier—these will, so far as possible, be omitted or simplified in the text.

  H?tel de Ville - It was the Paris’s City Hall—the seat of the municipal government and its administrative offices. During the Revolution, it served as the nerve centre of the capital’s day-to-day governance and crisis management.

  Palais de Justice -

  The noble titles will be written in French, the list for comparison is below:

  Grand-Duc (Grand Duke) / Grande-Duchesse (Grand Duchess)

  Duc (Duke) / Duchesse (Duchess)

  Marquis (Marquis) / Marquise (Marchioness)

  Comte (Count) / Comtesse (Countess)

  Vicomte (Viscount) / Vicomtesse (Viscountess)

  Baron (Baron) / Baronne (Baroness)