What is the meaning of this?
What culpable act have you been guilty of towards me?
What have you done to me?
What are your wrongs with regard to me?
You accuse yourself; you wish to be superseded—”
“Turned out,” said Javert.
“Turned out; so it be, then.
That is well.
I do not understand.”
“You shall understand, Mr. Mayor.”
Javert sighed from the very bottom of his chest, and resumed, still coldly and sadly:—
“Mr. Mayor, six weeks ago, in consequence of the scene over that woman, I was furious, and I informed against you.”
“Informed against me!”
“At the Prefecture of Police in Paris.”
M. Madeleine, who was not in the habit of laughing much oftener than Javert himself, burst out laughing now:—
“As a mayor who had encroached on the province of the police?”
“As an ex-convict.”
The mayor turned livid.
Javert, who had not raised his eyes, went on:—
“I thought it was so.
I had had an idea for a long time; a resemblance; inquiries which you had caused to be made at Faverolles; the strength of your loins; the adventure with old Fauchelevant; your skill in marksmanship; your leg, which you drag a little;—I hardly know what all,—absurdities!
But, at all events, I took you for a certain Jean Valjean.”
“A certain—What did you say the name was?”
“Jean Valjean. He was a convict whom I was in the habit of seeing twenty years ago, when I was adjutant-guard of convicts at Toulon.
On leaving the galleys, this Jean Valjean, as it appears, robbed a bishop; then he committed another theft, accompanied with violence, on a public highway on the person of a little Savoyard.
He disappeared eight years ago, no one knows how, and he has been sought, I fancied.
In short, I did this thing!
Wrath impelled me; I denounced you at the Prefecture!”
M. Madeleine, who had taken up the docket again several moments before this, resumed with an air of perfect indifference:—
“And what reply did you receive?”
“That I was mad.”
“Well?”
“Well, they were right.”
“It is lucky that you recognize the fact.”
“I am forced to do so, since the real Jean Valjean has been found.”
The sheet of paper which M. Madeleine was holding dropped from his hand; he raised his head, gazed fixedly at Javert, and said with his indescribable accent:—
“Ah!”
Javert continued:—
“This is the way it is, Mr. Mayor.
It seems that there was in the neighborhood near Ailly-le-Haut-Clocher an old fellow who was called Father Champmathieu.
He was a very wretched creature. No one paid any attention to him.
No one knows what such people subsist on.
Lately, last autumn, Father Champmathieu was arrested for the theft of some cider apples from—Well, no matter, a theft had been committed, a wall scaled, branches of trees broken.
My Champmathieu was arrested. He still had the branch of apple-tree in his hand.
The scamp is locked up.
Up to this point it was merely an affair of a misdemeanor.
But here is where Providence intervened.
“The jail being in a bad condition, the examining magistrate finds it convenient to transfer Champmathieu to Arras, where the departmental prison is situated.
In this prison at Arras there is an ex-convict named Brevet, who is detained for I know not what, and who has been appointed turnkey of the house, because of good behavior.
Mr. Mayor, no sooner had Champmathieu arrived than Brevet exclaims: