Chapter Text
If anything were absolutely indisputable, it was the fact that Marius Pontmercy was an obsessive personality.
From his father to Napoleon, from Cosette to the barricades, the young Baron had the annoying propensity for honing his attention on one subject and one subject only for months at a time. It was the reason for many a grievance on behalf of his grandfather, who in his supercilious wisdom equated his one-track mind to that of a horse with blinkers around its eyes: “If you can only see the road in front of your face, you’ll be at the mercy of the cab driver.”
Marius, unable to formulate a refutory witticism, would nod his head amicably and shrug, deftly and deliberately ignoring it.
For Cosette, her husband’s niche specialties were an object of fascination and amusement, and she would tease him gently that he would wander off on a tangent someday and never return. Of course, this was all done in good humor, for Cosette was the sole interest whom Marius would treasure until the day he died.
But he had learned all he could about his father, he was no longer a Bonapartist, and he was wed to his precious Cosette. The barricades were long gone, swept away with his friends by the widows and their brooms. Marius once again wore black, this time for Jean Valjean, who could have been his father if the boy had not been so headstrong. The Baron had grown restless with his bourgeois lifestyle—he needed an outlet for his wandering mind.
And so it was that Marius found himself rifling absently through his books when a slip of paper fell from between the pages. As he bent down to pick it up, he realized it was the newspaper clipping Thénardier had given him the day Valjean had died: “Police agent Javert was found drowned under a boat of the Pont au Change.”
A spark of curiosity illuminated his eyes. Who was this Javert, anyway? The Inspector had been entangled in the boy’s life since the Gorbeau affair, yet Marius knew next to nothing about him. Subtle inquiries at the Prefecture provided no evidence, which only incensed the Baron to dig further into the mystery of this insular policeman. Thus another one of Marius’s pursuits was kindled into shaky existence.