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He had been a tree pruner at Faverolles.
In all the long years that Javert had known Jean Valjean, this was one thing about the man’s past that he had always known. Jean le Cric had been somewhat infamous at Toulon, and even though Javert had not become a guard there until some years after Valjean had been imprisoned, that much he knew about the convict with the strength of Atlas. It was, the other guards had told him, the only thing he would say for the first week or so of his imprisonment.
There was a garden in the house on the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, where Valjean now resided with his daughter and son-in-law. It had been fourteen months since the sixth of June, 1932.
Since Valjean had dragged him from the river and forced him to accept the gift of life he had been so intent on revoking, Javert had felt it was only his duty to ensure that Valjean also be denied his attempt at sabotaging the happiness that he so greatly deserved. What a fool that man could be! Javert could not understand why he would conceal from Marius that it had been Valjean himself who rescued him from the barricades. The dumb shock on his face upon beholding Javert for the first time since that night had been deeply satisfying. The stupid boy had thought Valjean had murdered him!
Valjean’s irrational need to continue punishing himself for the punishment he had already endured over the course of his life having been put to a stop by Javert and the newlyweds, the old parole-breaker had resigned himself to living the rest of his days in quiet joy.
There was a radiant glow about him, and at times it seemed as if Javert—his spirit newly awakened to the possibility of a higher law than that of humanity—were witnessing an angel instead of a man.
The garden of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire was somewhat gnarled and unkempt. Monsieur Gillenormand had never cared enough to hire a gardener for it, and so what little maintenance it saw was undertaken by Basque. The previous May, Cosette had mentioned the garden in passing to her father, voicing her sadness at the loss of their garden on the Rue Plumet and inquiring if her father wished to rehabilitate it, now that it was spring. Valjean had leapt to the task, and Javert, who visited frequently (reluctantly at first, but now with great pleasure) had been roped into accompanying and at times assisting him.
The garden thrived under Valjean’s gentle touch. Weeds were plucked, earth tilled, trees and bushes pruned, new ones planted, vegetables sown, and flowers arranged in flourishing beds. The summer passed in a breath of freshly turned earth and radiant growth. Javert recalled to mind his time in Montreuil-sur-Mer, to that other life where he had served as Chief Inspector to a magistrate called Madeleine. Madeleine had a way with plants that seemed almost supernatural. He showed the farmers and gardeners of that little coastal town the best methods of caring for their crops, of dealing with pests that would devour and ruin their yield, and of the numerous uses of those plants which were called weeds and which were torn mercilessly from the earth and cast aside to rot. Valjean saw their value when no one else did. Not even a weed was unworthy of salvation in his eyes.
Javert stood aside and watched as Valjean got on his knees to tend the roses by the stone wall of the garden. Valjean only knelt to garden and to pray. The two acts were not dissimilar. It baffled Javert how, by lowering oneself into the earth, Heaven could be reached. Valjean alone seemed to embody this bizarre quality of inversion—the convict-saint, the man who had achieved enlightenment through suffering and salvation through condemnation, who gave by stealing and stole through giving. These paradoxes spun, like the Earth upon its axis, in Javert’s mind—tilted and off-balance. With Valjean, nothing was certain and black and white were no longer possible.
This man turned everything into shades of green.
Green was his color, the hazel of his eyes, and Javert’s soul cried out to think that this gentle man—this peaceful gardener who cradled roses in his hands, who murmured softly to bees and butterflies, and who watched lilies unfold and melons sprout with such love and tenderness in his eyes—had ever been shackled to a pit like Toulon, where nothing grew and no birds sang; where the sun was harsh and unyielding; where the softness of grass and the coolness of the morning dew never touched.
A few days earlier, when Valjean had been pruning the great apple tree in the center of the garden, he had reached up into the branches, plucked an apple—large and red, its waxy skin shining in the sunlight—and held it out to Javert. There had been a smile on his lips as he said, “For you, Monsieur l’Inspector.”
Javert had taken the gift with trembling fingers. It was far too early in the season for an apple to be so ripe. It seemed to him that the green of Valjean’s eyes had become a serpent wrapped around his forearm, fangs bared above the crest of the apple, ready to strike should Javert dare to take it. He had taken it, but Valjean had continued to watch him, as if waiting for something. Javert brought the apple to his lips and felt the coolness of its skin. Saliva flooded his mouth as he anticipated the sweet crunch of its flesh. He opened his mouth and sank his teeth in, feeling juice run down his chin. Valjean’s eyes had not left him, and as he swallowed the white flesh of the fruit, he felt his heart begin to race and a heat which was not the August air rise in his cheeks.
He was Eve and this was the fruit of knowledge, the fruit of temptation. He almost laughed.
“An apple, Valjean, really? Would not a pear have been more appropriate for a sinner-saint such as yourself?” he did not say.* Valjean continued to smile, and Javert had a sudden, hot desire to cast the apple aside and pull Valjean’s mouth into his own. He took another bite of the apple, wishing that its cool juices could extinguish this heat inside him.
Javert’s observing of Valjean as the older man toiled in the garden had become an experience almost akin to reverie. Valjean became something else as he knelt among the stalks and brambles of the rosebush. Light reflected off his white hair and flecked his green eyes with splinters of gold. He walked among trees and flowers like a god among children. He was Demeter, and summer followed in his footsteps.
There was something about Jean Valjean that made things grow and bloom.
He brought light in darkness, rain in drought, health in sickness, and life in decay. He did all this, and yet somehow remained ignorant of it. Not Demeter perhaps, but Persephone. And Javert—ha! Javert would be Hades then, would at one time have seen that bloom of life dragged beneath cold stone. But now instead of wishing Valjean imprisoned, wishing an eternal winter on this august soul—instead he had...
Javert did not know what to call it.
On that night over a year ago, Jean Valjean had touched Javert’s heart of petrified wood and it had cracked in two. And as he stood on that precipice—the black, churning waters of the Seine rushing like the Lethe beneath him, promising not salvation but oblivion—he thought that it was dead all the way through, that there was nothing else to do and no way to go on.
But when Valjean had dragged him, gasping and retching, from the water and onto the bank, he realized that in that fossilized wood there was a single stripe of green wick. Soaked in the waters of the Seine and heated by the warmth of Valjean’s hands, it had begun to grow.
The Bible said that the pain of childbirth was God’s punishment for Eve’s sin—for that single bite. Ignorance was a cool darkness; knowledge, a searing light.
From this knowledge which Valjean had forced into him like a knife in his gut, Javert had experienced the agonizing pangs of new life.
Green shoots sprouted from the heart he thought dead, curling around it with soft tendrils. They coiled around his lungs and slithered into his arteries. There was monkshood blooming in his areoles and wisteria in his liver. Valjean’s touch had woken something in him; like a parasite he could feel it invading every fiber of his being—filling his bones with wood and his muscles with roots and vines.
Was this love? He felt the thing inside him grow every time Valjean cast that warm glance his way, every time their fingers brushed in passing or Valjean laid a hand on his shoulder. These minute looks and touches fed it, made it thrive, this seed that Valjean had planted inside him—but no, Valjean had planted nothing. This thing had been in Javert all along, lying in a sleep like death. Perhaps it was normal, though it did not feel so.
Was this love? It felt like a tree had taken root inside his breast. It was draining him dry and at the same time raising him higher than ever before. This tree fed on love, and it had lain dormant so long that Javert had nearly lived a lifetime without even giving it a chance to grow. Most people would feel it growing inside them bit by bit as their bodies and minds expanded to accommodate it—love growing to fill each new inch of them as children became adults.
In Javert, the growth of love had come like the breaking of a dam, like a sudden flood, a sprout which becomes a colossus overnight. It was all he could do to catch up, and the effort left him breathless. Small wonder that it felt like a foreign invader! He had denied this part of him so long that it was difficult to accept that a part of him it was.
Javert could feel himself flourishing beneath Valjean’s touch, reaching up towards him as if he were the sun, drinking in his light and warmth and ascending towards the heavens. He watched Valjean stroke the soft petals of the roses, praising them softly and tenderly for their vigor, and felt a thorn of jealousy prick at his fresh and throbbing heart. It should not have surprised him that without its petrified armor, this new organ was vulnerable, mortal. When pricked, it bled.
What folly to be jealous of a flower! And yet that rose rested in Valjean’s caress. It had his attention and his affection. It felt the sun of his smile and the water of his love, and as this monster, this tumorous growth inside Javert grew and twisted and insinuated itself into his very flesh—his very soul—it hungered, starving for that light and water. He gasped for it as the tendrils drew tight around his insides, perforated his lungs, and filled his stomach with earth.
He did not need food, he could not digest it. He did not need air, he could not inhale it. He did not need light, he could not see it. He did not need water, he could not drink it.
Valjean was what sustained him now. It was Valjean who had catalyzed this transformation. He may not have planted the seed, but he had cracked its hard shell and watered it—heedless of the true repercussions of these actions. A man who commits a kindness without a thought of the consequences.
It was Valjean who must take responsibility, must support Javert as he could no longer support himself, burdened down as he was by the solid weight of living wood inside his chest. He felt dizzy, intoxicated, and light-headed. He did not know how to tell Valjean what he needed or how he felt. Dishonesty was not in his nature, but neither was indulgence and, despite its necessity for sustaining his life now, this felt like an indulgence.
Happiness was a luxury Javert had never allowed himself before, but Valjean seemed ready and willing to force it upon him regardless of his own thoughts on the matter. If only Javert could make him see, as Valjean had once made him see. This inability to voice his agony—to open his mouth and heave the writhing mass of loam and vegetation from his bowels—was driving Javert mad.
In a feverish moment, as the August sun beat down upon them and Valjean rose from the wet grass with dark stains on his knees and smears of dirt on his hands and the tip of his nose, Javert imagined pushing Valjean down onto his back in the grass. He imagined the little gasp of surprise, his wide hazel eyes, those parted lips. He would strip them bare—popping buttons and casting blouses and trousers aside like dead leaves. Their belts would be two coiled serpents in the grass.
He imagined their chests pressed together, hearts beating in tandem like two redbreasts fluttering in harmony. He would have Valjean know. He would say, “This is what you have done to me. There is a leviathan in my breast and it is you who have put it there.” Valjean would say nothing. He would smile that serene, infuriating smile, and press his fingers against the sides of Javert’s ribs.
What an exquisite agony it would be to feel those threads of vegetation pierce through his flesh! As Valjean leaned up and kissed him; as he thrust the vine of his tongue into Javert’s mouth. His body was Valjean’s, he knew—earth in which to sow his mercy and his love. He was a host to that parasitic growth which would not kill him, but rather keep him alive as it fed off him and took him over, until all his veins were tracheids and his blood ran sticky with sap.
Javert would root his own fingers into the earth as Valjean’s pierced him like hawthorn shoots—as they writhed upon the ground, their bodies lashed together with vegetation. Valjean’s eyes are green as an olive leaf, his tongue pink and soft as a carnation, nails as sharp as nettles, teeth white like a lily, ready to sink into Javert’s flesh and consume him. Trees do not have teeth, but their roots pierce the earth and their branches the heavens. They worm into solid stone and over time can shatter mountains, dam up rivers, and block out the very sun from the sky. He could feel Valjean creeping into his heart as surely as his body, but if there was a garden inside Valjean, then there was one inside Javert as well, and it sought to penetrate and propagate as much as Valjean’s.
Their bodies would be lost in the tangle of ivy and growth, roots snarled between their hearts, foxglove twisted in their hair, belladonna under every finger. It would not stop until they had taken each other over, until these things which men call hearts—which are trees and which, when fed, become monstrous and gluttonous and are never satisfied—had succeeding in grafting the two of them together as a gardener will graft together shoots which are too weak to grow alone, so that they might survive.
Valjean’s eyes gleam at him like mistletoe, like poison oak. He knows his own eyes are silt, chestnut, ebony. There is no longer anything stone about him. He has broken, but instead of falling to pieces he has found that there was a pliant sapling beneath that hard shell.
“Is something troubling you, Javert?”
The sound of Valjean’s voice snapped Javert back into reality, where Valjean stood before him, dirty and damp. He watched a bead of sweat roll along the underside of Valjean’s jaw, where it was wiped away, leaving a streak of dirt in its stead. Javert suppressed the urge to wipe that smudge from Valjean’s cheek.
He could lie. He could tell Valjean that his mind had wandered elsewhere, that he is bored, that it is hot and he wishes to retire. He could do this, and Valjean would nod and smile and concede to him whatever he wanted. Valjean, to his bafflement, denied Javert nothing.
The inspector had never been a cowardly man. He faced armed criminals with cool resolve and snide confidence. He laughed in the face of murderers and judged thieves with impunity. And yet this unknown fluttering in his breast, the kindness of this impossible man, turned his dog’s heart into that of a rabbit. He wished rather to bolt than to engage this threat of uncertainty.
He steeled himself. He pretended, just for one moment, that this fresh and tender thing inside his breast was still sturdy and invulnerable.
“You arouse feelings within me which I do not understand,” he said, embarrassed by the tremble in his voice. Valjean blinked, his brow knotted in confusion. Javert opened his mouth, then closed it, then licked his lips. He did not know what else to say.
“What do you mean?” Valjean asked. His face was gentle. Javert shuddered, straightened his back, cast his eyes upwards, and exhaled.
“I have not let many people into my life. I have let you in. You are…my friend. And yet,” he swallowed, “I do not think what I feel for you is friendship, and I do not know what to call it. Except, perhaps, impossible.” It took a moment, but the confusion on Valjean’s face was transfigured into realization. A hot blush spread across the bridge of his nose, and at the sight of it Javert felt his own face redden.
Valjean took a step towards him. He did not meet Javert’s eyes. Javert’s heart was pounding. His throat was full of brambles. Valjean placed the flat of his hand on Javert’s breast—felt the drumming beneath his fingers—fierce as a call to war. His fingers trembled and slowly drew the linen of Javert’s blouse into his clenched hand. Still, he did not meet Javert’s eyes.
Javert’s tongue is hemlock and he chokes on it.
With a hand, he cupped Valjean’s chin and tilted his face upward so he could see the other man’s eyes. The green of them lanced through him like a shaft of mistletoe. He smiled nervously, and Javert inclined his face in so that the tips of their noses brushed. Valjean’s lips parted slightly, his breath coming in short puffs. Javert tilted his head to the side and brought their mouths together.
Valjean’s lips were as soft as rose petals warmed by the sun. Javert breathed in his air, kissed him as though it was the only thing he had ever wanted. Valjean’s hand was no longer bunched in his shirt, but had slid down to grasp the jut of his hip. Javert moaned softly as he felt Valjean’s tongue slip into his mouth.
There was nothing sharp or poisonous about this. Valjean was warm and soft. He was gentle, and Javert was unwinding beneath his barest touch. How had a man, who had only ever been touched by those intending to wound him, become so very gentle? There was guilt in Javert’s joy, pain in this pleasure. A thousand doubts and uncertainties swarmed through his mind, eating at his tender heart like aphids. Valjean swallowed them all.
They pulled apart, breathless, and leaned their foreheads against each other for support.
“I had never imagined,” Valjean whispered, as Javert drew back so that he could see Valjean’s eyes, “That such a happiness… that such a manner of love—the love which is shared by lovers, by husbands and wives—might some day be allowed to me.” Javert blushed at this analogy, for they were neither of them women, and feelings such as these, while not condemned by the law, were still condemned by society at large.
Javert wiped the smudge of dirt from the end of Valjean’s nose. The older man looked surprised for a moment, then laughed. It was a panicked, nervous sound.
“Love is the garden of the young,” Valjean said desperately, as though this was some barrier which prevented them from pursuing the new possibility which was blooming between them.
“Young love is foolish and fleeting,” said Javert. “The young can keep it. This is something different. Older, sturdier.” He paused. “Like a tree.” Valjean laughed again, softer, but no less desperate.
“I have only ever known one kind of love,” he said, “That of a father for a child. Cosette has been everything to me. I did not learn to love until I took her into my care. I do not know how… I will ruin this. You deserve better than an old man such as me…”
Javert growled and butted his head forward, knocking their brows together and looking Valjean dead in the eye. The older man stared mutely at him in shock.
“I would be nothing without you,” Javert said, “You unmade me, and then you stirred life within me once more. I have let no one into my life but you. I did not think it possible. I have never known love. I am not even sure that love is what this is. I have nothing to compare it to. I had no Cosette to teach me.” Valjean closed his eyes and hung his head.
“You have been my only teacher. There is nothing for you to ruin. I desire this, and you desire this. Stop denying yourself happiness when there is no reason to.”
“I am sorry,” Valjean murmured. “It is too much. I cannot believe it.” He laughed again, and this time his laughter turned to tears. Javert flexed his hands helplessly. He was bewildered, uncertain, and the touch of Valjean’s skin on his felt like a brand.
Nervously, he wiped the tears from Valjean’s eyes with swipes of his thumb. He cradled the back of Valjean’s neck in his hand and bumped their foreheads together affectionately. How did one comfort a weeping man? He was unsure.
“You deserve whatever happiness you desire,” Javert said, fiercely and honestly. Truth was the only comfort he knew how to give. Valjean shuddered under his touch, and as he drew back to once again observe the older man’s face, he beheld a smile on those trembling lips. Unlike those before, this was a true smile. It spread through his face and into his eyes, lighting them up with a childlike wonder, as if it were Valjean who beheld one blessed by heaven, and not the other way around.
“Coming from you, Javert, those words mean more than you can imagine.” Valjean wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand, smiled at Javert with a humble innocence, a radiant and unconditional joy. Javert felt his heart swell and fill his ribcage. He felt solid once more, rooted, overflowing with the vitality and fragrance of life. He felt like himself again—and like something more.
“Would you like any help with the rosebush?” Javert asked, feeling somewhat stupid in his euphoria. Valjean smiled at him.
“Yes, I think so. Have you ever tended a rosebush before?”
Javert shook his head. Valjean’s smile never faltered.
“Well, roses require a particular kind of care,” he said. “They are hardy, but can be easily damaged. Caring for them can be difficult. The thorns which shield them from predators can be treacherous even for those who wish to care for them. But the flowers, ah, the flowers are worth all the pain and toil required to help them flourish.”
Javert felt heat re-enter his cheeks as he wondered if it was really the rosebush that Valjean was speaking of. He said nothing, but followed Valjean diligently to the garden wall and knelt with him the earth as Valjean began to instruct him on how to properly weed the rosebush and how to trim it so as to stimulate rather than stunt growth. Javert nodded frequently, but heard little of what Valjean was saying. Valjean’s hand lay upon his own, and it filled him with radiance.
Valjean was a gardener, and for the first time in his life, Javert felt like a garden.