Chapter Text
In Montreuil-sur-Mer, a very different lottery is occurring: a kinder, gentler lottery, in which its unmarried townsfolk are asked for their consent to participate.
"Welcome, my friends, to this year's celebration of La Saint-Valentin. It is good to see so many of you here on this February afternoon."
Madeleine addresses the crowd from his elevated step above the town square. At his side, the mayor's assistant fusses over a large wooden box, into which the populace desiring an evening of romance have apparently deposited letters of polite request.
Standing in the last of the afternoon light, Madeleine is smiling a faint, wry smile, one that Le Cric has never worn. His thick hair is shot through with silver that has not been there ten years ago. He cuts a handsome figure, this convict masquerading as a free man, his respectable clothes disguising brands and scars and a bestial body that cries out for discipline.
Beside Javert is the slender form of the Widow Aurélie, who runs the nearby Hôtel de France. She raises a languid white hand in order to catch the mayor's attention.
"Excuse me, M. le Maire. I wonder if this is the year you will accept my offer? I have been corresponding with you for some time, as has Mme. Fontaine, and you have always turned us down."
There is knowing laughter in the crowd, including a raucous bellow from the voluptuous, red-haired Widow Fontaine standing nearby. Javert feels an unaccountable stab of outrage.
Madeleine turns his mild smile to Aurélie and says, "Madame, as I have said before, as your mayor I must be seen to hold each of you in the same esteem and love. Certainly I cannot prefer one offer from a lady over another."
The Widow Aurélie puts her pretty head on one side and makes a moue of disappointment. Javert can hardly countenance this overt announcement of romantic intent, which Madeleine is shamelessly encouraging. How dare this man continue to flaunt himself before the good people of this town, pretending to be a fit prospect for any widow's attentions, when in years past he knew to bend his knee and submit his body to a man's proper discipline?
His hands have curled into fists. He can barely stop himself from shaking with fury. He has never made Valjean his, and clearly such restraint has not found him any favour with that man, who clearly only ever respected one thing.
Madeleine has turned to the box and extracts the first note, a folded sheet of yellow paper.
"This is from M. Nicolas," he says, and a youth in his twenties steps forward, grinning shyly. "M. Nicolas addresses Mlle. Jacqueline of the Boulangerie Broussard. 'Dear Mademoiselle, your eyes are like the night sky, and your voice is as gentle as a dove's. Please do me the honour of joining me for dinner at the Hôtel de France tonight'."
Madeleine peers over the paper at the young woman, standing in a circle of her excited friends. "I have to say, Mademoiselle, the young man writes rather nicely. But of course, the decision is entirely yours. What do you say?"
"I'll consider it," the girl retorts, but she is smiling, and she blushes when young Nicolas approaches her and diffidently offers her his arm.
Matters proceed in much the same fashion. Madeleine reads a note from some hapless swain that proclaims his fondness for one of the local maidens, who is predisposed by the circumstances to accept his offer; in instances where there is a competing offer, one suitor is persuaded to stand down or is more or less gently rejected.
Then Madeleine unfolds another note, and makes eye contact with Javert. The faint smile is edged with something more as he says, "This note is addressed to our Inspector Javert."
Javert feels his eyebrows climb all the way to his hat-line. "How unexpected," he says neutrally.
Madeleine continues, mildly, "Inspector, in the short months you have been here it seems you have called attention to yourself. There is a note, no, two notes, addressed to you: one from Mademoiselle Moreau from the post office, and here is another from the Widow Fontaine."
Javert glances across at the red-haired woman, who has the audacity to wink at him. He cannot help the hot embarrassment that fills him, but he refuses to let himself colour like a schoolboy.
Instead, he squares his shoulders and pulls himself up to his full height. He cannot continue to look at the beautiful widow or their serious assistant postmistress; he makes himself address the mayor instead.
"I thank the ladies for their consideration," he says, aware that he does not sound thankful at all. "But Monsieur knows how pressing my duties are, and that I have no time to spare this evening for pleasantries."
"I do know that," Madeleine says slowly, as the crowd murmurs in disappointment. His eyes hold Javert's for once, unusually thoughtful. In another man, Javert would say that his gaze lingered meaningfully, even temptingly, but those are not adjectives that would ordinarily apply to this modest public servant who is so scrupulously eschewing all female attentions.
The convict had not been so scrupulous, nor could he be under Toulon's rules, which left no room for discretion or modesty.
Javert could not help speculating as to whether Valjean relieved himself in secret, or worse, if he engaged in clandestine relations with another prisoner. The convict obviously possessed ordinary sexual urges; although Valjean remained stoic throughout, he could not hide how responsive his body had been when disciplined or required to serve in the lottery. But since Valjean's last escape attempt, he had been the model of self-denying submission. He had obeyed instructions with alacrity, he made himself available to the guards on request, and he appeared otherwise to keep himself chaste as if he truly had no desires of his own.
Perhaps he was hoping to gain something by his good behaviour. Or he was trying convince the authorities that he was capable of change. If he was trying to convince Javert, though, the convict would not find him so easily misled.
Javert did not expect Valjean to keep up the pretence for long, but the months lengthened to years without serious infraction, save for those occasions when Javert noticed the man staring at him, holding the eye contact until one of them had to look away.
Then the day came when Javert happened upon the man in an act of infringement.
It was the wane of summer, the heat turning Toulon's grounds oppressive. The salles stank with the smell of unwashed men, and the dingy cachots were filled with wasting disease that had already claimed five of the convicts who had been sequestered there. Javert took to walking along the sea-wall along the perimeter of the bagne after his shift to clear his head of the stench. The stinging salt breeze and the open air brought temporary relief before he was compelled to return once again to the dormitory and fitful sleep.
One afternoon, he was about to mount the stairs that led up the wall when he realised that he was being observed.
Jean-le-Cric was standing in the lee of the wall, the demi-chain around his ankle. Unguarded, he was in a place he strictly ought not be, lest he manage to avoid the sentry, clamber up the parapet, and from there fling himself into the sea.
When Le Cric saw he had been noticed, he stepped from the shadows. The last of the sunlight lit his beard and the tangle of his hair. The years of service in the bagne seemed only to have made him even stronger. He had left off his smock in the summer heat, and his massive chest was covered with a sheen of sweat. The front of his trousers was damp with sweat, as well, and against the thin, wet fabric jutted the unmistakable outline of the man's erection.
Valjean saw Javert staring; he looked down, too, and the flush stained his chest as well as his cheeks.
"I haven't been ... it isn't like that," he muttered. "It's just the heat."
"How can I be sure?" Javert asked. He stepped near the man, close enough to smell the perspiration and fear that curled off his skin, and something else.
"I swear it, Monsieur." The man swallowed and kept his eyes trained to the ground as he had been taught. "I have not laid hands on myself, nor done anything I shouldn't."
"That isn't true. You should not be here; the sea-wall and its surroundings are out of bounds to you." Javert paused, and then added, "And you have been watching me, as you should not."
Valjean protested, "I just wish a breath of air in the heat, the same as you. Although... I do watch you, I confess it." He looked up and held Javert's gaze. With visible effort, he added, "You would be within your rights to chastise me."
Javert found he could not respond for an instant. The eagerness to lay hands on the prisoner unfurled in him like a flag in a high wind: an urge to take possession of that sweating, powerful body and grasp hold of the arousal that Valjean was not himself allowed to touch.
It took long moments to recover his self-possession. He would not abuse the authority he had been entrusted with, and knew that enforcing that power over this man would be such an abuse, even if it was for Valjean's own good.
"I will overlook it on this occasion," he told the convict, once he was sure of his voice. "Do not do it again."
Valjean let out a gust of breath. Relief made his voice tremble, a strange thing in such a brutish man. "I will not. Not unless you ask me to."
Javert asked, curiously, "Does that mean you would willingly do as I asked?"
Le Cric did not answer immediately. When he next spoke his regard had become thoughtful. "You have been here for some years now, Monsieur. The others, they say you are well regarded."
Javert shrugged. He knew Maugin valued him and his men showed him reluctant respect; even the Commissioner had once commended his suggestions for the improvements in the shift system of the bagne. "I hope that is true. I was promoted early to adjutant-guard, at any rate."
Le Cric nodded as if the additional bars on Javert's uniform had indeed escaped his notice. He asked, neutrally, "Will you receive another promotion soon, do you think?"
Realisation broke him open like the crack of a dominant's whip, like a flash of lightning in a darkened sky. Javert had to pause for another long moment to catch his breath.
"Perhaps I will soon enough." His voice shook: a shameful thing in a man who aspired one day to bend a prisoner to his authority. "Would you do what I asked when that day comes?"
"Ask me then, and you'll see," Valjean said. His eyes shone. He bent his head very slightly to Javert, and stepped back into the shadows.
For the next days and weeks and months, Javert could think of nothing else save gaining status through diligence and irreproachable conduct, and finally becoming worthy of the responsibility for another. To have that other be Jean-le-Cric, the beast of the bagne at Toulon, whom no other hand had managed to tame — that thought filled him with a heat he could not resist from slaking in stolen moments of privacy. When he reached his completion, panting and trembling in every limb, it was with the prisoner's visage before his eyes and Valjean's name on his lips.
And then autumn turned to winter, and envoys from Paris arrived in Toulon from the Ministry of Justice and Marine. These men had orders from Napoléon to put an end to the worst of the prisoner maltreatment, including the bourgeois practice of sexual collaring, which was to have no place in the modern republic.
The Commissioner was removed, the adjudants-chef chastised. And all their submissives, both willing and unwilling, were uncollared and released back into the prison population.
One of the envoys, an official called André-Joseph Chabouillet, took a liking to Javert, the most senior guard in Toulon who had not mastered a submissive. He invited Javert to accompany them to Paris to take up a position with the Prefecture of Police.
It was the opportunity of Javert's life, and he would be a fool not to leap at the chance.
He did not look back on his life in Toulon. What reason would he have to remember a man, no, a convict, such as Jean-le-Cric?
* * *
In Montreuil's town square, they are reaching the bottom of the box, and the man, the mayor, is continuing, charmingly, to fend off all claims. The Widow Aurélie is attempting to argue him around, and Madeleine has put aside several notes written by her.
Javert realises this is what Le Cric has come to. The convict has not managed to do what he should not after all. Uncollared, left to his own devices, he has broken his parole and pretended he could be trusted in respectable company as a free man. What these women would do if they knew the beast that lurked under that gentle façade, ready to leap upon them and tear their clothes to shreds and devour them if given the opportunity!
Only Javert recognises the beast for what he is, only Javert is able to save the townsfolk from the criminal's subterfuge. Only Javert can hope to bend the convict to his strength, and rescue the man from himself.
The Widow Aurélie continues to press her case, and now another has entered the fray: Mlle. Bernadette, the schoolmistress at the École mutuelle, who walks up the steps and puts a note in Madeleine's hand.
Aurélie bristles visibly, and the Widow Fontaine laughs again, and truly, this cannot be endured.
It is now, it must be now; it cannot be a moment more. Javert clenches his jaw and leaves the square as rapidly as he dares.
There is a guard post on one end of Place Saint-Saulve; Javert commandeers ink and paper and dashes off a terse line — ’M. Madeleine, I request your presence at my office this evening’ — and hastens back out toward the proceedings.
The afternoon has now shaded into evening. The stragglers in the square have remained to watch the widows argue as the mayor tries to read out the last remaining letters and make a quick escape.
Javert's blood is very loud in his ears as he mounts the stairs. The note burns in his pocket. He will not permit the man to escape him.
He reaches out his hand to seize hold of Madeleine.
The mayor turns his entirely unsurprised eyes up to Javert's. "Ah, Inspector," he says, calmly, "I am surprised to find this last note in the box. 'Dear M. le Maire, I require you to attend at the station-house to discuss matters of import'. I did not know you were aware of our custom, or that you would use it for official purposes instead."
Javert does not immediately understand. The triumphant words freeze on his lips. He knows he did not write the note plucked from the box — his own note is in his pocket — which must mean Madeleine had — Valjean had —
— His hand falls on Madeleine's arm without any force at all.
"I accept your offer, Inspector," Madeleine says. "My apologies to the ladies Aurélie, Bernadette and Fontaine, but duty must come first. Thank you, Jules, that will be all. Let me bid everyone a good evening; we will all see each other again at church on Sunday."
The crowd murmurs in disappointment. It seems that the dour Inspector Javert has brought this colourful potential disagreement over their mayor to a premature end.
Aurélie frowns, the Widow Fontaine laughs appreciatively, and Bernadette turns on her heel and stamps down the steps after the mayor's assistant, leaving Madeleine and Javert alone.
Madeleine hands Javert the false note. Javert’s fingers tremble as he looks down.
The paper is blank.
"Lead the way, Inspector," Madeleine says, his eyes revealing nothing.
Javert clutches his arm as they descend the steps and cross the square as if the mayor is the one doing the leading, and indeed that is the truth of it. The paper is blank, and Javert's legs can barely hold him up.
The criminal must be perfectly aware of what he is doing to Javert. That old convict has managed to turn the tables so cunningly on his former guard; Javert has fallen into his trap as neatly as if he, Javert, had baited it with his own heart.
The station house steps are lined with paving stones that also line the way to the mairie. Within the station the floors are cheap concrete. Javert's feet recognise the way through the gathering dusk, which is a blessing, because the world is otherwise a cloud of darkness now the mayor is at his side.
The young deputy manning the front desk snaps to attention when the inspector and the mayor enter through the station door. Javert does not know what has become of Duchamp or the mayor's assistant and finds he does not much care.
"Ensure we are not disturbed," he manages to grind out, and then he is alone with Madeleine in his dark, cramped office, where he finds there is barely enough room between the door and the writing desk for two grown men to stand face to face.
Javert crowds Madeleine against the door, squaring his shoulders and hips and greater height into Madeleine's body so the mayor is forced to tilt his chin up to look at him. The small lamp above the desk casts its brightness across the darkened room, wreathing Madeleine's upturned face in both light and shadow.
The composure that he wore in the square has vanished like the façade it was. Now that he has delivered himself into Javert's domain, Madeleine’s eyes are fearful and his lips have paled; his brow glistens with cold sweat. At his throat, his once carefully-knotted cravat has come half undone.
Javert's fingers ache to rip away the flimsy silk and reveal the scars of the iron collar the man had once worn, to bare that throat for the submissive's collar the man has never worn.
He settles for taking hold of the front of Madeleine's coat, pinning those powerful arms to their sides in the way he had only dreamed of trapping the convict in Toulon. Madeleine's mien is as stoic as Le Cric's always has been, but underneath the gentleman’s coat and waistcoat and shirtsleeves, his powerful body is trembling, the last vestiges of disguise so close to being unravelled at last.
Javert reaches for the harsh tones of the bagne, although he finds he cannot once again address the convict as thou. "You should not have pretended I wrote that note."
Madeleine's eyes flicker: with nervousness, with the defiance he remembers, and a wryness that belongs to the mayor. "Is it pretence, when you yourself have a similar note in your pocket?"
Javert has forgotten his own note, and is struck silent for an instant. "How do you — I only did such a thing to rescue you from yourself!" He hardly knows what he is saying, but now it’s said he does not doubt it is true. Nor this: "How could you dare put yourself forward in such a manner?"
How indeed could this cunning man, fleeing from the police, have so distinguished himself — by claiming the mayor's scarf and presiding over this ridiculous custom and parading himself like an alluring prospect before those whose claims he could never accept? What is more, why would he have placed himself into Javert's hands?
Madeleine says, "I have nothing to fear from these people. I have served them faithfully for years; I've sought nothing but their good." Echoing words Valjean said so many years ago, standing beside the sea wall with dusk gathering around them, he says, desperately, "I have done nothing I should not have —"
"That is not true," Javert says, echoing his own words. "What else would you call what you've done, M. le Maire — taking this name, claiming to be a man of standing, when you are in truth a danger to others and to yourself?"
His chest heaves with quick breaths. They are standing so close together he can feel the shudder run through the man's broad body. He continues, hardly aware of what he's saying: "I would have known you from the way you watch me. It is the way you have always watched me, from before."
And there it is, at last: the shared past, the old name, the harsh rules of ownership and dominance laid down in Toulon a lifetime ago. Madeleine — Valjean — breathes out in a huge gust, and neither admits nor denies that these things are true.
What he says is, "I am no danger, Javert. I have not laid hands on anyone else, nor on myself, I swear it."
"How can I be sure?" murmurs Javert, and draws off Madeleine's coat and jacket, and sure enough, there is the evidence of Le Cric's insubordination, pressing hot and shameful against the fine cloth of the mayor's breeches.
Madeleine inhales sharply but does not draw away. "It isn't like that," he murmurs. "Although I have been watching you; I have thought about nothing else for these weeks and months, I confess it." His fingers grasp Javert's own coat. "You would be within your rights to chastise me, Inspector."
"Are you asking me to chastise you?" Javert asks. Madness, of course, for a mayor to seek discipline from a policeman. Unless that mayor was a convict who had once promised to submit to the authority of the only man strong enough to claim him.
Madeleine says — Valjean says, "I will not. Not unless you first ask me," and he folds to his knees before Javert.
Javert swears in surprise and then in earnest, but Le Cric's legendary strength is irresistible; those large hands seize hold of Javert's hips and pin them to Javert's desk with brute force. Javert's own coat has come loose. The criminal — the man — puts his cheek against the front of Javert's uniform trousers, and Javert cannot catch his breath.
"Monsieur — I am not—"
"Then I, too, have nothing to say," and the man opens Javert's trousers and takes Javert into his mouth.
Is Valjean finally surrendering to custody, or is he submitting to Javert's claim? Or is this yet another deception? It is impossible to concentrate as the man's lips close over Javert's swollen member with terrible gentleness, with skill that comes from years of practice and urgency that comes from years of drought.
Valjean holds Javert in place as he struggles: either to get away from the convict or to keep from bucking them both off the desk, Javert isn't sure which. Valjean stretches his lips over the head of Javert's prick and sucks him down to the root, and then it is Javert who is submitting.
No other hand has ever touched Javert to caress him, no man has ever before offered such service him on his knees, and here is the mayor, the convict, who seems to know precisely how to impose pleasure upon him. Even if this is artifice, a last desperate trick from a desperate man, Javert cannot help but surrender.
From far away he hears himself groaning, hears himself make the abandoned noises that he remembers from others in the open courtyard of the bagne on La Saint-Valentin, during a very different lottery of love.
Javert tries to keep from choking the man, as any considerate owner would, but Valjean's touch is so warm and seemingly so willing that restraint is impossible. He winds his fingers around Valjean's throat and thrusts recklessly into the man's wet mouth as if he has that right.
The groans he makes are wordless. If he could speak, what he would say is: Let me have you, even if I can no longer claim you, at least while it is still Saint-Valentin.
Valjean complies as if his lips can read Javert's thoughts. His throat works around Javert's leaking prick, his hands stroke the long muscles in Javert's thighs, his tongue coaxes the desires from Javert that were long buried on the shores of Toulon.
Javert's fist closes around the man's cravat as if it is a collar; Valjean chokes but doesn't pull away, and Javert cannot hold back. He makes a sobbing sound that could have been the convict's name, any of his names, and then he is spending his secrets and his self in hot spurts that the man drinks down whole.
When he is emptied, Javert sags back on the desk. It creaks under his weight as if the foundations of Authority itself cannot hold him up.
Valjean sits on his haunches, his mouth swollen and red. His eyes gleam with fear, and something else that might be victory. He says Javert's name, as he has never said it in the bagne, in the same way as he might call him Master.
Javert wants this too much, which means it must be false, as all his dreams of pleasure have always been false. "Are you now ready to give me an answer?" he says, his voice as unsteady as his legs.
Valjean gets to his feet, his jaw set grimly. "Are you now ready to ask?"
When Javert cannot respond, the man draws his jacket and his coat on over his shirtsleeves and straightens his cravat, becoming Madeleine once more before Javert's eyes.
"Since that is so, Inspector, we have no further business tonight. Perhaps you would do me the courtesy of stopping by tomorrow after your duties are over." He gazes searchingly at Javert. "Let me clarify: this is a request you are free to decline."
Javert stares back as if into the abyss. In the flickering lamplight the image of Le Cric's blunt, sensual features is superimposed like a palimpsest upon Madeleine's authoritative face.
Madeleine sees something that satisfies him for now. He nods decisively and opens the door, and despite the manifold large and small reasons to detain him, Javert lets him go.
Javert cannot understand any of it. Why has Jean Valjean revealed himself to Javert now; what does he hope to gain by this service? Is he trying to prove that Javert is no better than any common guard, prepared to accept a forced surrender — or is Valjean finally submitting to Javert's claim? Or perhaps he means to pre-empt re-arrest by offering, as a Saint-Valentin bribe, the love he thinks Javert wants? Javert is none the wiser.
What he knows is this. The man would kneel again very soon — be it before the Law, or to be claimed by Javert's collar.
Javert tells himself it does not matter which it is, as long as he sees that man on his knees again after Saint-Valentin.