Fiction Writing: Wolves And Urchins

Wolves and Urchins is a historically grounded novel exploring the early life of Inspector Javert, tracing the formation of law, morality, and absolutism through childhood poverty, incarceration, and revolution-era instability. The work draws on archival prison records, revolutionary pamphlets, and material culture of late eighteenth-century France to examine how institutions shape belief and identity.

This excerpt depicts the early life of a child born into incarceration, tracing the formation of law, authority, and moral absolutism in late eighteenth-century France.

Prologue

In the year 1781, the doomed queen Marie Antoinette brought forth the long-awaited dauphin, Louis Joseph.

Upon the boy’s birth, church bells sang out in jubilant celebration across Paris and Versailles, and a private household was immediately created for him. This child was very wanted indeed, and his emergence into the world was a cause for great communal joy.

The boy would die of tuberculosis at the age of seven, perhaps a merciful end for a member of a family whose heads most commonly wound up in baskets.

In the year 1780, just months before the birth of the eagerly-awaited dauphin, a fortune-telling Gypsy woman gave birth to her progeny in a dank and lonely prison. The father, a nameless convict in the bagne at Toulon, was neither present at the birth nor particularly concerned with the event, and the wailing of the new child went entirely unaccompanied by church bells. The only private household to be created was that within his mother’s cell.

This child was Javert, known by that single name from his first ignominious breath. He would greatly outlive that celebrated dauphin, though his own story was one forged in a crucible of chaos, in a world of severed heads and shattered hearts and broken laws. He had an entire life before Montreuil-sur-Mer, before Monsieur Madeleine and the runaway cart. Let us return, then, to the sorrowful prison, for some of the most important tales begin quite humbly.

Chapter 1

His mother was beautiful, though perhaps Javert only thought so because hers was the only face he’d ever seen that was not scowling.

She liked to sit in the corner and hum old songs whose words she seemed to have forgotten. Her clothes were tattered but still so very bright contrasted with the dull uniforms of the guards and the filthy rags of the male prisoners.

Javert would sometimes stare out the little window, gazing down toward the sea, grasping the two iron bars in his hands and wondering what it would feel like to have the ocean spray his cheeks. On cloudy days, the water was the same gray as the sky, and it was unclear where the heavens met the seas. On sunny days, the sky was a pale blue and the water much darker. Sapphire, his mother called that color, and she said it was the color of a shining, valuable stone.

Javert thought perhaps he might see a real sapphire one day. Perhaps not. It probably didn’t much matter; the stone was meaningless to him, but the color was the ocean. Javert liked when it was windy, when he caught glimpses of the white foam where the waves folded upon themselves.The convict ships could be seen leaving the port far down the hill from time to time. His father was in one of those bagnes, Javert’s mother had told him. He was a forced labourer, toiling and toiling. Javert had once asked when his father would stop toiling, and his mother had just smiled a bit and said, “When he simply can not toil anymore, I suppose.”

She was like to speak in such a way, in roundabout and wistful musings. When Javert was finally old enough for his mind to formulate the question, he’d asked why it was they were in a jail instead of in a house like the people in the town below. Something deep in his core told him that humans were not universally penned up like this. His mother had shrugged and seemed utterly unaffected by the discrepancy.

“The decision-makers do not take kindly to the idea of fortunes being told, my child,” she had said. Then, laughing bitterly as though it was at once humorous and tragic, she’d met his eyes and added, “They do not take kindly to Gypsies at all.” That was a rather unsatisfactory answer, but Javert had just looked out the window again, watching a ship hurry in before a storm. Sometimes Javert, being a child in a place that was entirely unfit for children, was allowed to walk the grounds with an accompanying guard. He would ask questions of the guards the same way he did of his mother.

Why did the bells chime from the church towers? Why did the grass go brown and dead in the winter and come back to vibrant life in the spring? What were the convict ships used for, and why did the king need them so badly? What sort of food did the people in the town eat? The guards responded with varying levels of sympathy and thoroughness, but Javert treasured every brief walk whether he got answers or not.A singularly benevolent guard had once tossed four or five tattered books between the bars of their cell, and Javert had been so elated at the prospect of reading that he’d picked the books up and hugged them tightly against his chest. 

But it was all for nothing. His mother explained that she had no use for written words and simply couldn’t make sense of them. Javert had thus spent well over a year simply staring at the figures on the pages of the tomes, deciding that someday he would become learned enough to read them. After all, his mother’s sentence was due to expire in three years’ time, and then they would be free. 

He was eight years of age when his mother did not wake up.She’d been sleeping, as she did every night, but when the sun came over the horizon, she had missed her normal cue to rouse from her hard cot. She was utterly still and a bit cold as Javert shook her. She’d been coughing and trembling for a few days, but catching fevers was a normal part of life in the prison, and the boy had thought little of it. Now Javert shook and shook at the woman until tears boiled hot and unwanted in his eyes.

“Maman!” he finally cried, thinking perhaps she might not wake after all. He shook her so hard that she nearly tumbled from the cot, and Javert seized her face in his hands and saw that her lips had gone a hideous shade of purple. He dashed over to the bars and screamed,

“Help! Please! My mother is… please, come quickly!”

The guard patrolling the corridor turned round and stared curiously for a moment at Javert, who clutched at the bars as tears streamed down his dirty cheeks. The guard looked beyond Javert, and an expression of realization came over his stoic face. He barked out the name of another guard, and soon enough there were two men inside the cell, murmuring about fever and ‘where to bury the creature.’

The creature. His mother was a creature, not a true woman. As they put her body on a litter and carried it away, that was all Javert could think. The decision-makers, after all, did not take kindly to Romani, and a dead one would surely sully their sacred burial grounds.

Javert stood alone in the cell, looking at the corner where his mother had so often hummed those wordless tunes, and he wondered if he was just a creature like she’d been. For two days and two nights he was left alone in the cell, apparently forgotten. He was sitting on the edge of his mother’s cot, his treasured old books stacked beside him, when the cell door opened and the prison director came striding in.

“Come with me, boy,” the red-haired director said sharply. Confused and still reeling from his mother’s abrupt expiration, Javert snatched his books from the cot and followed the director out of the cell. His bare feet pattered on the stone floor all the way to the thick wooden doors that led to the outside world. The director led Javert outside, yanked a few coins from his uniform pocket, and pressed them into Javert’s hand.

“Your mother is gone,” the director said sharply. “You needn’t stay here anymore. Take the money for a start and go.”Javert stared at the coins, unsure of their value or what exactly he was meant to do with them. He blinked a few times and looked up to the director.

“Where should I go, Monsieur?” he asked, and the director scoffed as he threw his hands up.“What does it matter to me? Plenty of little urchins scurrying about the streets of every town in this damned country, aren’t there? Suppose you’ll become one of them.”He turned to go back into the prison, and Javert panicked a little. He called after the director,

“Monsieur, what is the nearest place where I might find work?”The director turned back and smirked a little, tipping his head and stroking at his red beard. He walked back to Javert and pulled some more coins from his pocket.

“You ask me about work? Then your years here must have been for something, eh? Yes, my boy. You should work. Do not be like the wretched little beasts who run about picking pockets.”

He handed Javert three shining silver coins that had the rather ugly profile of a man upon them. Javert studied the coins and listened as the director said,

“Go down to the little town and ask around until you find someone going to Toulon. There you will find work helping at the arsenal. Work until you’ve some coin of your own. Get yourself some food, some clothing, and a bed. And because you will have earned it yourself without stealing, you will not be wretched like the others. When you’re a man, come back and I shall give you proper work here as a guard. Now, go. I have other things to do today.”

Javert watched the director go back into the prison, and he was left standing on the rough gravel just outside the mighty stone structure. He squeezed his fingers around the coins, glanced at the books in his arms, and realised they would only weigh him down on his journey. He walked over to the heavy wooden door and set the books down beside it, thinking that he would learn to read with something else. Surely these were not the only books in the world. He tucked the coins away into a pocket of the linen trousers he wore, the ones that had been altered for him from a full-sized inmate uniform.

Javert took one last look at the prison, sniffed quietly as he thought of his mother’s humming, and turned to face the sea. He set off down the grassy hill that led down to the shore where Javert had every intention of feeling the ocean spray his cheeks.