In a garden there sat a girl, reading in the shadow of a high hedge. She did not notice that there was far too much alliteration in the opening sentence, something with caused it to resemble Old English verse (In so far as one can really write quantative verse in modern English, that is) because she was so immersed in her book. She was a young girl with auburn hair, grey eyes, a graceful throat and a nose that was “the despair of painters and the delight of poets”. She was clad in a long black skirt and simple white chemise.

She was not Cosette. Partly this is because Cosette was a fictional character whereas this young woman was very much flesh and blood, partly it was because Cosette would never be caught swearing or quarrelling or going out and getting ridiculously drunk with her ex and then suffering for it the next day as this girl all too frequently did. Mostly, however, she was not Cosette because her parents had chosen to call her Sophia instead. She was, I regretfully inform the reader, one of that loathsome species, the self-insert, although she did not yet realize this.

Sophia sat in her garden idly reading Les Misérables and thinking that everything after the third round had been a mistake and that one should never go to the pub with a lawyer. She was leafing through the book without really concentrating when a chapter heading caught her eye. “Too Many Javerts Spoil the Broth” it said.

“Now, I don’t recall that chapter,” she remarked to herself, “What the blazes in Norman Denny up to?”

She read on: “The first thing that Javert did after his escape from the barricade at the rue Mondetour was to go to Gisquet and make his report.”

Curioser and curioser . . .

As she read on, her only though was “I must have dropped some serious acid last night – I’m hallucinating multiple Javert!” Although she did not believe that multiple Javerts were entirely a bad thing, she decided to fetch a class of water and see if it cleared her head.

It did not, since, after draining the cup, she read “The man in the nightgown then leant forward on the bed and blew a kiss at the fellow at the writing desk, who fell of his chair in shock.”

“What on earth is going on?”

“Well you might ask” boomed a voice from no-where in particular. I would say that it was an authorial voice, but since I’m not actually speaking at the moment and we already have one self-insert, I won’t. I think that I shall call it The Voice Of Reason.

“Dire things have come to pass,” boomed The Voice Of Reason, “And you are to blame”

“Me”

“Yes, you”

“Couldn’t have been”

"Then who?"

“Er . . . I dunno. But the point is, I didn’t steal no cookies out of no jar. Or, rather, I haven’t been screwing with canon.”

“So,” said The Voice Of Reason with awful solemnity, “you do not recognize the man named variously Javert or Javart. Born in Bretagne in 1780 to one Dolcequita, card-reader, thief and vagabond, and christened Louis Andoche – “

“Ok. Point taken. But just what do you expect me to do about it?”