Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

Hugo already had composed a version of his masterpiece, first entitled
Les Misères,
between 1845 and 1848, during the height of his activity in the House of Peers. During fourteen months of intense activity between 1860 and 1862, Hugo expanded this original version by 60 percent.
Les Misérables
embeds the story of a poor workman in a vast mythic-historical context. It tells of the fall and redemption of Jean Valjean, a young tree pruner in the region of Paris, the sole support of his widowed sister and her seven children. One winter, unemployed and desperate to feed his dependents, he breaks a bakery window at night to steal a loaf of bread. He is arrested and sentenced to five years’ hard labor in the galleys of Toulon. Four escapes, attempted instinctively and unreasoningly, lead only to additional sentences, which finally total nineteen years. The harsh punishment embitters him against society, and after his release this attitude is reinforced by the scorn and rejection he experiences whenever he must show his convict’s yellow passport. But a saintly Catholic Bishop, Monseigneur Myriel, treats Jean Valjean respectfully, feeds him, and gives him lodging for the night. Despite this kindness, Valjean cannot resist stealing the bishop’s last remaining luxuries—for the cleric has given everything else to the poor—his silver place settings. When the gendarmes bring Valjean back, the bishop saves him from further imprisonment by saying he had given the place settings to Valjean. And the bishop adds the two silver candlesticks that his guest had “forgotten.” As Valjean sets off again, the bishop whispers that he has purchased the ex-convict’s soul with his gifts, that Valjean has promised him to live a virtuous life henceforth.

On the road north, a last flicker of brute instinct takes over: the convict cannot resist the temptation to steal a coin dropped by a little itinerant chimney sweep. Then he repents and resolves to lead a virtuous life, guided by an inner voice inspired by the bishop’s kindness to him. (Hugo identifies our conscience with God.) He manages to conceal his identity, educate himself, and transform himself into the benevolent “Monsieur Madeleine” (an allusion to the penitent prostitute Mary Magdalene in the Gospels). By inventing a superior method for making glassware, he ensures the prosperity of an entire village enriched through the “trickle-down” theory of economics. The grateful townspeople elect him mayor in a town where the rigid, self-righteous Javert, overcompensating for having been born in prison as the illegitimate son of a fortune-teller, serves as chief of police.

Meanwhile, Fantine, a young working woman in Paris, has been seduced, impregnated, and cynically abandoned by her lover. Once her baby, Cosette, is born, she innocently leaves her in the care of the evil Thénardier couple, dishonest innkeepers, and goes to her native village, where Jean Valjean has settled. She finds work there in the glassware factory, but is fired by a self-righteous female foreman who discovers that she has an illegitimate child. The Thénardiers have been starving Cosette, dressing her in rags, and forcing her to do hard labor, while sending Fantine exorbitant, fraudulent medical bills. She must turn to prostitution to support her daughter. At the same time, the Thénardier daughters Eponine and Azelma are pampered, creating a Cinderella-like situation.

“Monsieur Madeleine” finally learns of this situation when Fantine has been unjustly accused of assault against a wealthy idler who had assaulted her first. He overrules Javert, who is blinded by social prejudice, and orders her release. He promises to care for her and to reunite her with her baby. But his defense of a social outcast alienates Javert and intensifies his suspicions, which derive from his preconscious memories of having seen Jean Valjean as a galley slave at Toulon twenty years earlier, when he served as assistant warden there. His suspicions intensify when the mayor demonstrates enormous strength by lifting a heavily loaded cart to free a man being crushed beneath it. Only the former convict Jean Valjean, nicknamed “Jean le Cric” (Jack the jack), still sought for having robbed the chimney sweep, would have been capable of this feat, Javert believes. Events soon confirm the policeman’s intuition. An innocent, inarticulate vagrant, Champmathieu, has been falsely accused of stealing apples (a third offense, leading to life imprisonment). Former convicts have identified him as Jean Valjean. After intense struggles with his conscience, M. Madeleine feels morally obligated to step forward and denounce himself. He has had time to bury in the woods the fortune he made legally from glassware, but the rigid Javert will not allow him to take Cosette to visit Fantine before Fantine dies. Then Jean Valjean is sent back to the galleys.

He escapes by feigning a drowning accident, rescues Cosette from the Thénardiers, and takes refuge with her in Paris. Javert, however, has been reassigned there, and recognizes him in the street. Fleeing the police, Valjean climbs a high wall with Cosette and finds himself in a convent garden tended by the grateful man he had saved from underneath the cart. A false burial in an empty coffin allows him to reenter the convent from the outside as an assistant gardener. In this shelter, he raises Cosette as his beloved daughter, and the nuns educate her. Comparing the voluntary austerities and self-sacrifice of the nuns for the good of humanity with his own past sufferings as a convict, Jean Valjean overcomes his resentment toward society and learns humility. Cosette’s dependency gives him reasons to live; her weakness keeps him strong.

After seven years, however, he leaves the convent with her to prevent her from pursuing a religious vocation by default. They live in seclusion. Nevertheless, Cosette’s growing beauty attracts the attention of a poor young man, Marius, who has been alienated from his royalist grandfather, his only living relative, because of his loyalty to his deceased father, who was a heroic colonel under Napoleon. Fearful of losing the only person who gives meaning to his life, and fearing detection, Valjean evades Marius by moving across Paris. But there his generous almsgiving attracts the attention of the Thénardiers and their criminal gang, although the innkeeper does not recognize him. Failures in business, Thénardier and his monstrous wife have come to join the Parisian underworld.

Thénardier’s moral decline criss-crosses Jean Valjean’s progressive moral redemption. Potentially law-abiding in prosperity, in poverty Thénardier becomes increasingly vicious. He plans to kidnap and torture Jean Valjean, force him to reveal where Cosette is staying, and then kidnap her to force Valjean to pay a huge ransom. Meanwhile, he becomes increasingly indifferent toward his own children. He uses Eponine as a spy and lookout for his burglaries and callously risks her life. He makes no effort to find his son Gavroche when the little boy becomes separated from his family, and he deliberately abandons Gavroche’s two younger brothers.

By yet another coincidence of many in the novel, Marius has moved into a cheap room next door to the Thénardiers. Listening and watching through a hole in the wall, he learns of their plans to kidnap Cosette. Marius denounces them to Javert, but then learns that Thénardier had “saved his father’s life” (had inadvertently revived him by rifling though his clothes after he had fallen at the Battle of Waterloo). His father’s dying wish had been that his son find and reward Thénardier.

Eponine has fallen in love with Marius. Now her former relationship with Cosette is reversed. Cosette is wealthy, privileged, and beloved, while Eponine, formerly coddled, must choose between her father’s beatings and sleeping in ditches. The two girls do not recognize each other. Hopelessly devoted, Eponine helps Marius find Cosette again: Marius and Cosette fall in love, meeting in Cosette’s garden at night for a chaste but passionate romance. When Thénardier’s gang has staked out Valjean’s isolated new residence for a burglary, without realizing that it belongs to their former intended extortion victim, Eponine drives them away with false warnings about the police, and anonymously advises Valjean to move. He plans to flee to England. By accident, Cosette is prevented from communicating with Marius.

Knowing that Marius cares only for Cosette, Eponine despairs and writes an anonymous note summoning him to join his friends fighting on the barricades of the worker-student insurrection of 1832. She hopes he will die there; but she wants to die first, by his side. In despair at not finding Cosette at home, Marius seeks death on the barricades. There, a sudden political illumination makes his commitment to his friends’ republican cause authentic. Eponine, disguised as a young worker, saves Marius by throwing herself in front of a bullet aimed at him.

Meanwhile, Valjean has discovered the imprint of Cosette’s desperate note to Marius on her blotter. Her adoptive father is taking her away; she does not know where. Valjean hates Marius for threatening to deprive him of the only person he has ever loved. He struggles to overcome his possessiveness, and despite his rage, he goes to the barricades to protect Marius. Behind the barricade, Javert has been unmasked as a police spy. Valjean asks permission to execute him, but secretly sets him free. As the barricade falls to the government troops, Marius collapses, wounded and unconscious. Valjean escapes through the sewers, carrying the young man through the foul muck on his shoulders for four miles.

At the locked exit by the Seine, Valjean meets Thénardier, who has hidden there from Javert. Thénardier does not recognize Valjean. He thinks Valjean has killed Marius for his money, and demands all Valjean’s cash in exchange for opening the gate with his skeleton key so that Valjean can escape. He hopes to divert the waiting Javert by offering him a substitute fugitive. Javert does indeed arrest Valjean, but feels morally obligated to release him, because he owes the convict his life. Then, torn by an insoluble conflict between religious and legal duty, Javert drowns himself. Marius’s repentant grandfather nurses Marius back to health and marries him to Cosette. Valjean has given her all his fortune. The novel reaches its moral climax on the wedding night. Should Valjean confess that he is an escaped convict, and renounce all contact with Cosette to spare the young couple the shame of his possible denunciation and arrest? “He had reached the last crossing of good and evil.... two roads opened before him; the one tempting, the other terrible. Which should he take? The one which terrified him was advised by the mysterious indicating finger which we all perceive whenever we fix our eyes upon the shadow.... We are never done with conscience.... It is bottomless, being God” (pp. 769—770). Human love alone cannot bring us closer to God. Sacrifice is required.

The next day, Valjean secretly confesses to Marius that he is an escaped convict, and not Cosette’s father. Marius, believing that Valjean’s fortune was stolen, does not touch it. Thinking that Valjean killed Javert at the barricade, Marius only reluctantly allows him to see Cosette in the anteroom to his grandfather’s house. Persona non grata to Marius, Valjean stops coming, stops eating, and wastes away. But Thénardier unwittingly serves as the instrument of Providence. He comes to extort money from Marius by threatening to reveal the “secret” that his father-in-law is an escaped convict who has recently killed a man (he unwittingly refers to Marius himself). As he speaks, he accidentally reveals that Valjean made his fortune legally, that he did not kill Javert, and that he saved Marius. The latter pays his debt of honor to Thénardier by giving him enough money to travel to America, where he becomes a slave owner (an even further degradation, in Hugo’s eyes). Marius and Cosette, repentant, rush to Valjean’s bedside. They arrive too late to save him, but he dies happy in one of the most pathetic scenes in literature. In the shadows, an enormous, invisible angel awaits his soul.

Traditional analyses of fiction distinguish between “story,” meaning what happens, and “plot,” meaning how the things that happen are arranged (straight-line temporal sequence or flashbacks and flash-forwards, a single story line or several story lines, parallel or embedded stories, and so forth). Parallel stories (while A is doing X, B is doing Y, etc.) characterize television situation comedies and melodramas, or epistolary novels; embedded stories (A tells B a story about C, who in turn tells D a story about E, etc.) characterize the fantastic tale, memoirs and autobiography, and many other long novels.

Plot also explains
why
things happen: are they “events” (“acts of God,” to which the characters must react) or “acts” (initiated by the characters)? In either case, is the agent unconscious (a floor or a fire), blind (a mistaken or compulsive act), or lucid? Is the act premeditated or impulsive?

At first glance, chance encounters among the characters seem to motivate most of the action. Javert happens to be assigned to the galleys, then to the town of M—sur M—, and finally to Paris when Jean Valjean arrives at each of those places. In Paris their paths cross decisively several times. At M—sur M—, Valjean happens by just when Fantine and then Fauchelevant need to be rescued. Thénardier’s wife happens to be sitting on her doorstep as Fantine is passing, in need of a place to board her child; after Thénardier releases Cosette to Jean Valjean for extortionate sums, he moves to Paris and encounters Valjean in three different places there, at critical moments, without recognizing him. Thénardier just happens to loot Marius’s unconscious father’s body on the battlefield, incurring a mistaken debt of honor for Marius, who then happens to rent a room next to Thénardier’s in Paris. Th6nardier’s elder daughter, Eponine, and Cosette, both fall in love with Marius after the happenstance of running into him. The coincidental resemblance between the vagrant Champmathieu and Valjean moves the plot by forcing the latter to denounce himself and leave M—sur M—for a second trip to the galleys. Only because the former enemy whom Valjean saved from being crushed beneath his cart has become the gardener in the convent into whose garden Valjean and Cosette escape when fleeing from Javert, do they find a safe refuge and does Cosette receive a good education. Only because Thénardier tries to blackmail Marius by threatening to reveal that his father-in-law is an escaped convict, does Marius accidentally learn that Jean Valjean has committed no crimes, and has saved his life, all of which prepares the final, climactic reconciliation between the son-in-law and Cosette’s former guardian. These many coincidences attempt indirectly to persuade us that God intervenes in human affairs, while preserving the imperatives of human commitment and responsibility in the overt rhetoric of the narrator.