by Victor Hugo
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.
The Plot
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 b
y 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.
As in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, but in both upward and downward directions, a departure from the horizontal sometimes symbolizes independent choice: Jean Valjean plunging off the prison ship into the sea to feign drowning, so that he can escape to rescue Cosette; his climbing over the wall of the convent with her; and his descent into the depths of the sewers to save Marius. Hugo, moreover, refuses to let us hold God, rather than ourselves, responsible for political events. Suffering, violence, and injustice will be eliminated by philia, by a community of active mutual concern. Hugo, nevertheless, offers a realistic image of political change: one finds only a few fully committed militants on either side; others are drawn in through love, despair, affection, anxiety, greed, or hatred.
The Major Subjects of the Novel
How can we make sense of this sprawling, complex story? To a superficial reader, the numerous coincidences that bind the characters’ lives together seem like mere melodramatic contrivances. But for Hugo, multiple coincidences reflect his belief in an unseen, overarching Providence that interrelates and governs human destiny. The preface to Les Travailleurs de la mer (The Toilers of the Sea) identifies three “fatalities” in the fallen, material order: nature, religious dogma, and social inequities. By “fatalities” Hugo means obstacles to progress, which tempt us to despair and to renounce effort. How can we exercise our free will when we are caught between a spiritual Providence and a material/institutional fatality?
Considered in isolation, the generalizations and aphorisms with which Hugo characterizes the moral dynamics of his story might seem to rule out the possibility of enlightened choice: “Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do” (p. 11); “it seems as if it were necessary that a woman should be a mother to be venerable [instead of merely respectable]” (p.12); “there is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher” (p. 15). Such generalizations appear to reflect a traditional belief in a “human nature” that remains invariable. But this impression is misleading. First, Hugo always grounds his maxims solidly in a social context, and in the social, financial, and biological contingencies of one’s individual existence. He is not La Rochefoucauld, the classicist whose aphorisms describe unvarying relationships among abstract nouns, as if wealth, health, gender, or ethnicity made no difference: “Hypocrisy is a form of respect that vice pays to virtue.” Second, throughout the novel he dramatizes the titanic inner struggles of Jean Valjean with his conscience; and he richly analyzes the moral evolution of many other characters such as Bishop Myriel, Fantine, Thénardier, Marius, Gillenormand, Eponine, and Javert.
Throughout most of Les Misérables, cosmic motifs are muted and implicit. They often appear subtly in descriptions of looming darkness and unexpected radiance. Nature seems hostile to the outcast Jean Valjean; as he contemplates the sleeping bishop, that man’s face seems to glow with an inner light; Eponine, hating her life as an outlaw and pursued by a larval form of conscience, describes the hallucinations of starvation to Marius by saying that the stars seem like floodlights, and the trees like gallows—her crimes are known to God, and she is doomed to hang, she feels. Hugo adopts the motif of the Transfiguration from the Bible: filled with the Holy Spirit, the faces of Moses or of Jesus shine.
Characters
Hugo integrates this worldview with his character depiction and plot development through the implied religious doctrine of supererogation (in French, réversibilité): exceptional individuals may accrue sufficient merit, through their loyal faith and virtuous acts, not only to ensure their own salvation but also to aid in the salvation of others, to whom some of their extra merit may be transferred. Supererogation is the dynamic and positive mode of the archetype of Inversion: what seemed bad (Christ’s betrayal by his friends, humiliation, torture, and agonizing death on the cross) proves good (mankind will be redeemed). It allows the concept of free will to be synthesized with the concept of Providence. Hugo represents this force not mystically, but quite realistically, through the influence of conversation and example, which often occurs partially, gradually, and belatedly. Good influences, in his view, are not compulsions, but invitations to which their objects must choose to respond. But they can create a chain reaction.
The first example appears in the figure of the conventionist G—(a representative of the assembly that dissolved the monarchy, and of which a majority excluding G—condemned Louis XVI to death). He humbles the initially scornful Bishop Myriel, who comes to recognize the moral excellence of his devotion to humanity and kneels before him to ask his blessing. “No one could say that the passage of that soul before [Myriel‘s] own, and the reflection of that grand conscience upon his own had not had its effect upon [the Bishop’s] approach to perfection” (p. 34). This blessing is later transferred, so to speak, from Myriel to Valjean, thus saving the ex-convict from further hatred and crime: “Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I am withdrawing it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I am giving it to God!” (p. 63). In turn, Valjean later symbolically transfers his own superabundance of merit to the dying Fantine, assuring her that since her motivation for prostituting herself was her pure wish to provide for her daughter, she remained innocent in the eyes of God. And in the final scene the repentant Marius, kneeling at the dying Valjean’s bedside to ask his blessing, recalls the initial scene between the conventionist and Myriel.
Hugo broadly signals the presence of supererogatory merit in his characters. He compares the parables of Bishop Myriel to Christ’s (p. 17). He suggests that the origin of Jean Valjean’s name is “Voila Jean”—there’s John (p. 48). That phrase recalls Pontius Pilate’s ecce homo (there is the man), spoken when he shows Christ, wearing the crown of thorns, to the Jewish priests who have accused him; see the Bible, John 19:5). A person condemned according to one law, and destined for suffering, will be vindicated according to a higher law. Years later in the plot, Hugo associates Valjean clearly with Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the mayor hesitates over whether to denounce himself in order to exculpate the pruner Champmathieu (pp. 148-149). Hugo reintroduces the image of the bitter chalice in the title of part V, book seven, “The Last Drop in the Chalice.” Marius’s point of view affirms Valjean’s absolute, self-sacrificial goodness and his total transformation unequivocally: “The convict was transfigured into Chr
ist” (p. 821).
But although Bishop Myriel demonstrates for Jean Valjean the power of absolute trust in God, and active benevolence, this influence cannot be definitive. Through practicing virtue, he risks succumbing to pride. His “accidental” discovery of a refuge in the convent helps save him from pride: he must compare his involuntary suffering from social inequities and vindictiveness to the voluntary, altruistic suffering of the nuns (pp. 334—335). Their example foreshadows his voluntary self-sacrifice at the end. Through Cosette, he has learned of human love; but this love remains selfish (pp. 267—270). Cosette becomes indispensable to him. The illusion that she will grow up ugly, and thus stay with him always, consoles him. The narrator speculates that Jean Valjean might have needed Cosette’s filial love to persevere in the virtue that Myriel first inspired in him. As mayor, he had learned much more than before about social injustice; he had been sent back to prison for doing good; he needed the support of Cosette’s dependency to keep him morally strong (p. 70; see also pp. 523—524). And finally, he must accept his need to let her become independent of him as she matures. His desire to kill his “rival” Marius, or at least to let him die on the insurrectionists’ barricade, is so powerful that Hugo does not describe Jean Valjean’s next-to-last struggle with his conscience. The final struggle, ending in his decision to confess to Marius that he is an escaped convict, finally kills him.
