Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [12]
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