Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [14]
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 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