I’m still reading the posts I have to confess I’m obsessed with Les Miserables. I’ve become – or at least becoming – an amateur historian on the French Revolution I’ll read a few lines of Les Miserables, and whenever I come across a word, name, etc. I’m unfamiliar with, before you can say “Sacrebleu!” I’m surrounded in history books and highlighters! I expect to finish Les Miserables in December…of 2009

“He was terrible but not ignoble. Integrity, sincerity, honesty, conviction, the sense of duty, these are qualities which, being misguided, may become hideous, but still they retain their greatness; amid the hideousness, the nobility proper to the human conscience still persists. They are virtues subject to a single vice, that of error. The merciless but honest rejoicing of a fantastic performing an atrocious act still has a melancholy claim to our respect. Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good.”

Bobby, if you are still reading this, those are wonderful musings and observations. Thank you. Yes and the accused, Champmathieu, says he was given for his work 30 sous, less than a proper rate for a day’s work, because he was old, 53. That was old. I was struck particularly by the description of Champmathieu, a man so deprived in life ( which was probably common- ” Paris is like a swamp”) that he could barely talk. ( page 250 ff.) ” I am one of those who don’t eat everyday”….I don’t know how to say things, I never had any schooling, I am one of the poor.”

And then the description of Javert ( p.267-268) ending with this after which I took a deep breath:

“He was terrible but not ignoble. Integrity, sincerity, honesty, conviction, t he sense of duty, these are qualities which, being misguided, may become hideous, but still they retain their greatness, amid the hideousness, the nobility proper to the human conscience still persists. They are virtues subject to a single vice, that of error. The merciless bu honest rejoicing of a fantastic performing an atrocious act still has a melancholy claim to our respect. Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good.”

1. Did Jean Valjean actually steal the child’s money?

Jean Valjean was in a sort of trance/dream state before, during, and after the encounter with the boy. (BTW. Did anyone notice that prior to the boy’s arrival, just as JVJ was falling into his “meditation” he was recalling memories of when he was a boy, and that “These memories were almost intolerable to him.” Anyway, can one truly be culpable of stealing if one is unaware he’s stealing, or only realizes after regaining “consciousness”? Also, the money rolled across the ground and landed at JVS’s feet, the same money, coincidentally, “which, up to that time,” Little Gervais (while continually singing, mind you) “had caught with a good deal of adroitness on the back of his hand.”

2. Does “Little Gervais” even/ever exist?

When JVJ sits behind the bush, Hugo describes the landscape as being barren, “a large ruddy plain, which was absolutely deserted. There was nothing on the horizon except the Alps. Not even the spire of a distant village.” And even when the boy approaches JVJ, we’re reminded that “The spot was absolutely solitary. As far as the eye could see there was not a person on the plain or on the path.” So where did the child come from? Why didn’t JVJ see him approaching? I also found it odd that Little Gervais (a 10 year old kid) “showed no astonishment” when he first sees JVJ, a man, Hugo said, had a “savage face”and would be “terrifying to any one who might have encountered him”. Instead, he stands before JVJ with a “childish confidence which is composed of ignorance and innocence.” If I’m right, Bishop Bienvenu is the only other person so far who has looked at JVJ without drawing back. (And notice that when the sun sets behind the boy, it “cast threads of gold in his hair and empurpled with its blood-red gleam the savage face of Jean Valjean.”) And finally, there’s the priest on horseback who, when asked by JVJ if he has seen the boy, says that he has not. But the priest then says, “If he is like what you say, my friend, he is a little stranger. Such persons pass through these parts. We know nothing of them.” Huh? And what’s with the “ancient fragment of blue earthenware which had fallen in the grass.”? It no doubt symbolizes something; but what? Anyway, until someone out there sets me straight, I’m sticking with my hypothesis, and say that the kid ain’t real.

BTW. Out of curiosity, I typed “forty sous”, the value of the coin which JVJ “stole” from the boy, into Google; there I found multiple references to a book titled The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle (a man who just so happens to resemble Chris. Hmmm?). In that book, Carlyle talks about the “Law of the Forty Sous”, which (if I read correctly) is the day’s wages of a poor person. Anyway, click here if you want to see the text.

Finally, remember the scene where Monseigneur Bienvenu is walking in the garden the morning after JVJ stole the silver and the fled. He picks up the basket that held the silver and sighs after realizing it had broken a plant. (No doubt because JVJ dropped it after taking the silver) Anyway, that plant (cochlearia des Guillons) is from the plant family which is known as Cruciferae, which means “cross-bearing”.

I think JVJ stole the child’s coin with the intent subconsciously to shock himself, to have that reality in front of him to face, to actually feel the result in his heart, to test, to push himself to that point of seeing himself from his evolved consciousness, to be sure of it-if it was really real or whether he could dismiss his encounter with the bishop and continue on the old self-destructive trajectory. This is Frost’s fork in the road I think.

My blood pressure rose when JVJ almost drove that spike into the bishop’s head. By then the Bishop’s “magic” was already working on him. But that was the first test. The second was the child’s coin soo after. I wanted Hugo to make that child reappear further down the road and have his coin returned, his faith in humanity unspoiled- I did not want that child to go off into the world like that. Life is cruel though.

Backing up, I think the contrast between Jean ValJean and what he had become after all those years, how he looked upon the world, society, with the countenance of the bishop who, no matter what, never seemed to lose his faith in the human heart, the inherent goodness of spirit- is amazing, brilliant. This is wonderful dichotomy, a split in which the heart must go one way or the other, yes or no to life. There are so many Jean Valjeans in this world in need of big doses of goodness to help heal. Alas. What a better world we would have. It’s so current.