After introducing the bishop in book one of “Fantine”, Victor Hugo brings into the story the main protagonist Jean Valjean. As a part of examining the tragic life of this character up to his introduction in the story, VH has an opportunity to criticize the French legal system. JV (Jean Valjean) enters the story after having been imprisoned (confinement at hard labor) for nineteen years. He arrives at the town of Digne where the bishop lives, and after he is rejected from two inns for being an ex-convict the writer flashes back in time to tell the story of how JV came to this predicament. His story begins thus:
Jean Valjean was born into a poor peasant family in Brie region. In his childhood he had not been taught to read. When he had come of age, he chose the occupation of a pruner at Faverolles.
And…
He had lost his parents when he was very young. His mother died of a poorly treated milkfever, his father, a pruner before him, was killed when he fell from a tree. Jean Valjean now had only one relative left, his older sister, a widow with seven children, girls and boys. This sister had brought up Jean Valjean, and as long as her husband lived, she had taken care of her younger brother. Her husband died, leaving the eldest of these children at eight, the youngest one year old. Jean Valjean was just twenty-five. Taking the father’s place, he supported the sister who had reared him. He did it naturally, as a duty, but with a trace of surliness. His youth was spent in rough and poorly paid labor; he was never known to have a sweetheart; he had no time to be in love.
And…
In the pruning season he earned eighteen sous {not quite a franc} a day; after that he hired out as a reaper, a workman, teamster, or laborer. He did whatever he could find to do. His sister worked also, but what could she do with seven little children? It was a sad group, gradually held tighter and tighter in the grip of misery. One very severe winter, Jean had no work, the family had no bread. Literally no bread and seven children.
VH goes on to describe how JV breaks the baker’s window at night and takes one loaf of bread. JV was caught of course and…
Jean Valjean was found guilty: The terms of the penal code were explicit. In our civilization there are fearful times when the criminal law wrecks a man. How mournful the moment when society draws back and permits the irreparable loss of a sentient being. Jean Valjean was sentenced to five years in prison.
And…
Sitting on the ground like the rest, he seemed to take in nothing of his position, except its horror. Probably with the vague ideas of a poor ignorant man, there was also a notion of something excessive in the penalty. While they were riveting the bolt of his iron collar behind his head with heavy hammer strokes, he wept. The tears choked his words, and he only managed to say from time to time, “I was a pruner at Faverolles.” Then still sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it seven times, as if touching seven heads of unequal height and from this gesture one could guess that whatever he had done had been to feed and clothe seven little children.
And…
He was no longer Jean Valjean; he was Number 24,601. What became of the sister? What became of the seven children? Who worried about that? What becomes of the handful of leaves of the young tree when it is felled?
The story goes on with only a brief mention of his sister working in Paris with only the youngest boy; all the other children were scattered to the four winds. In the fourth year of JV’s sentence, he tries to escape and is free for 36 hours before he is recaptured. He gets another three years for this attempt and in the sixth year he tries again to escape and fails. In this case he tries to resist so he gets another five years (two with a double chain). In the tenth year he tries and fails again and gets an additional three years, and in the sixteenth year he tries one more time and gets another three years—in this attempt, he is only free for four hours before recapture. Here is the summary:
Nineteen years. In October, 1815, he was freed; he had entered in 1796 for having broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.
And to get a real feel for the plight of this man check out this passage:
He talked little and never laughed. Only some extreme emotion would draw from him, once or twice a year, that mournful laugh of the convict, like the echo of a devil’s cackle. He seemed continually absorbed in looking at something terrible.
In fact he was absorbed.
Through the sick perceptions of an incomplete nature and a vanquished intelligence, he vaguely felt a monstrous weight was on him. In that wan half light where he crouched, whenever he turned his head and tried to raise his eyes, he would see, with mingled rage and terror, forming, massing, rising out of view above him with horrible ramparts, a frightening accumulation of laws, prejudices, men, and acts, whose outlines escaped him, whose weight appalled him—it was that prodigious pyramid we call civilization. Here and there in that shapeless, seething mass, sometimes near, sometimes far, or at inaccessible heights, he could make out some group, some vivid detail, here the jailer with his cudgel, here the gendarme with his sword, there the mitered archbishop, and high up, in a blaze of glory, the emperor crowned and resplendent. It seemed to him that these distant splendors, far from dissipating his night, made it blacker, deathlier. All this—laws, intolerance, actions, men, things—came and went above him, according to the complicated, mysterious movement God imposes on civilization, walking over him and crushing him with an indescribably serene cruelty, an inexorable indifference. Souls sunk to deepest misfortune, unfortunate men lost in the depths of limbo where they are no longer visible, the rejects of the law, feeling on their heads the whole weight of human society, so formidable to those outside it, so terrible to those beneath it.
From his position, Jean Valjean meditated. What sort of reflections could they be?
If a millet seed under a millstone had thoughts, undoubtedly it would think as Jean Valjean did.
Into this living death of only law, shone the light of grace, for when everyone in the town of Digne gave not a place to Jean Valjean to even sleep or eat, the bishop invited him in and warmed him by the fire and fed him and gave him a clean bed to sleep in. When JV ate his dinner on silver (the only treasure the bishop had), the hardness in his heart crept in, and after sleeping for some time he arose and stole away with the silver. When the gendarmes brought him back, the bishop bade him be released and he chided him for not taking the silver candlesticks as well. The bishop tells him that he has bought his soul and that he should go forth in repentance. This bright light of grace blinded him and it took awhile for it to sink in and when it did, he wept for the first time in nineteen years.
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