W: LP: LG: VH: LM: part 3a

The next book in the part of Victor Hugo's novel called "Fantine" introduces the character, Fantine. The year is 1817, the scene is Paris. Fantine is a working girl who has gone to the big city to make her fortune or maybe just do a little better than she could have done in her small village. She is friends with three other girls of her class and the four of them came to be acquainted because they were the girl-friends of four young men who were friends together at the university. These men came from a slightly higher social class and enjoyed a life of profligacy in the city of lights. Victor Hugo describes in poetic terms a day of leisure on a Sunday (the only day off for the girls) for these four couples. There is description of the enjoyment of a summer's day, much like when many of us were young, going to the county fair, having a great dinner at the end of a long day that one wished would last forever.
The other girls are a little more experienced than Fantine and have had other boy-friends and they look at romance in this young stage of life as merely a fling. Fantine is a bit younger and this is her first love. This day of leisure together captures in a tableau a larger time of months of relationship and frivolity. The men have promised a surprise to the girls at the end of this great day, and at the end of supper they leave to provide the surprise and the surprise turns out to be their departure. They give lame excuses about how their families will be concerned about their choices of women and they must grow up and chose someone to fit their lives. The 'book' ends with Fantine broken-hearted and with a small child, a daughter. This is the introduction of Cosette.
Fantine is in a quandary, she loses her so-called friends and there is no family in Paris to help her. She decides to go back to her village, but she is concerned that being an unwed mother might give her some trouble. As she is on her way back to her village, she happens across a small inn where the innkeeper's wife is sitting out front with her two daughters at play. She thinks this woman looks like a good mother and she strikes up a conversation and it eventually comes about that Fantine negotiates with the innkeeper and his wife to take care of her daughter until she can get established in her home town. Presumably she would send for the girl when she were able.
Fantine returns to her village and no one remembers her and a new factory has been built by Jean Valjean who is living under another name. Fantine gets a good job even thought she is not very skilled and JV is a generous employer, taking good care of his employees. But more about him later. Unfortunately the people she has left her daughter with are the Thénardiers who are unscrupulous money grubbing wastrels who will not be taking very good care of her daughter. Her is a perfect description of these cretins from the book:

They belonged to that bastard class composed of rough people who have risen and intelligent people who have fallen, which lies between the so-called middle and lower classes and unites some of the faults of the latter with nearly all the vices of the former, without possessing the generous impulses of the worker or the respectability of the bourgeois.
They were among those dwarfish natures, which, if they happen to be heated by some sullen fire, easily become monstrous. The woman was at heart a brute, the man a blackguard, both in the highest degree capable of that hideous sort of progression that can be made toward evil. There are souls that, crablike, crawl continually toward darkness, going backward in life rather than advancing, using their experience to increase their deformity, growing continually worse, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying viciousness. That was the case with this man and this woman.

VH goes on in great form and at the end you just despise these characters. The Thénardiers keep increasing the amount of money they are extorting from Fantine.
In the next book, Fantine falls on hard times by first losing her job due to the jealousy of the woman in charge of the women workers at the factory. Jean Valjean does not know that Fantine is let go unjustly and Fantine's reputation is ruined because the gossipers find out that she has a bastard child being cared for by the Thénardiers. Fantine does the best she can but the Thénardiers keep raising the amount she must send and her business of selling shirts suffers because prison labor used to make shirts drops the wages of everyone else. The Thénardiers finally lie about Cosette being ill to try to get more money out of Fantine. Fantine finally descends to selling her beautiful front teeth, lovely hair and finally her body to keep the money coming in.

In another book, the character, Javert is introduced. This man is an inspector of police and is the personification of all that is vicious in the law without mercy. Javert attempts to have Fantine thrown in prison after she attacks some young "gentleman" who had shoved some snow down her dress and made fun of her in public where she was trying to ply her last trade. Jean Valjean intercedes as he discovers that Fantine had been unjustly let go from his factory. Fantine's health declines and JV ends up caring for her at the hospital that he finances; she eventually dies and he agrees to care for Cosette.
Javert is the major antagonist of this story and VH has provided a perfect description (which I will quote in the next entry--stay tuned).