Part I, Book 2, Chapter 10
The Man Awakened
It’s 2 AM and Jean Valjean can’t sleep. Relatable! Part of this is because he hasn’t slept in a bed for 19 years and so the bed is too comfortable for him, which is not so relatable, especially when you realize it’s probably not the nicest bed given how the bishop lives.
One thing stays at the forefront of Valjean’s mind, and that is the silver that he saw, laid out on the table before him at dinner and then put away in the bishop’s bedroom. “Those six sets of silver preyed on him.” Oh, when did this turn into a Poe story?
The chapter pretty accurately describes the experience of insomnia so well that I want to give Hugo a “can’t sleep either?” solidarity fistbump. Someone knows what it’s like to have your mind be both muddled and obsessively fixed on something!
Valjean, obsessed with the silver the way you can only be obsessed with things in the middle of the night, does the mental math. The silverware and matching ladle would go for 200 francs, which is almost double what he was paid for 19 years’ of work. I’m not entirely sure how Valjean comes to this number given that prior to not seeing the outside world for 19 years he was an illiterate peasant who presumably would not know the going rate of silver, but let’s just be glad Victor Hugo didn’t write an entire prologue explaining how Jean Valjean happens to know how to appraise antique metals.
Valjean then stands up and looks at his surroundings, particularly his exit; the alcove he’s set up in opens directly out to the garden, and in the moonlight he can see that the garden is surrounded by a low, very climbable wall. So he grabs his knapsack, takes out a miner’s candlestick (an iron candlestick where the base is a sharp point for jamming into rock, presumably because Valjean was once put to work in a quarry—a detail that is not fully necessary and also raises the question of how convicts were allowed to keep tools that cost money and also could be used easily as weapons, but again thank you Hugo for not offering a long explanation about that), and then goes to the door between his room and the bishop’s.
The door is ajar. LFG.
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