Part II, Book 4, Chapter 3
Happiness in Shared Misfortune
This chapter made me so emotional! And despite all my cracks about this horrible building being so sketchy and sad, there is something so beautiful and innocent about a child finding wonder and happiness in squalor; as someone who is so obsessed with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn that I have to stop myself from talking about it all the time, I feel the exact same themes pressing the exact same emotional buttons here, and I love it.
Hugo tells us that Jean Valjean has never loved in his entire life—the devotion he showed to his sister’s seven children was borne out of duty more than love, although I know there was tenderness there!—and everything that has happened to him has ensured that he’d never experience any kind of love—romantic, platonic, familial–with anyone.
But here he is with Cosette, and suddenly he feels “pangs,” and a “great and extraordinary stirring” for the first time, and he doesn’t know what’s happening to him. After 55 empty years, “all the love he might have felt throughout his life blended in a kind of ineffable light.” Folks, if you were missing the divine light imagery, it’s BACK!
This is the second major awakening of Valjean’s life: “The bishop had brought the dawn of virtue to his horizon. Cosette brought the dawn of love.”
Cosette has also changed; she, too, has no memory of love (which is extra tragic because Fantine loved her so much) as she doesn’t remember her mother, and tried to love everyone around her at the Thénardiers’ only to be rejected by all. (Except for the dog, because dogs love everyone, but the dog died.) So for the first time, her instinct to love is fulfilled. “Cosette’s instinct sought a father as Jean Valjean’s instinct sought a child. To meet was to find each other.”
This is so beautiful and it’s getting to me! I find it especially notable that Valjean’s previous devotion to Cosette—which was an obsession that was kind of the flip side of Javert’s obsession with him—was not borne out of true love for the child, but obligation. This was a man who was motivated by goodness and guilt thanks to the bishop, who strove to be good and to do the right thing, who made a promise to Fantine and who felt responsible for her misfortune and death—all of this creates strong motivation based on virtue, but not of love.
It’s not that virtue is a bad thing. But while Valjean had learned the bishop’s ways, his spiritual journey wasn’t complete (and I do believe the difference between Valjean and Myriel, besides gobs of money, was that the bishop truly felt love for the people to whom he showed kindness). I think it’s Hugo’s way of saying that you cannot live by virtue alone.
Am I basing this on the fact that one of the musical’s closing lines is “To love another person is to see the face of God”? Perhaps!
Anyway, I love this development for Valjean. And Cosette—the two of them spend several very happy weeks in that miserable place. Valjean teaches Cosette to read (!!!) and lets her play. Over those weeks, Valjean’s soul undergoes a subtle transformation: now his life has meaning and a bigger perspective.
His latest experience with the justice system/society in general has seeded him with “fresh resentments,” “disgust and weariness,” and he came out of his last prison stint in danger of relapsing to his pre-bishop ways. But his love for Cosette saves him from that possible fall.
And in fact, one of his takeaways from prison is itself transfigured; Valjean reflects that he learned to read in prison with the intent of using this skill to revenge himself on the world that wronged him, and now he’s repurposing said skill to teach a child. It’s so thematically gorgeous that I can’t stand it. I also love that Valjean is basically Cosette’s personal Levar Burton.
There’s a bit of explanation, near the end of the chapter, of their arrangement in the tenement and their cover story. No one else is living in the tenement, other than the “doorkeeper” who is their erstwhile landlady, who does the housekeeping and got the room ready for Valjean and Cosette to arrive. Valjean paid her for 6 months’ rent upfront, and fed her the story that he was a “gentleman of means” who’d lost his fortune and would be living in that hovel with his granddaughter.
General ambient misery aside, it’s all a pretty good setup. Why do I get the sense this happiness isn’t going to last long?
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