Part I, Book 2, Chapter 11
What He Does
Valjean opens the door to the bishop’s bedroom, “with that furtive and circumspect delicacy of a cat that wants to come in.” Victor Hugo, confirmed cat guy!!!
RIP Hugo, you would have loved movies. What follows is a long series of descriptive paragraphs that verge on the cinematic. Valjean goes to the bishop’s bed and gazes down at his sleeping host, just as the moon comes out from behind a cloud and the bishop is bathed in heavenly moonlit radiance.
The paragraph about the moonlight is written with such assurance that the reader can picture the scene exactly that it made me realize that…I don’t really know, as a modern urban dweller, what pure moonlight shining on someone looks like. Electric lights are so ubiquitous now that, at night, any light I see coming in from outside is from a streetlight or neighboring building.
Hugo paints a picture of the scene so vividly it could be a movie poster; the bishop, so full of serenity and goodness even in sleep, is lit in the moon’s soft glow, looking literally divine, while Valjean stands in the shadows, terrified. He stares at the bishop for a very long time, wrestling with himself, paralyzed while the bishop sleeps on. Tbf staring at someone while they sleep is very cat behavior.
“He seemed to be hovering between two abysses—that of perdition and that of salvation,” Hugo writes, which is such a beautiful way of summing up Valjean’s internal struggle.
Finally, after many paragraphs about the moon and Valjean’s indecision, a lot happens in one sentence: Valjean grabs the basket of silverware from the bedroom cupboard, goes back into his room and climbs out the window, dumps the silver into his knapsack, and leaps over the garden wall into the night.
Specifically, he leaps over the wall “like a tiger.” Is Jean Valjean just…a cat? Does this explain everything, like how he’s so strong and flexible?
Somewhere at the end of this train of thought is a version of the musical Les Misérables where Jean Valjean is played by one of the Cats from Cats, and if I think too long about it I’m going to convince myself that it works. (There’s already a song in Cats about being all alone in the moonlight! It totally works!)
Leave a Reply