Part I, Book 2, Chapter 1
The Evening after a Day’s Walking
VALJEANNNN. AT LAST.
Yes, after 14 chapters of bishop lore and a silverware tease, our favorite main character tenor, Jean Valjean, appears!
Our man Valjean is looking rough. He’s in ragged clothing (Hugo has a very long description re: the colors, weave, exact level of hole-yness of Valjean’s clothes, which I imagine the costume designers of the world bless him for), and he is covered in dust from walking over 30 miles in one day.
He is so thirsty that he drinks from two back-to-back fountains in the middle of town, which makes one of the stage musical moments (“Drink from the pool / How clean the taste”) more or less canon. (I am mentally tracking these things, even though I’m sure many nerdy Les Mis fans before me have already documented the book-to-musical decisions.)
Hungry and exhausted Valjean is turned away, like Jesus’ parents, from every inn and house he tries. Both times I saw the musical I thought this sequence was kind of heavy-handed in how obviously, infuriatingly unjust it was, but it turns out that it’s even worse in the book.
At one inn, and then a tavern, both of which clearly have hot food ready and space available, Valjean is initially welcomed after he explains that he has money to pay for room and board, and told to hang on a minute for supper, which makes you go “Oh yay, xenia‘s not dead! :)” Then, both times, the host receives SCARY GOSSIP and then throws Valjean out, making you go “BOO YOU WHORE :<“.
There’s a poignant moment, footnoted by the translator, where the tavern owner switches to the informal you when he tells Valjean to get lost and Valjean, while beseeching him to let him stay, continues using the formal you. Heartbreak through grammar!
Valjean is so desperate that as these men are throwing him out, he begs them to let him sleep in the stable on a spare bale of hay, and even that request is rejected, wtf! Fix your hearts or die, innkeeper jerks.
At this point I was kind of thinking that all the good the bishop is doing—and I realize it’s a lot of good—isn’t doing much to make the regular townspeople better or kinder people. Maybe he needs to start teaching free ethics classes, Chidi Anagonye style. I also realized that, judging by the horrifying online comments on local news stories whenever my city does literally anything to help unhoused folks, that basically nothing has changed and it’s possible that I, too, live in a town of assholes.
Can I airdrop copies of When We Walk By onto this little French town?
Anyway. Having been thrown out twice, Valjean passes by the town prison and asks the jailer if he can have a cell for the night. And even the jailer gets sassy and turns him away! Jesus Christ this is so freaking sad.
He then spots a friendly-looking house with a cheery family inside, so he politely knocks and offers to pay if they’ll give him a plate of soup and let him sleep in the shed, and the family gets all scared and asks if he’s “the man” and the dad points a gun at Valjean and tells him to scram. I am so glad at least that this town is not in a Stand Your Ground state.
Also, how did this random peasant family get wind of whatever gossip the innkeepers heard? Is everyone in this town on Nextdoor?
At this point it is dark, Valjean is bone-tired (he walked! over 30 miles! in a single day! with no food!!!), and he has just experienced more rejection in a few hours than I did in a whole year of applying to colleges at the peak of the Millennial college application boom.
He spots what looks like a hut, goes “Screw it, I’m going in,” (my paraphrase, not Hugo’s actual words) and crawls in…only to find that it’s not a hut, but it’s a doghouse, with a very large and angry dog in it. Valjean gtfos of the doghouse and cries, in despair, “I’m not even a dog!”
Like I said, this is even more heavy-handed than the musical, and it’s also so infuriating and sad.
He ends up returning to the town square and finding a stone bench to lie down on, and at this point I’m glad that at least 19th century France hasn’t heard about hostile architecture.
A kind lady, the FIRST person who isn’t an asshole to show up in this chapter, stops to ask Valjean what he’s doing and why he’s not at an inn. He asks her how much money she has on her and then tells her, kind of rudely, to give it all to him.
…
I’ll let him have this one, he’s just experienced a crushing amount of assholery from the people of this town. Also I often give money to unhoused folks who just ask point-blank, and I don’t take it personally, and neither does the nice lady.
Valjean explains that he’s been turned away at every single door he’s knocked on. Then the lady points to the bishop’s house and says, “Knock there.”
That’s the end of the chapter, and it left me vibrating with excitement.
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