Les Miserables

Hugo wrote the great argument that a person is worth more than their worst act, and he makes you feel it instead of just believing it. The bishop's candlesticks are still the most famous second chance in literature. Read it if you have ever written someone off, or been written off yourself, or if you simply want the novel that turned a convict's conscience into a cathedral of a story.

1. 1

   Act 1

   A Door Slams in Every Face

   October 1815. A gaunt man of forty-six walks into Digne with a knapsack, a stick, and a yellow passport that announces him as a dangerous ex-convict. Nineteen years in the galleys have taught Jean Valjean exactly what comes next. He is hungry, he is tired, and he has money, a little, honestly come by. It does not matter. The innkeeper at the Croix-de-Colbas, named Jacquin Labarre, takes one look at the passport and turns him out. Valjean tries a second inn, then a third, then a fourth. Every door closes. He tries private houses and is refused there too. Even the jail will not have him; even the dog kennel shuts him out. By nightfall he has collapsed on a stone bench in the town, and an old woman points him toward a low house beside the cathedral, the one with a light in the window. He knocks. Madame Magloire, the bishop's housekeeper, answers and calls to her master. Monseigneur Bienvenu, the Bishop of Digne, does not ask for the passport. He does not ask for anything. He simply says, 'Come in.' What Valjean cannot know yet is that this old man has already given away nearly everything he owns, down to the silver on his table, and that tonight he is about to give away the last of it, without knowing he is doing it.

2. 2

   Act 2

   Silver on the Table

   Madame Magloire is horrified. She sets the table with the full silver service, forks, spoons, the great silver soup ladle, and she protests to her bishop that they know nothing about this stranger, nothing at all. Bienvenu insists. The best they have, for a man who may be a murderer or a thief, because who is she to say what he is not. Valjean eats like a starving animal, and the bishop watches him with a kind of cheerful innocence, talking about ordinary things, asking about the galleys as if it were a trade like any other. When the meal is done, Madame Magloire, still uneasy, follows the custom of the house: she takes the silver and hangs it in the alcove, on the iron rod beside the bed where the bishop sleeps, behind a little curtain. It is the one precaution she has ever been allowed. The bishop makes up the spare bed for Valjean himself, near the alcove, and then he goes to his own narrow alcove and sleeps, as he always does, with the silver hanging an arm's length from his head and a curtain between him and a stranger he has fed and trusted. In the middle of the night, Valjean wakes. He gets up. He takes the silver plates from the cupboard in the alcove, climbs over the garden wall, and is gone into the dark.

3. 3

   Act 3

   Caught, and Then Undone by Kindness

   Dawn. Valjean is in the open country, moving fast, the silver heavy in his knapsack, when soldiers' hands close on him. Gendarmes. They march him back through the streets of Digne to the bishop's house, and the whole town comes out to watch the spectacle: the convict who robbed the one man who was kind to him. They push him into the presence of Monseigneur Bienvenu, and Valjean, who has spent nineteen years learning to expect the worst, stands with his eyes on the ground, waiting for the sentence. The bishop looks up and says, 'Ah, there you are! I am glad to see you. But I gave you the candlesticks too, which are silver like the rest, and would bring you two hundred francs. Why did you not take them along with your plates?' Then, before the gendarmes can speak, he goes to the mantelpiece, takes down the two silver candlesticks himself, and presses them into Valjean's hands. The officers release him. The door closes behind them. The bishop says only one thing more: that Valjean no longer belongs to evil, but to good, and that he has bought his soul for God. Valjean walks out of that house holding silver worth more than he can carry, and it nearly kills him, because he cannot return to being the man he was an hour ago.

4. 4

   Act 4

   A New Man, Built on a Lie of Mercy

   Valjean leaves Digne a thief and arrives somewhere else, hours later, a different man, though he does not yet know it. He robs a small chimney sweep's boy of a coin almost by reflex, out of the old animal habit, and then, when the boy is gone, he realizes what he has done and weeps for the first time in nineteen years. From that hour forward, the whole novel becomes the story of a man trying to deserve the candlesticks. He breaks parole, invents a new name, builds a new life, becomes a mayor and a factory owner, and spends the rest of the book hunted by the policeman Javert, who cannot accept that a man can change. Every act of goodness Valjean performs is a payment on a debt the bishop never asked him to pay. The silver candlesticks sit at the center of everything that follows, a private sacrament he carries through fire, prison, sewers, and barricades. When he finally dies, it is with the candlesticks near him, and the last thing he asks is to be buried under a stone with no name, because the only name that ever mattered to him was the one the bishop gave him: brother.

• JJean ValjeanA hardened ex-convict, nineteen years in the galleys for stealing bread, who arrives in Digne expecting cruelty and receives the opposite. He spends the rest of his life trying to become the man the bishop insisted he already was.
• MMonseigneur BienvenuThe Bishop of Digne, an old man who has given away his palace, his carriage, and nearly everything else, keeping only the silver. He sees a thief at his table and calls him a guest.
• MMadame MagloireThe bishop's housekeeper and the practical conscience of the household, who hangs the silver by the bishop's bed every night because she trusts no stranger. She is right, and it does not matter.
• JJavertThe policeman who believes the law is the same thing as justice and cannot forgive a man for being more than his record. He hunts Valjean for decades and is destroyed by the moment Valjean shows him mercy.

The silver candlesticks

The most famous second chance in literature. They are the gift the bishop adds on top of the stolen plates, worth two hundred francs, given to a thief in front of the police. Valjean carries them for the rest of his life as a private sacrament, a physical reminder that someone bet on him when there was no evidence to justify it, and they are near him when he dies.

The yellow passport

The state's verdict made portable. It marks Valjean as a dangerous man and gets him refused at every inn and private house in Digne, turning his release from prison into a second prison. It stands for every system that treats a person as finished, a label that closes doors before the person inside it can speak.

The silver plates

The bishop's only remaining wealth, hung every night on the iron rod beside his bed by Madame Magloire, the one precaution in a house that has given everything else away. They are what Valjean steals, and what the bishop then claims he gave, converting stolen goods into a gift by an act of pure will. Their fate is the hinge of the whole story.

The bishop's bed in the alcove

The bishop sleeps in a narrow alcove with the silver hanging an arm's length from his head and only a curtain between him and a stranger. It is a small image of his whole philosophy: he does not protect himself from the world's danger, he simply trusts it, and the one night this trust is betrayed is also the one night it saves a soul.

The ending Hugo builds toward, from the very first scene in Digne, is that Valjean dies at peace, with the candlesticks near him, having spent his whole life trying to deserve a mercy he received in a single evening. Some readers see this as a religious ending: the bishop bought Valjean's soul for God, and the deathbed is the receipt. Others read it as secular: the candlesticks are not God's claim on Valjean but one human being's faith in another, and what Valjean finally proves is that faith can be justified. There is also a darker reading, that Valjean never stops being a convict, that his goodness is a lifelong penance rather than a freedom, and that the bishop's mercy trapped him as surely as the galleys did. What makes the ending land is that Hugo never lets you forget the cost. Valjean's new life is built on a broken parole, a false name, and decades of being hunted, and the book refuses to pretend that becoming good is free. The last image, an unmarked grave, is the final answer to the yellow passport: the state's label on his life was wrong, and in the end he escapes it by having no name at all.

1. 1.The bishop's lie, telling the gendarmes the silver was a gift, is the moral hinge of the novel. Is a lie told to save a soul ever justified, and does Hugo's answer hold up if the thief had gone on to hurt someone?

Anyone who has ever been written off, or been tempted to write someone else off, will find this book aimed directly at them. It is also for readers who want the source of half the moral vocabulary of modern fiction, and who do not mind earning the great scenes through a few long digressions.

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