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Daily · Classics

Les Misérables

Victor Hugo · novel, 1862·45 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • The bishop gives away silver a thief already stole from him. Caught with the Bishop of Digne's candlesticks, Jean Valjean is saved when the Bishop tells the gendarmes he gave them freely, then hands over two more he had not taken. "Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man," the Bishop tells him.
  • Fantine sells her front teeth for two gold coins. A traveling dentist offers Fantine a napoleon apiece for her "palettes," her upper front teeth, and she flees in horror, saying she would rather jump from a fifth story window. Chapters later she reappears with "a mouth which lacked its two front teeth": she went back and sold them.
  • Valjean interrupts a courtroom to confess his own identity. With an innocent man about to be sentenced as Jean Valjean, the real Valjean, disguised for years as the respectable mayor Monsieur Madeleine, stands up in the Arras courtroom and says, "Gentlemen of the jury, order the prisoner to be released! Mr. President, have me arrested. He is not the man whom you are in search of; it is I: I am Jean Valjean."
  • Javert files a formal complaint memo before he drowns himself. On the night he lets Valjean go free, Javert stops at a police post and writes ten numbered administrative grievances about prison conditions, signs it "Inspector of the 1st class," seals it, and only then walks on toward the Seine near the Place du Châtelet.
  • Valjean itemizes his own factory margins on his deathbed. Dying, he will not let Cosette's six hundred thousand francs go unexplained: he walks Marius through the exact economics of his black-jet jewelry business, down to a gross of buckles costing ten francs and selling for sixty, to prove the money is honest.
  • His grave carries no name, only an epitaph. Valjean asks to be buried under a plain stone with nothing written on it. The narrator closes at that unmarked plot in Père-Lachaise, quoting the epitaph carved there anyway: he lived, he died when he no longer had his angel, simply, as night follows day.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is a novel built entirely out of receipts, a stolen loaf, a dental transaction, a ten-point police memo, itemized factory margins, that keep insisting a person's worth cannot be reduced to any one of them.

A man convicted for stealing a loaf of bread spends nineteen years in the galleys, then the rest of his life trying to outrun both the label and the one inspector who refuses to let him.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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