Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

been reassigned there, and recognizes him in the street. Fleeing the police, Valjean climbs a high wall with Cosette and finds himself in a convent garden tended by the grateful man he had saved from underneath the cart. A false burial in an empty coffin allows him to reenter the convent from the outside as an assistant gardener. In this shelter, he raises Cosette as his beloved daughter, and the nuns educate her. Comparing the voluntary austerities and self-sacrifice of the nuns for the good of humanity with his own past sufferings as a convict, Jean Valjean overcomes his resentment toward society and learns humility. Cosette’s dependency gives him reasons to live; her weakness keeps him strong.
    After seven years, however, he leaves the convent with her to prevent her from pursuing a religious vocation by default. They live in seclusion. Nevertheless, Cosette’s growing beauty attracts the attention of a poor young man, Marius, who has been alienated from his royalist grandfather, his only living relative, because of his loyalty to his deceased father, who was a heroic colonel under Napoleon. Fearful of losing the only person who gives meaning to his life, and fearing detection, Valjean evades Marius by moving across Paris. But there his generous almsgiving attracts the attention of the Thénardiers and their criminal gang, although the innkeeper does not recognize him. Failures in business, Thénardier and his monstrous wife have come to join the Parisian underworld.
    Thénardier’s moral decline criss-crosses Jean Valjean’s progressive moral redemption. Potentially law-abiding in prosperity, in poverty Thénardier becomes increasingly vicious. He plans to kidnap and torture Jean Valjean, force him to reveal where Cosette is staying, and then kidnap her to force Valjean to pay a huge ransom. Meanwhile, he becomes increasingly indifferent toward his own children. He uses Eponine as a spy and lookout for his burglaries and callously risks her life. He makes no effort to find his son Gavroche when the little boy becomes separated from his family, and he deliberately abandons Gavroche’s two younger brothers.
    By yet another coincidence of many in the novel, Marius has moved into a cheap room next door to the Thénardiers. Listening and watching through a hole in the wall, he learns of their plans to kidnap Cosette. Marius denounces them to Javert, but then learns that Thénardier had “saved his father’s life” (had inadvertently revived him by rifling though his clothes after he had fallen at the Battle of Waterloo). His father’s dying wish had been that his son find and reward Thénardier.
    Eponine has fallen in love with Marius. Now her former relationship with Cosette is reversed. Cosette is wealthy, privileged, and beloved, while Eponine, formerly coddled, must choose between her father’s beatings and sleeping in ditches. The two girls do not recognize each other. Hopelessly devoted, Eponine helps Marius find Cosette again: Marius and Cosette fall in love, meeting in Cosette’s garden at night for a chaste but passionate romance. When Thénardier’s gang has staked out Valjean’s isolated new residence for a burglary, without realizing that it belongs to their former intended extortion victim, Eponine drives them away with false warnings about the police, and anonymously advises Valjean to move. He plans to flee to England. By accident, Cosette is prevented from communicating with Marius.
    Knowing that Marius cares only for Cosette, Eponine despairs and writes an anonymous note summoning him to join his friends fighting on the barricades of the worker-student insurrection of 1832. She hopes he will die there; but she wants to die first, by his side. In despair at not finding Cosette at home, Marius seeks death on the barricades. There, a sudden political illumination makes his commitment to his friends’ republican cause authentic. Eponine, disguised as a young worker, saves Marius by throwing herself