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

in front of a bullet aimed at him.
    Meanwhile, Valjean has discovered the imprint of Cosette’s desperate note to Marius on her blotter. Her adoptive father is taking her away; she does not know where. Valjean hates Marius for threatening to deprive him of the only person he has ever loved. He struggles to overcome his possessiveness, and despite his rage, he goes to the barricades to protect Marius. Behind the barricade, Javert has been unmasked as a police spy. Valjean asks permission to execute him, but secretly sets him free. As the barricade falls to the government troops, Marius collapses, wounded and unconscious. Valjean escapes through the sewers, carrying the young man through the foul muck on his shoulders for four miles.
    At the locked exit by the Seine, Valjean meets Thénardier, who has hidden there from Javert. Thénardier does not recognize Valjean. He thinks Valjean has killed Marius for his money, and demands all Valjean’s cash in exchange for opening the gate with his skeleton key so that Valjean can escape. He hopes to divert the waiting Javert by offering him a substitute fugitive. Javert does indeed arrest Valjean, but feels morally obligated to release him, because he owes the convict his life. Then, torn by an insoluble conflict between religious and legal duty, Javert drowns himself. Marius’s repentant grandfather nurses Marius back to health and marries him to Cosette. Valjean has given her all his fortune. The novel reaches its moral climax on the wedding night. Should Valjean confess that he is an escaped convict, and renounce all contact with Cosette to spare the young couple the shame of his possible denunciation and arrest? “He had reached the last crossing of good and evil.... two roads opened before him; the one tempting, the other terrible. Which should he take? The one which terrified him was advised by the mysterious indicating finger which we all perceive whenever we fix our eyes upon the shadow.... We are never done with conscience.... It is bottomless, being God” (pp. 769—770). Human love alone cannot bring us closer to God. Sacrifice is required.
    The next day, Valjean secretly confesses to Marius that he is an escaped convict, and not Cosette’s father. Marius, believing that Valjean’s fortune was stolen, does not touch it. Thinking that Valjean killed Javert at the barricade, Marius only reluctantly allows him to see Cosette in the anteroom to his grandfather’s house. Persona non grata to Marius, Valjean stops coming, stops eating, and wastes away. But Thénardier unwittingly serves as the instrument of Providence. He comes to extort money from Marius by threatening to reveal the “secret” that his father-in-law is an escaped convict who has recently killed a man (he unwittingly refers to Marius himself). As he speaks, he accidentally reveals that Valjean made his fortune legally, that he did not kill Javert, and that he saved Marius. The latter pays his debt of honor to Thénardier by giving him enough money to travel to America, where he becomes a slave owner (an even further degradation, in Hugo’s eyes). Marius and Cosette, repentant, rush to Valjean’s bedside. They arrive too late to save him, but he dies happy in one of the most pathetic scenes in literature. In the shadows, an enormous, invisible angel awaits his soul.

The Plot
    Traditional analyses of fiction distinguish between “story,” meaning what happens, and “plot,” meaning how the things that happen are arranged (straight-line temporal sequence or flashbacks and flash-forwards, a single story line or several story lines, parallel or embedded stories, and so forth). Parallel stories (while A is doing X, B is doing Y, etc.) characterize television situation comedies and melodramas, or epistolary novels; embedded stories (A tells B a story about C, who in turn tells D a story about E, etc.) characterize the fantastic tale, memoirs and autobiography, and many other long novels.
    Plot also