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

explains why things happen: are they “events” (“acts of God,” to which the characters must react) or “acts” (initiated by the characters)? In either case, is the agent unconscious (a floor or a fire), blind (a mistaken or compulsive act), or lucid? Is the act premeditated or impulsive?
    At first glance, chance encounters among the characters seem to motivate most of the action. Javert happens to be assigned to the galleys, then to the town of M—sur M—, and finally to Paris when Jean Valjean arrives at each of those places. In Paris their paths cross decisively several times. At M—sur M—, Valjean happens by just when Fantine and then Fauchelevant need to be rescued. Thénardier’s wife happens to be sitting on her doorstep as Fantine is passing, in need of a place to board her child; after Thénardier releases Cosette to Jean Valjean for extortionate sums, he moves to Paris and encounters Valjean in three different places there, at critical moments, without recognizing him. Thénardier just happens to loot Marius’s unconscious father’s body on the battlefield, incurring a mistaken debt of honor for Marius, who then happens to rent a room next to Thénardier’s in Paris. Th6nardier’s elder daughter, Eponine, and Cosette, both fall in love with Marius after the happenstance of running into him. The coincidental resemblance between the vagrant Champmathieu and Valjean moves the plot by forcing the latter to denounce himself and leave M—sur M—for a second trip to the galleys. Only because the former enemy whom Valjean saved from being crushed beneath his cart has become the gardener in the convent into whose garden Valjean and Cosette escape when fleeing from Javert, do they find a safe refuge and does Cosette receive a good education. Only because Thénardier tries to blackmail Marius by threatening to reveal that his father-in-law is an escaped convict, does Marius accidentally learn that Jean Valjean has committed no crimes, and has saved his life, all of which prepares the final, climactic reconciliation between the son-in-law and Cosette’s former guardian. These many coincidences attempt indirectly to persuade us that God intervenes in human affairs, while preserving the imperatives of human commitment and responsibility in the overt rhetoric of the narrator.
    As in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, but in both upward and downward directions, a departure from the horizontal sometimes symbolizes independent choice: Jean Valjean plunging off the prison ship into the sea to feign drowning, so that he can escape to rescue Cosette; his climbing over the wall of the convent with her; and his descent into the depths of the sewers to save Marius. Hugo, moreover, refuses to let us hold God, rather than ourselves, responsible for political events. Suffering, violence, and injustice will be eliminated by philia, by a community of active mutual concern. Hugo, nevertheless, offers a realistic image of political change: one finds only a few fully committed militants on either side; others are drawn in through love, despair, affection, anxiety, greed, or hatred.

The Major Subjects of the Novel
    How can we make sense of this sprawling, complex story? To a superficial reader, the numerous coincidences that bind the characters’ lives together seem like mere melodramatic contrivances. But for Hugo, multiple coincidences reflect his belief in an unseen, overarching Providence that interrelates and governs human destiny. The preface to Les Travailleurs de la mer (The Toilers of the Sea) identifies three “fatalities” in the fallen, material order: nature, religious dogma, and social inequities. By “fatalities” Hugo means obstacles to progress, which tempt us to despair and to renounce effort. How can we exercise our free will when we are caught between a spiritual Providence and a material/institutional fatality?
    Considered in isolation, the generalizations and aphorisms with which Hugo characterizes