The Les Misérables Reading Companion

The most significant of those changes is my pet-peeve, which you can probably guess by now: Javert here is not obsessed with Jean Valjean, and in fact shows no evidence of thinking he’s involved in any of this in any way!!

The 2019 BBC adaptation came closer, but in a context that deeply changed many of the characters in ways that (for me) canceled out any enjoyment of the faithfully-adapted action.

And it’s not that it’s NEVER been done, but this is all usually shortened in one way or another, such that the final scene doesn’t make sense as written. In the musical, it’s almost unrecognizable.

How do they resist this action scene? Wouldn’t Thénardier firing at Javert be great in a trailer? The rough-looking guys with scary weapons, Jean Valjean burning his own arm…. It’s all made for the movies.

Now, let’s talk about adaptations again…. I wish I could see this section on film as Hugo wrote it, including the feeling of magic, and that’s hard to come by, which boggles the mind.

There’s just one person more magical than Javert here, and it is, of course, Jean Valjean, who seems to be able to disappear.

And Thénardier’s gunshot and his wife’s paving stone miss him, seemingly because he wills them to.

He gets the armed bandits to give up without even drawing a weapon, just by *saying* he has them outnumbered. (Remember that move for later, btw.)

Javert is almost magical in this scene.

Reading Les Misérables in 2025, a chapter a day: August 9, Part III, Book 8, Chapter 21, “On devrait toujours commencer par arrêter les victimes” 👇

And of course, just like when he tried to follow them, he doesn’t know who he’s dealing with when it comes to Jean Valjean. Or, he didn’t. He may be starting to get it now!

He also doesn’t know the circumstances of “M. Leblanc’s” adoption of “Ursule.”

He doesn’t know that Thénardier’s rescue of his father was a only side effect of his intent, which was theft, and he doesn’t know about all of the Thénardiers’ other horrific abuses.

But of course, it’s the exact combination of things he knows – Thénardier’s plan, and his father’s final wish – and things he doesn’t know, that makes this a dilemma at all.

But it also echoes the Champmathieu affair, in that there is no way out of it without doing harm that he would prefer not to do.

Meanwhile, Marius’s dilemma is a classic one in literature, between protection of his beloved and loyalty to his father.

Marius sees it as “hideous like evil and poignant like truth” – a striking phrase, to say the least.

He’s right, of course, but he and his accomplices, while they are also poor, are being called criminals because they’re doing crime!

He also muddies the waters that are in fact complicated in the context of this book, when he claims that people get called criminals just because they’re poor.

The appropriate place for blame doesn’t matter; he’s so enraged about these slights that the person in front of him is as good a place as any to focus his revenge.

In Thénardier’s long rant, the self-centeredness of his grudge stands out. It’s only about what HE lost, what HE could have had, what HE thinks he deserves.

There’s a lot going on in this looonnngg chapter, and I’ll direct you to the podcast episode 32 as well, but just a few thoughts here….

And there is something silly about the idea of spoilers for a 160-year-old book as ubiquitous as this one. But I figure the least I could do is not spoil this big reveal within my own chapter-a-day premise.

Of COURSE a lot of you knew who Jondrette was all along, and we were pretty clear on M. Leblanc in the Luxembourg gardens.

Were you shocked, SHOCKED, to discover who Jondrette and M. Leblanc were? 😱😂

Reading Les Misérables in 2025, a chapter a day: August 8, Part III, Book 8, Chapter 20, “Le guet-apens” 👇

Not a full idea, though. The last line here leaves us on a cliffhanger before tomorrow’s (LONG) chapter. Who are the Jondrettes going to turn out to be??

Only now, we’ve got a pretty good idea of why they’re there.

I think of the dream Jean Valjean had the night of the Champmathieu affair, with men standing silently in shadowy corners and behind doorways.

The way Patron-Minette are described here is nightmarish. In the shadows, they seem like monsters, not men.