Seven Labels, One Man
Jean Valjean is given seven names and numbers in Les Miserables, and the stone over his grave carries none of them.
Fair warning: I spoil the whole novel, ending included. It is a giant book in five volumes, called Fantine, Cosette, Marius, Saint Denis and Jean Valjean, so one thread is the easiest way through. The thread is what other people call this man. By the end you will know the whole plot and which label, if any, is the real one.
We read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number one hundred thirty-five, in Isabel Hapgood’s translation. Here are the seven, in order. His own name. Number twenty-four thousand, six hundred and one. Number nine thousand, four hundred and thirty. Monsieur Madeleine. Ultime Fauchelevent. Urbain Fabre. And Monsieur Leblanc, a name he never chose.
Label One: A Loaf of Bread
Start with the first label. Hugo’s preface, dated eighteen sixty-two, says that as long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books like this cannot fail to be of use. Then the story proves it with one man. Jean Valjean is a tree pruner at Faverolles, and his father’s name may be a nickname, a squashed version of the words, here’s Jean. His sister is a widow with seven children, the winter is hard, and there is no bread.
In seventeen ninety-five he smashes a baker’s window and takes a loaf. The sentence is five years. At Toulon the book takes his name away: he is no longer even Jean Valjean, he is number twenty-four thousand, six hundred and one.
Now do the arithmetic with me. Five years for the loaf. Three more for one escape, five for another, three for a third and three for a fourth. Five, three, five, three, three: nineteen years. He goes in during seventeen ninety-six, sobbing, and walks out in October, eighteen fifteen, impassive, with one hundred and nine francs and fifteen sous, and a yellow passport that makes every door close. A distillery at Grasse promises him thirty sous a day and hands him fifteen.
One door opens. Bishop Myriel, whom the town calls Monseigneur Welcome, gives him dinner and a bed. At night Valjean takes six sets of silver and runs. The police drag him back, and the bishop says he gave them, and adds, you forgot the candlesticks. Then comes the line the book is built on: Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you.
Label Two: Monsieur Madeleine
Label two is a mask. Valjean reaches the town the book calls M sur M, whose trade is imitation jet and black glass trinkets. He improves the business, makes the town rich, puts his fortune with the banker Laffitte, and becomes Monsieur Madeleine, the mayor. His one rule at the factory is, be an honest man, be an honest woman, and he sets up an infirmary in his own house for the sick. The book says he is about fifty, preoccupied, and good, and that is all anyone can say about him.
Meanwhile Fantine has left her little daughter Cosette with an innkeeper couple, the Thenardiers, and keeps sending money. She works in Madeleine’s factory until she is dismissed. To pay what the Thenardiers demand, she sells her golden hair for ten francs, then her two front teeth, and then herself.
One night a gentleman named Bamatabois torments her in the snow, she strikes him, and the police inspector Javert wants her jailed. Madeleine stops it. Then the plot closes in. A man named Champmathieu is arrested and believed to be Jean Valjean, and he will be sent to the galleys for life.
Madeleine fights with himself for a whole night. He drives to the court at Arras and says, I am Jean Valjean. He returns to Fantine, but Javert arrives to arrest him, and Fantine dies in that room. Label two is gone.
Label Three: Number Nine Thousand Four Hundred and Thirty
Valjean is back at Toulon, and the galleys give him a new number: nine thousand, four hundred and thirty. Volume two opens with a long stretch on the battle of Waterloo, and it matters later. A prowler among the dead, a sergeant named Thenardier, drags a wounded officer out of the field. The officer says, my name is Pontmercy, and promises to remember.
At Toulon, Valjean goes to help a sailor on the ship Orion and falls into the sea. The newspaper of the seventeenth of November, eighteen twenty-three, reports that a convict, number nine thousand, four hundred and thirty, drowned. He did not.
At Christmas that year he finds Cosette at Montfermeil, sent out into the dark with a bucket bigger than she is, and buys her away from the Thenardiers for fifteen hundred francs. Javert gets on the scent in Paris, and Valjean climbs a convent wall with the child.
Label Four: Ultime Fauchelevent
Inside the convent garden is Father Fauchelevent, the old man whom Madeleine once lifted from under a fallen cart. Fauchelevent says Valjean is his brother, and gives him the name Ultime Fauchelevent. Valjean is carried out in a coffin, buried and dug up, and becomes the convent gardener, while Cosette grows up as a boarder.
That is label four, and the book keeps it for years. When Cosette leaves the convent they live in Paris, and Valjean is simply Monsieur Fauchelevent, a quiet man with a little money.
Labels Five and Six: Fabre and Leblanc
Volume three belongs to Marius Pontmercy, the son of that officer from Waterloo, raised by his grandfather Gillenormand. Marius notices an old man with white hair and a young girl in the Luxembourg garden. The students name them, Monsieur Leblanc for his hair, and Mademoiselle Lanoire for her gown. That is label six: a name he never chose, and never knew he wore.
Marius’s poor neighbors, the Jondrettes, are Thenardiers in disguise. They invite the kind old man to their garret to ambush him. Asked his name, he answers, Urbain Fabre. That is label five: a name he gives to thieves.
Then Jondrette shouts, my name is Thenardier. Marius, who owes that name his father’s life, cannot fire the signal shot. Javert bursts in and arrests the gang, and when he looks for the prisoner, Monsieur Leblanc, Monsieur Urbain Fabre, has gone through the window.
The Barricade
Volume four follows the young men of the barricade in June, eighteen thirty-two, and Marius goes there in despair over losing Cosette. Eponine dies there in men’s clothes. Little Gavroche goes out under fire, singing, until a second bullet stops him.
Valjean arrives to find Marius. The insurgents have caught Javert as a spy, and Valjean takes the prisoner to a back lane, unties him, and says, be off with you. He fires his pistol into the air. Javert, who has called him thou all his life, says, kill me rather, and does not use thou.
When the barricade falls Marius is shot, and Valjean carries him through the sewers. At an iron grating stands Thenardier with a key, and he lets them out. Outside waits Javert, who drives them to the grandfather’s door. Then Javert writes a note for the administration, walks to the Seine at the Place du Chatelet, takes off his hat, and falls into the river. That is the small hours of the seventh of June.
The Morning After the Wedding
Marius recovers in his grandfather’s house and marries Cosette. Valjean tells the family that Cosette has six hundred thousand francs, and he comes to the wedding with his right arm in a sling, so that he need not sign the register as Fauchelevent. The next day, the seventeenth of February, he visits Marius, unrolls the bandage, shows a hand with nothing wrong, and says, I am an ex-convict. He tells him he was nineteen years in the galleys, and that the six hundred thousand francs are a deposit, not a theft. Marius, horrified, lets the old man drift out of their lives.
Then Thenardier turns up, disguised, with two old newspapers and a plan to sell Valjean as a thief and a murderer. The papers prove the opposite. They show that Madeleine and Valjean were the same man, and that Javert killed himself after an insurgent spared him. Marius understands who carried him through the sewer.
The Stone With No Name
Marius, ashamed, runs with Cosette to Valjean’s rooms. He is dying, with the two silver candlesticks lit on the chimney piece. He speaks of the money he made, even explaining the trade: a gross of buckles cost ten francs and sold for sixty, so the six hundred thousand is honest money. He speaks of the first time he touched Cosette’s cold hand at Montfermeil, and of her mother, Fantine. He tells Cosette to kneel whenever she says that name. He leaves Cosette the candlesticks, and he says the five hundred franc bill in the chest of drawers is for the poor. His last wish is plain: a stone, and no name on it.
He dies with a hand on each of their heads. The last chapter shows a plain stone in Pere Lachaise, cut only to be long enough and narrow enough to cover a man, in a corner where the grass is high and few people walk. No name is to be read there. Only four lines in pencil, nearly washed away, that begin: he sleeps.
So here is the count. Seven labels, and in the end none. Which label is the real Jean Valjean? Tell me in the comments. If this saved you a few hundred pages, subscribe, and tap like for the next classic.
