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Les Miserables: Fantine

Employed in his factory was Fantine, a girl who had been deserted in Paris by an unworthy lover. She had left her baby, Cosette, with a crafty and hideous pair named Thenadier. When it was learned that she had an illegitimate child, she was discharged without the knowledge of M. Madeleine, the benevolent manufacturer, and was reduced to such poverty that she could not pay the Thenadiers, who took Cosette's clothes for their own girls and wrote Fantine for more. The girl sold her beautiful blond hair; then they informed her that Cosette was ill, which was a lie, and demanded one hundred francs. To obtain this she sold her front teeth to a traveling dentist; then she went on the town, and when a dissolute dandy, to annoy her, put snow down her back, she scratched his face and was arrested by Javert, inspector of police, a brutal and over-officious tyrant, who had been attached to the galleys when Jean Valjean was there and suspected the mayor of M-- of being the former convict. The mayor freed Fantine. She supposed he was the cause of her misfortunes and spat in his face. He took the affront meekly and investigated her complaint. She was ill of consumption and he provided for her and promised to look out for her child.

About the same time the police arrested another man who three former convicts swore was the missing Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean's conscience would not allow an innocent person to be punished in his place. Surmounting extraordinary difficulties, he went to Arras, where the trial took place, and just as the judge was condemning the wrong man, he confessed he was the missing convict that had robbed the bishop and the hurdy-gurdy boy.

The judge let him go; but Javert was implacable and apprehended him at Fantine's death-bed. He was lodged in jail, but, having enormous strength, he broke out and returned to his house to secure his great fortune. He had time to hide his money in the haunted forest of Montfermeil, but was captured once more and sent to the galleys for life.

Nine months later at Toulon he broke his chain and saved the life of a sailor who was hanging head down from the topmast of a ship, but he himself either fell or jumped off from the spar and was reported drowned. The battle of Waterloo had taken place and the Thenadiers, who had been guilty of robbing the dead on the fatal field, kept a wretched inn at Montfermeil. They treated Cosette, now eight years old, with great cruelty. Christmas, 1823, was the climax of her wretchedness; she was sent after dark to fetch water from a spring in the dreadful forest. A poorly dressed stranger, passing, carried her heavy bucket. At the tavern he protected her from her mistress's threatened punishment, and the next morning he paid Thenadier one thousand five hundred francs and took Cosette to Paris, where he occupied a tumble-down habitation just outside of the city, the gloomiest place in all the gloomy boulevard. By day ugly, at twilight lugubrious, and at night sinister. He thought himself secure there, but his benevolence made him conspicuous, and the old caretaker, being full of envy and uncharitableness, grew suspicious of her lodger. One day he saw Javert. He took Cosette and again fled. But Javert was on his track. Only by unexampled adroitness and by his colossal strength did he escape by climbing over a high wall. He found himself in the garden of the convent of the Petit Picpus, where worked Pere Fauchelevent, whose life M. Madeleine had saved when he was mayor of M--. The gardener, out of gratitude, got him appointed his assistant by representing him to be his brother. Cosette was taken into the convent school. She grew up into a charming girl; beauty suddenly came to her like the blossoms to a cherry-tree in April, and Jean Valjean, happy in loving her as his daughter, as his granddaughter, as the only woman he had ever loved, guarded her as a sacred treasure. He had good reason to be wary, for the Thenadiers had come to Paris and joined a band of robbers, and Javert never forgot. He had several desperate encounters with them. On the one side outlaws; on the other undeviating law personified. He took part in the abortive revolution of 1830 and saved Javert's life, at last winning the admiration of that implacable and fatally honorable man.

But there was one danger from which he could not protect Cosette: the most beautiful thing in the world, which nevertheless seemed to him his worst enemy--love.