Touched by this sight, she asks the woman to take care of her daughter while she works. Stopping at Montfermeil on the way to the factory town of M.-sur-M., she sees a woman, Madame Thenardier, watching her two children, Eponine and Azelma, play outside. After she gives birth to her child, Cosette, she knows that she must take desperate measures in order to care for her without revealing the socially stigmatizing fact of Cosette’s illegitimacy. At the end of their summer together, Tholomyes and his friends leave a note for the girls saying that they’ve been summoned back home and must return to reality. Fantine, however, is sincere in her love for him, and unable to see through his act. She’s fallen in with a group of youths, paired off between men and women, and led by Felix Tholomyes, a jovial young provincial man who’s in Paris to study but mainly to have a good time. The novel’s focus moves to Paris, where a young, poor, and innocent woman named Fantine has arrived from the provinces to gain a living for herself. Suddenly, he’s stricken by what he’s just done-a reflexive act based in his own past-and he races around the area, attempting without success to find Gervais. As he’s struggling with the new idea of mercy, Valjean comes across a small Savoyard boy named Gervais, and steals the young boy’s money from him. He heads away from town, struggling to understand how and why the Bishop didn’t obey the laws of judgment and revenge that seem, to Valjean, to define society. Valjean is absolutely overwhelmed by this act. The next day, he’s brought back by the police, but the Bishop claims that he had given Valjean these things as a gift, so he should be set free. That night, however, Valjean wakes up and, after a brief battle with his conscience, tucks the Bishop’s silverware and ornate candlesticks under his arm and runs away. He does so, and the Bishop treats him kindly and cordially. Finally, a woman in the street tells the despairing Valjean to knock at the Bishop’s door.

Word gets around that this man is Jean Valjean, a convict recently released from the galleys-his yellow passport, a requirement for ex-convicts, betrays him-and everyone refuses to host him. One day, a shady, ominous-looking figure arrives in town, looking for a meal and a bed. The Bishop is not necessarily a brilliant theologian but rather shows his character through his good works. Les Misérables opens not with the protagonist, Jean Valjean, but in an anonymous French town of D-, where a Bishop known as “Welcome” or “Bienvenu” is astonishing the inhabitants with his modest ways, his commitment to the poor, and his unyielding acts of forgiveness.

Les miserables french edition