The current situation
In this chapter Madeleine finds himself in an uncomfortable conversation with Fantine about the fate of Cosette. The dual tensions of Madeliene’s concerns around getting Cosette back to Montreuil-sur-mer before Fantine dies and his uncertainty about what will happen and when it will happen on the heels of his pronouncement that he is Jean Valjean (which nobody currently present knows about) are further complicated for the reader: we know that there is a third point of tension around Cosette and the fact that none of these people understand just how bad her situation with the Thenardiers really is.
We see Madeleine, recently pushed to reveal his deepest secret now struggling to be honest with Fantine. Why is that happening? If we remember, his biggest fear about being honest about his identity was that it would result in devastation and ultimate destruction for Fantine and Cosette. Here we see him outwardly calm but inwardly in a frenetic state where he is trying to do everything he can to protect Fantine and Cosette and bring them to safety before the other shoe drops.
Fantine is showing signs of recovery but all of that recovery is built upon a house of cards. She firmly believes that Cosette is healthy and no longer in the care of the Thenardiers. In reality Cosette is not being cared for at all. She has been used to filch money from her desperate mother and is in a terribly precarious situation. Though Madeleine doesn’t know the full reality of this he does know that Cosette is not in Montreiul-sur-mer and that her condition is unknown. He also knows that if he is honest in this moment he risks a full relapse and perhaps even the death of Fantine.
A braid of tensions with a shared root
It is an incredibly messy braid of tensions that we find ourselves caught in here as the reader. It raises questions around everything we have seen unfold, and there are no easy answers around what is “right” in the current context. Madeleine has done the right thing by preventing the false accusation of Champmathieu to land and result in that man’s imprisonment and destruction. Madeleine was also right to forsake his past life and move forward on a path of love and generosity. What Madeliene did not account for that has bitten him terribly is his buried identity come back in full force to reassert itself. Jean Valjean is no longer a historical personality. He has been forcefully reinserted into the present.
This tangled web of lives all destroyed in varying degrees by a system that was engineered to help the powerful and keep the oppressed down is now center stage and spotlighted for the reader.
- Madeleine (back when he was Jean Valjean) was reduced to a shell of a man after years in prison for trying to feed his sister’s starving family.
- Champmathieu was brought before the law because he took a fallen branch from an apple tree, and because of his hard and difficult life at the hands of the system he was mistaken for Jean Valjean and faced a potential life sentence.
- Fantine was born into a position where she had no family to lean on and found herself struggling to survive. After being abandoned as a pregnant woman by someone of the upper class (the fuck boi Tholomyes) she is reduced to nothing, forced to abandon her child, and ends up selling herself just to survive.
- Cosette, born to a single mother (Fantine) who could not provide for her, is used and abused by the very people who are supposed to be keeping her safe. She knows only darkness. We can only imagine that her childhood with the Thenardiers has been awful.
- Javert. Let us not forget Javert, who finds himself growing up on the outside of a system he believes he can never reenter. He makes what he believes to be a valiant decision: he will be a protector of the system and the “good” people inside of it by seeking to prosecute and exterminate those on the outside who would do the system or those benefited by it harm.
Responding to the system
Each one of these individuals has been shaped and formed by a system that was designed to extract value from them while simultaneously discarding them as objects with no value. Extractive and dehumanizing, the system is the true villain at this current stage in the novel. The questions we face in the immediate moment all spin out from this reality. These are not people who find themselves in a world and system that is actively cultivating growth, fruit and a thriving life. This is a system and world that is actively choking the life out of them, and they are all scrambling for survival in the midst of it.
Look at Javert: he has asserted a code for himself, a system of control that allows him to theoretically rise above the fray, but in doing so he has become a tool of the system. Will he recognize that what he does in the name of law, order, and the perceived “good” of “society” and it’s system is in fact destructive?
Look at Madeliene: he has chosen a code as well - a code of love and generosity on one side and of profound secrecy about his past on the other. Having seen these two halves collide aggressively he has chosen to reveal his secrets and let love and generosity win, even if it costs him everything. Will it cost Fantine and Cosette everything as well?