Here we have a chapter that serves the sole purpose of catching us up on the actions and intentions of Jean Valjean from the moment of his escape from the ship Orion until he had successfully retrieved the child Cosette and set off with her into the next phase of their lives.
Hugo tells us this important little nugget about Valjean:
His first act on reaching Paris had been to buy a complete set of mourning for an eight year old girl.
While this may seem like a small point, I think it’s one worth fixing our attention on. This was not the second, or third, or fourth thing that Valjean did. It was the first. Why does that matter, you may ask? In my mind it matters because it speaks of Valjean’s intent and his sense of purpose. It also ondicates what had been on Valjean’s mind during his imprisonment.
He was not thinking about himself. He was not thinking about his freedom as a thing to be grasped for his own use. He was thinking about the fate of Cosette and the fact that in hsi mind, the death of Fantine and the fate of the little girl were something he was responsible for. Hugo put us inside the mind of Valjean for his agonizing decision around telling the truth about who he was, and the main thing he feared was the way that truth might negatively impact Fantine and Cosette. Now, after making his escape, we see that orientation has not changed. He can do nothing to bring Fantine back, but the act of buying the clothes for mourning for Cosette shows that it is both the girl and her mother that he is acting on behalf of. I think we can even go as far as asserting that they were the reason he made the escape in the first place. Valjean could not rest until he knew that Cosette was safe.
This is something that Hugo does a great job of highlighting from several angles without spelling out directly. One of my favorite angles used is the way that Valjean’s selfless and gnetle bearing make Cosette feel completely safe and at ease with him. It might stretch the bounds of believability, but it is a beautiful framing device from a literary perspective. Cosette’s response to Valjean is used to illuminate the very things that make Valjean who he is.
With that thought in mind I’ll leave you with this image of Cosette that Hugo uses to close out this chapter & book of the larger “Cosette” portion of his novel:
It had been a strange day for Cosette, filled with extraordinary happenings. They had sat under hedges eating bread and cheese bought at remote inns, they had traveled by different conveyances but had also walked a good deal of the way. She had not complained, but she was very tired and Jean Valjean felt her hand tug more heavily at his as they walked. So he picked her up, and set her on his back, and Cosette, without letting go of Catherine, hid her head on his shoulder and slept.
Safe in the care of Valjean with a doll of her own, the child sleeps.