#and Valjean is just. an unbearably sad beast always

[secretmellowblog]

Another parallel between Valjean and Javert is that they’re eerily silent when captured or threatened.

Jean Valjean being captured by Patron-Minette:

The silence preserved by the prisoner, that precaution which had been carried to the point of forgetting all anxiety for his own life, that resistance opposed to the first impulse of nature, which is to utter a cry….

Javert being captured by Les Amis:

Javert had not uttered a single cry.

The other police spy who’s captured at the barricade— Le Cabuc— is not like Javert, in that he behaves like a normal person. He cries out in pain and anger and fear; he begs for mercy; he prays. But Javert is inhumanly tranquil, and reacts to his death with indifference.

Jean Valjean, when captured by Patron-Minette, is similar. He acts eerily “calm,” and inhumanly “silent.” Of course in Valjean’s case, he has to be silent, because he’s aware that the police would only hurt him if they arrived; his politeness is also a survival strategy. Knowing how to behave in a superficially polite solicitous way to avoid punishment from authority is clearly something he’s had to learn to survive prison.

This parallel feels like another way the trauma of prison has affected both of Valjean and Javert’s lives. Javert spent time in prison as a child, Valjean spent nineteen years serving his sentence— and both of them have now learned to silence “the first impulse of nature” to cry for help. They know instinctively how to behave in situations where they are trapped in another person’s power and have no autonomy. They are able to remain calm and tranquil and even “polite” even when they’re threatened with death.

[secretmellowblog]

The moments where other criminals try (and fail) to threaten Jean Valjean are fascinating, because we get a glimpse of how deeply Valjean was altered by prison— how much nineteen years of prolonged torture really has made him into a “formidable” “dangerous” criminal.

If he weren’t a shy gentle compassionate person who just wants to be left alone in peace with his daughter, he could easily be the most deadly man in Paris. He’s strong, he’s cunning, he has decades of knowledge about how to evade police and a wealth of hidden tools at his disposal, he’s highly skilled at deception, he can fend off gangs of men at once even while unarmed and has perfect aim with a gun; he could do so much harm if he decided to, but he doesn’t.

I love how Jean Valjean seems to view Patron-minette’s affiliates as… amateurs? They’re bad criminals in that they’re bad at being criminals. When Montparnasse attempts to rob him, and when Patron Minette/Thenardier ambush him, Jean Valjean speaks to them with lofty pity and kinda implies he thinks they do not really understand how to commit crimes. He explains the galleys to Montparnasse like he’s lecturing a silly misbehaving child.

When he burns himself with the hot chisel, the implication is: “I spent nineteen years in a prison where I was beaten and tortured every day, and you’re naive and inexperienced enough to think you can hurt me with a single scrap of metal you’ve heated up in a fireplace. You poor things. Don’t be afraid of me because I’m certainly not afraid of you <3”.

Compared to Jean Valjean, Patron-minette and their affiliates really are kinda just …play-acting. I think that’s part of why they get all those comparisons to theater and Vaudeville. Thenardier is a failed innkeeper puffing himself up as the most dangerous and clever criminal mastermind in Paris. But Jean Valjean actually has decades of experience living in “the criminal underworld” of the galleys, and as a result he has more deeply traumatizing knowledge and experience than Thenardier can even begin to imagine. Thenardier fails at torturing Valjean because Thenardier does not have the experience to even start to imagine the torture Valjean has already survived. As I mentioned before, Valjean has all the skills and knowledge that Thenardier wants to have, but doesn’t. So it’s like….Jean Valjean is in many ways the kind of “successful expert criminal” that Thenardier is only pretending to be.