Les Misérables (Part I, Book Three, Chapter 9)

This post contains a minor spoiler.

The day after I posted about finding a reference to 1 Corinthians 13 in Les Misérables, I found an-other important Biblical reference.

Part I, Book Three is about Fantine, her three friends, and their lovers, rather than Jean Valjean.  Chapter 2 starts with "In this year, 1817, four young Parisians played 'a good joke.'"  The joke itself doesn't come until chapter 9.  Throughout Book Three, these four students have been telling their lovers that they have a surprise for them.  In chapter 9, after eating at a restaurant, they get up (ostensibly to go and get the surprise) and just leave the girls.  After a hour, the waiter gives them a letter (on which is written "THIS IS THE SURPRISE") that the students left for them.  It starts:

Oh, our lovers!
     Know that we have parents.  Parents - you scarcely know the meaning of the word, they are what are called fathers and mothers in the civil code, simple but honest.  Now these parents bemoan us, these old men claim us, these good men and women call us prodigal sons, desire our return and offer to kill for us the fatted calf.  We obey them, being virtuous.

The students want to portray themselves as honorable men who do what their parents want, and - in doing so - they compare themselves to (or say that their parents compare them to) the prodigal son.  But, instead, their comparison illustrates their complete ignorance of the prodigal son.

In the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), a son asks his father for his share of the inheritance, goes off travelling, and "squander[s] his property in reckless living" (15:13).  A famine comes, leaving him even more desperate, so he gets a job feeding pigs (and finds himself envying even their food).  Then he realizes that his father's servants are treated better, so he goes back to his father's house, intending only to ask to be a servant and say "I am no longer worthy to be called your son" (15:19).  But, instead, his father welcomes him joyfully and commands his servants to "bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet.  And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate.  For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found" (15:22-23).

The key difference between the actual prodigal son and the four students is that the prodigal son demonstrates penitence ("I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you'" [15:18]) where the students pride themselves because they think themselves "virtuous."

There's also a difference in the incentive to return home.  The prodigal son returns merely so that he can find work and lodging, but the students' letter explains that the fatted calf is a reward that the parents are offering in exchange for their sons' homecoming.  The prodigal son wasn't expecting a feast upon his return, but the students seem almost weary of the prospect, as if it's an ordeal they have to go through.  If anything, they're like the prodigal son at the beginning of the parable, when he wants his share of the inheritance and is interested in "reckless living."

What struck me about the prodigal son comparison is its irony.  The students want to appear as if they're good sons and do what their parents want, but the actual prodigal son attained a much better understanding of his filial relationship.

Les Misérables (Part I, Book Two, Chapter 13)

About a month ago, I started re-reading Les Misérables (this is the second time I've read it).  I recently finished Book Two, and at the very end (in Chapter 13 - "Petit Gervais"), I think I found a reference to 1 Corinthians 13.

The narrator writes that Jean Valjean "beheld himself then, so to speak, face to face, and at the same time, through that hallucination, he saw, at a mysterious distance, a sort of light which he took at first to be a torch.  Examining more attentively this light which dawned upon his conscience, he recognised that it had a human form, and that this torch was the bishop."

The "face to face" part in particular is what reminded me of 1 Corinthians 13:12:  "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known."  The study notes in my Bible gloss this passage, explaining that it's talking about the personal knowledge of God that the believer will have, but in Les Misérables, it seems to apply more to Jean Valjean's self-examination and his later certainty in what he has to do.  Shortly before his seeing himself face to face, the narrator asks:

Did a voice whisper in his ear that he had just passed through the decisive hour of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him, that if, thereafter, he should not be the best of men, he would be the worst, that he must now, so to speak, mount higher than the bishop, or fall lower that the galley slave; that, if he would become good, he must become an angel; that, if he would remain wicked, he must become a monster?

These two passages are linked by the expression "so to speak."*  Of the two options presented, Valjean chooses to "mount higher than the bishop."  The chapter (and Book Two) ends with him "in the attitude of prayer, kneeling upon the pavement in the shadow, before the door of Monseigneur Bienvenu."

That higher path is characterized by the bishop bearing illumination, which is a similar description to what 1 Corinthians 13:12 has.  Things are no longer seen dimly, but with illumination ("The light grew brighter and brighter in [Valjean's] mind...").  The preceding verse seems to have some relation to Valjean's choice too:  "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I gave up childish ways" (1 Corinthians 13:11).  Valjean also seems to acquire a new perspective (he now "know[s] fully"):

His past life, his first offence, his long expiation, his brutal exterior, his hardened interior, his release made glad by so many schemes of vengeance, what had happened to him at the bishop's, his last action, this theft of forty sous from a child, a crime meaner and the more monstrous that it came after the bishop's pardon, all this returned and appeared to him, clearly, but in a light that he had never seen before.  He beheld his life, and it seemed to him horrible; his soul, and it seemed to him frightful.

At the end of the previous chapter (chapter 12 - "The Bishop at Work"), the bishop tells Jean Valjean that "It is your soul that I am buying for you.  I am withdrawing it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I am giving it to God!"  This dedication to God is an important part of the book, so it's fitting that Hugo's narrator uses Biblical descriptions like these from 1 Corinthians 13 to describe Valjean.

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*Usually, I'd be hesitant to assert something about a translated work based on a particular phrase, but I checked an-other translation I have, and it too uses "so to speak" in both passages.