Hugo has an instinct for innocence; with sexually mature women characters he is sometimes uneasy as a writer, but with the girl-woman his touch is unerring. Confronted by the elder Jondrette girl, with her torn bodice, her harsh voice, and her abominable argot, he looks beyond the surface and shows us hunger, grief, modesty, shame, courage, a longing for affection and even for respectability. Through her and her sister, he gives us a vivid illustration of his thesis that "le misère de l'enfant" is the most appalling of all.
However, this is not his only purpose in introducing them. Where his plot is concerned, he is taking up again, on a deeper, more human level, the Cinderella theme treated at the beginning of Book II. These two creatures in rags were once the spoiled darlings, Eponine and Azelma; the "ugly sisters" have become ugly indeed, and when Cosette appears before her erstwhile tormentors in silk cloak and velvet hat, she takes a crushing revenge, though she is quite unaware of it The irony of their meeting is mingled with tragedy: Eponine and Azelma were, at Montfermeil, and are still, only children and no more deserve their present fate than Cosette deserved her ill-treatment at the inn. All three have been equally victims of Thénardier.
Thénardier is the most enigmatic of the characters in Les Misérables, and during most of Book VIII he has us, like Marius, standing on tiptoe with an eye to the peephole to see what he will do next.
"Evil" is not an exact adjective for Thénardier, nor is "criminal," though he is both. "Perverse" describes him more precisely; he is incurably perverse, and his perversity ruins his own life as well as that of others. He is not without intelligence and education, and when we saw him last he was proprietor of his own inn, with 1,550 francs of debts, of which Jean Valjean had just relieved him by buying Cosette. There was no reason why he could not have led a reasonably prosperous life. However, even then, far from being content with his luck, he followed Jean Valjean to extort more funds. As Jondrette, he behaves in exactly the same way: In the hope of one extra franc of charity, he destroys two francs' worth of chair, window, and fire, not to speak of injuring Azelma, and when he is assured of regular help from Valjean-Leblanc, he throws it away in the vain hope of wringing his whole fortune from the ex-convict. Never satisfied with what he has, each failure leaves him poorer and more embittered.
The most dangerous thing about him, however, is the power of his fantasy to obscure the truth. When he tells Valjean in Part Two how fond he is of Cosette, how much he will miss her, we have to think twice to reestablish the real facts; when he rails against society in the garret, he almost convinces us that it is the world and not himself who is responsible for all his troubles. In his presence, even Jean Valjean's image becomes distorted, and from behind the facade of the philanthropist emerges again the figure of the convict, complete with prison ruses, secret escape coin, and superhuman strength. As for Marius, Thénardier's old lie on the field of Waterloo has him so confused he does not know whether or how to come to Jean Valjean's aid. This, however, is the least of Marius' unwitting sins against Cosette's foster-father; by notifying the police, he has put Javert back on Jean Valjean's track again.
The "recognition scene," in which one character turns out to be other than he appears, has been a common device for achieving dramatic surprise since the Greeks; with the superb nonchalance of a great writer, Hugo tops off Part Three with a quintuple recognition scene. We have, of course, suspected for a long time that the Jondrettes are really the Thénardiers, but the confirmation is satisfying; and there is even some genuine surprise in our realization that Gavroche is the baby we heard wailing, neglected, at the inn when Jean Valjean came to find Cosette.
Les Misérables is, like a drama, divided into five sections, and its inner structure parallels that of a drama as well. The first act is a highly suspenseful exposition; the second one, unfortunately, drags; the fourth and fifth are reserved for climax and denouement. At the end of the third act, most dramatists like to provide a sub-climax, only slightly less powerful than that at the end of the fourth. This is the pattern of most of Shakespeare's tragedies, and it is the pattern Hugo follows here, bringing together, at almost exactly the midpoint of the book, all his key characters in a dramatic confrontation. The confrontation is, however, inconclusive for all of them, and we are left in the expectation of a more decisive encounter later on.
