One by one, Hugo untangles his complications and brings them to a tidy conclusion. Jean Valjean is safe, Marius is healthy, M. Gillenormand and his grandson become completely reconciled, Cosette and Marius are united. Only one problem remains: the antipathy between Jean Valjean and Marius. And it is a genuine problem. Marius is young and callow, and fails to appreciate Valjean at his real value, it is true; but he also has extremely good reasons to mistrust him. It is hard to feel comfortable with your father-in-law when you have met him in a den of thieves and heard him shoot a policeman.
Valjean is fully aware of this problem, but he cannot help Marius. To reveal that he is the young man's rescuer would be to burden him with an uncomfortable debt of gratitude, and the explanations it would entail would saddle Cosette, too, with the details of a dark past from which he has done his best to shield her. The only solution is for him to vanish, but he cannot bring himself to do it. His struggle, however, is qualitatively unlike any he has undergone before. At Arras, at the barricades, the good in him struggled with the evil; now he undergoes a conflict between two goods, his human love for Cosette and the spiritual nobler love that demands he surrender his earthly joys for her ultimate salvation and his own. Neither choice can be a wrong one.
