Skillfully, Hugo here begins to draw all his characters together toward the climax of the revolution. Not all will be on the same side: Javert, for instance, will be there as a police officer, and Valjean as an angel of mercy; and even among the revolutionaries motivations will differ widely. Marius will fling himself into it because he has lost the only thing in life he cares about; M. Mabeuf because he simply cannot afford to go on living; and even among the Friends of the A.B.C., the emotions are not entirely political. This only adds to the realism of the events, however, and to the credibility of their actions.
In French, a climax is known as a noeud, or knot, and the denouement is the untying of that knot. Hugo in the last two parts has given us an excellent example of the aptness of the term. At the beginning of Part Three, the lives of most of the characters of Les Misérables were single threads scattered all over Paris and its nearby villages. Thénardier with his colonel at Waterloo, Cosette and Marius, Enjolras and Gavroche—all appeared to have nothing whatever to do with one another. Gradually Hugo has tied these threads together, knotting Marius and Cosette together by Eponine, Valjean and Javert by Thénardier, Gavroche and M. Gillenormand through the little lost boys. Now he throws a final loop about them and, like the fine dramatist he is, draws them all gently toward a common center.
