ABSTRACT
The entirety of the chapter that recounts Valjean’s entrance in Digne in “The Night After a Day’s Walk” [“Le soir d’un jour de marche”; I.2.i] brings into sharp relief the hostility of the social and natural worlds in which the former convict finds himself-man and nature in seeming total collusion to hinder his effort to satisfy the most rudimentary of physical survival needs: food, sleep, and shelter. But if nourishment is one among several demands in equal and terrible competition in this moment, the state that defines its absence-hunger-dominates Les Misérables from beginning to end. It is hunger, we soon learn, that provoked Valjean’s descent-a loaf of bread, stolen 19 years earlier, to feed his sister’s family of seven children, “a sad bunch, enveloped by a poverty that was slowly squeezing them dry” [“un triste groupe que la misère enveloppa et étreignit peu à peu”; 72/69]. And if the circumstances of the theft are particular to Valjean and his (back)story-“One winter was particularly rough. Jean had no work. The family
had no bread. No bread. Literally. Seven children!” [“Il arriva qu’un hiver fut rude. Jean n’eut pas d’ouvrage. La famille n’eut pas de pain. Pas de pain. A la lettre. Sept enfants”; 72/69]—it is their unexceptional quality that is underscored through the narrator’s laconic recounting of them.
