So it’s the last week of the year, and as per custom I’m listening to the complete symphonic Les Miz soundtrack bit by bit. Doing so has brought the following quandary to mind:
It’s 1820-something-or-other, and you’re the owner of a prosperous factory in a French village, of which you are also mayor. Your neighbors know you as Madeleine, but that is not your real name; in truth you are a convict who has broken parole and taken a pseudonym because of the unjustness of the system. The local police inspector was your tormenter during your time in prison, but he seems not to recognize you. One day, after seeing you do something heroic, he tells you that you remind him of a prisoner who broke parole whom he has recently captured after hunting him for six years; the inspector identified the prisoner as you (or, rather, your previous, “true” identity by the brand on his or her chest.
Do you own up to your former identity to save this prisoner? Why or why not?
Yes, otherwise the book will end just when it is really starting to roll along. And if that happened, Andrew Lloyd Webber would be a much let rich man and I couldn’t have that on my conscience.
I hope I’d speak up - I would hate myself if I let another man suffer for my crimes, even if he had his own to answer for as well. But the truth is that I just don’t know what I’d do. It’s a damned hard thing to step off the cliff on a matter of principle - I don’t know that I have it in me. It’s cold comfort that most men probably don’t have it in them, either.
So, I voted “I can’t do it (stupid conscience)”, but that’s more aspirational than anything else. I’d be at least as likely to let the poor bastard rot, and spend the rest of my days thoroughly disgusted with myself.
You’re assuming, I gather, that the innocent man has no brand and that Javert is using this to trick Javert into revealing himself. That is a correct assumption from the book, but I think the OP refers only to the musical, which makes no such suggestion.
I’ve never read the book. After having only ever seen the musical, I posted the following last year: “Valjean tears open his shirt like Superman to vindicate the innocent guy. Talk about dialogue that doesn’t make sense: our hero reveals he’s got ‘24601’ tattooed on his own chest to prove the defendant doesn’t? Wouldn’t he just tell 'em to open the other guy’s shirt?”
It always bothered me that he abandoned his workers and likely cost them their livings. Look what happened to Fantine when she was fired. Didn’t he worry that the rest of them might come to that too? Did his conscience let him screw over hundreds of workers to save one guy? Why should his conscience be more important than their lives and the lives of their families? Pretty arrogant of him to think so, I say.
Possibly someone else took over the business. But he wasn’t easy about taking the chance; note that he specifically mentions fear for his workers as being a reason to do nothing.
For the record, there’s nothing in the book about a brand on either Valjean or Champmathieu. Champmathieu had never been in prison before. Valjean proves that he is Valjean by his knowledge of tattoos and other “distinguishing characteristics” on the jailhouse snitches who came to court to identify Champmathieu as Valjean.
Which is a third of the reason I specified the musical. Another is that book!Javert already believes M. Madeleine to be Valjean and is trying to trap 24601, as I recall.