"What They Don't Know Is Your Real Advantage. When You Live For Someone, You're Prepared To Die."

"What they don't know is your real advantage. When you live for someone, you're prepared to die."

- Pearl & Grantaire

Jean Valjean, inspired by this line from his introduction chapter:

It was, moreover, a firm, energetic, and melancholy profile. This physiognomy was strangely composed; it began by seeming humble, and ended by seeming severe. The eye shone beneath its lashes like a fire beneath brushwood.

(I'm working on a series of stained glass paintings for Jean Valjean's different names/titles/identities; here's a link to the previous painting in the series)

Lucifer Enjolras from the demon AU @shamedumpster and @aromantic-enjolras came up with

put victor frankenstein, henry jekyll and dorian gray in a room together, who comes out crying first

Wounds of the Earth

— by xis.lanyx

Jean Valjean’s horrible awful relationship with religion is really fascinating— the way religion becomes deeply meaningful to his life but is also still a tool of social control that is used to violently oppress him. I love this line where he describes how bishops would “preach” to him in the galleys:

“[the bishop] said mass in the middle of the galleys, on an altar. He had a pointed thing, made of gold, on his head; it glittered in the bright light of midday. We were all ranged in lines on the three sides, with cannons with lighted matches facing us. We could not see very well. He spoke; but he was too far off, and we did not hear. That is what a bishop is like.”

Jean Valjean’s early relationship with religion is as this horrible violent obligation. He attends “mass” in the galleys, where cannons are pointed at him, so that if anyone in the crowd acts up they can all be massacred. The bishop is also so impossibly distant that they can’t even hear him. No one in prison is trying to actually speak to Jean Valjean or the other convicts; they’re just violently forcing them to act out the empty forms of Christianity while not allowing them to truly participate in it.

And while Myriel does change his life, and his faith…. Jean Valjean never fully internalizes the way Myriel treated him as an equal and insisted that they were brothers. And that’s in large part because of the hostility or terror which which the rest of the Church and society views him.

We’re told later that in the convent, Jean Valjean prays to the nuns doing penance, because “he did not dare to pray directly to God.”

There’s a fascinating tension between the fact that religion is extremely important to Jean Valjean’s life, but also, that same religion is often used against him as a tool of violent social control. He belongs to a religion that rejects him violently. He prays to a God that he does not dare to pray to directly, out of self-loathing. It’s a really strange complex relationship.