Les Miserables Novel / Tropes O to Z

This page is for tropes which have appeared in the novel Les Misérables.

For the rest:

• Tropes A to D
• Tropes E to N

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• Older Than They Look:
  • Valjean as long as Cosette is with him. He is always supposed to look about ten years younger than he is, despite his white hair. After he stops visiting Cosette though...
  • Little Cosette too, although here it is conflicting. The suffering gives her face an older expression, but she has big eyes and is stick-thin which makes her look younger than she actually is.
  • Azelma (Éponine's little sister) looks like a sickly 11- or 12-year-old by the time she's 14.
  • Enjolras is so pretty he's said to look around 17 while actually being 22.
• One Degree of Separation: Would you believe it, Cosette, we just happened upon the same convent of which I had saved the gardener's life? And your boyfriend, what a coincidence, feels obliged to fulfill a debt owed to the same family that abused and starved you for three years! And that same family produced that gamin on the streets who's taking care of his brothers who were supposed to go live with your boyfriend's grandfather and mon dieu let's talk about the Parisian sewers.
  • And then the barricades, where every surviving character fit for battle (and a few who aren't, like Valjean (seventy-two going on eighty) and Eponine (starving, lovesick, homeless and female) shows up either during the battle or in the sewers.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. There are no less than six characters named Jean, or some variation thereof — four of them in the Valjean family, which consists of Jean and Jeanne Valjean, and their children, Jean and Jeanne Valjean.
• Only Known by Their Nickname:
  • Cosette. To the point where, when discussing her dowry right before her marriage, her future grandfather-in-law asks about her inheritance. (Paraphrased:)
    Jean Valjean: Mlle Euphrasie Fauchelevent has five thousand francs a year.
    M. Gillenormand: Well, good for Mlle Euphrasie Fauchelevent, but who's that?
    Cosette: Er... that's me.
  • Two of Tholomyès' friends' mistresses, Favourite and Dahlia.
• Parental Abandonment: Several:
  • Valjean loses his parents "at a very young age" and is brought up by his sister.
  • In a way, Valjean's nieces and nephews: Their father is dead and their uncle in prison.
  • Javert's father is a galley-slave and he apparently severed ties with his mother very early.
  • Fantine's parents are entirely unknown.
  • Fantine gets dumped by her lover with a two-year-old child and has to abandon Cosette a year later.
  • Gavroche is the unloved oldest son of the Thénardiers, who lives in the streets
  • The Thénardiers sell their two youngest sons to Manon, after Manon's own children (whom she claims were fathered by Gillenormand, who pays her for their keep) die from illness.
  • After the death of Marius' mother, his father gets forced to abandon Marius to his grandfather. Marius thinks his father has abandoned him and learns the truth only aged 17.
• Parental Favoritism: Mme Thénardier clearly favours her own daughters over Cosette. Averted, in that this doesn't extend to her sons, though.
• Passing the Torch: Several torches are passed, not all of them heroic. Cosette and Marius resolve to follow Valjean's lead, but on the other hand Azelma Thénardier takes over smoothly from her dead mother and Gavroche's younger brothers pick up where he left off.
• Pilfering Proprietor: : Thénardier is a greedy innkeeper who extorts as much money as he can from his guests. In the musical, he sings a Villain Song called "Master of the House" where he gleefully boasts about adding charges to their bills for things like having lice and looking in the mirror, and spending as little as possible on the food ("Kidney of a horse, liver of a cat / Filling up the sausages with this and that!")
• Point of View: Mainly omniscient narrator, but switches to subjective third person sometimes, usually when a character has a moral dilemma to go through. Needless to say that while many protagonists are a viewpoint character at some point, Valjean's POV is the most common.
• Power of Trust
• Power Trio: Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac are seen as the three leaders as Les Amis de L'ABC with Enjolras as the chief, Combeferre as the guide, and Courfeyrac as the centre.
• Precision F-Strike: One that notoriously caused a stir in the Russian aristocracy at one point. Early on in the book, the Mot de Cambrionne is spoken, and when Anastasia circled it as one of the French words she didn't understand, embarrassment ensued between her father Czar Nicholas II and her French teacher.
• Pretty Boy: Enjolras. It is stated that he has girlish, pretty features. Also, Montparnasse.
• Pride: According to the narrator, Valjean is on the way of becoming a proud man before getting to spend four years in a convent. Not that the reader ever noticed anything different about Valjean's behaviour.
• Primal Fear: Little Cosette is afraid of the dark forest.
• Prison
• Prisoner Exchange: When Jehan Prouvaire is captured by the national guard, the revolutionaries plan to exchange Javert for his return, but before they can even raise the flag for a temporary truce, the national guard executes their prisoner.
• Prisons Are Gymnasiums: In two meanings: Valjean learns how to climb walls in prison (it helps that he's already super-strong) and he also learns to read and write.
• Prison Ship: Gets mentioned. Historically accurate, as old ships no longer fit for use were moored in the Toulon harbour as prison ships.
• Promotion to Parent: Valjean's older sister Jeanne raises him after their parents have died.
• Punny Name:
  • Jean Valjean is supposed to be a contraction of "Voilà Jean" – "Here's Jean". Still better than one of the names Hugo considered earlier: "Jean Sou" (figuratively "Jean Penny").
  • Grantaire usually signs as "R" (a pun on the pronunciation of his surname, which sounds like "capital r" in French).
  • There're also a few jokes with Bossuet's surname, which nobody knows whether it's spelled L'Aigle ("the eagle"), Lesgles or Legle.
  • Les Amis de l'ABC allegedly named themselves that way because they're a society for furthering literacy among the poorer classes; it's a mere coincidence, of course, that in French "l'ABC" sounds exactly like "l'abaissé", "the oppressed". No revolutionary inclinations whatsoever.
• Quicksand Sucks
• Rags to Riches: Valjean as M Madeleine, Cosette when he adopts her. Throughout the novel, the economic position or evolution of a character marks him or her either as "one of the misérables" (not a good thing to be marked as, in this book) or as someone who could actually get a happy ending.
• Redemption Equals Death: Javert.
• Relatively Flimsy Excuse: Valjean and Fauchelevent.
• Retired Badass: Georges Pontmercy, father of Marius. The novel goes into detail, describing his unbelievable badassery while serving in the French army. When the restoration kicked in, he retired good and proper.
• Returning the Handkerchief: Or at least, so Marius thinks.
• The Reveal:
  • M. Madeleine revealing himself as Jean Valjean in the middle of a trial. However, subverted in the reader's case. Madeleine is introduced to the reader as a completely separate character to Valjean, though it is completely obvious that they are one and the same. It looks like Hugo is setting the whole thing up for a big reveal, but after a while he simply remarks that the reader will have guessed by now that they are the same person.
  • The Anticlimax happens again when Thénardier, having fallen in to ruin, is scamming money off some people he heard were generous. He comes across Valjean again, and soon after the meeting reveals this. A passing line is made about a hundred pages later about how the reader probably guessed this before him.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: The Friends of the ABC are portrayed as heroic defenders of the common man, right down to the token drunkard. To balance the scale, however, the sympathetic Bishop Myriel is described as a once-noble victim of the Revolution of 1789, and early in the book has a debate with a dying revolutionary regarding who deserves more pity, the poor, or the nobles who are murdered for a crime that is not their fault. While he wasn't blind to the crimes committed in its name, Hugo greatly admired the French Revolution. His last novel, 93, is focused on it.
• Rich Kid Turned Social Activist: Some of the members of Les Amis de l'ABC are privileged students who nonetheless empathize with Paris's poor and try to stage a rebellion in their name. Their leader, Enjolras, is specifically mentioned to be born to a wealthy family.
• Rich Sibling, Poor Sibling: Cosette is abused by her foster parents the Thénardiers while Eponine and Azelma are doted on by their parents. Gavroche, the son of the couple, is also neglected to the point that, in Paris, he went to live in the streets. Two other sons were rented out to a woman wanting to pass them to Gillenormand as his sons, after the real ones died.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Quite a few real life criminals get mentioned. Two articles are even reproduced – unfortunately, those two are entirely fictional.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: Thénardier writes with such creative spelling that it makes his letters recognisable.
• Sadistic Choice: Marius has to choose whether to get Thénardier arrested (to save his love interest's father), even though it was his father's Last Request for Marius to repay Thénardier for saving his life. See Take a Third Option below.
• Saved by the Coffin: Jean Valjean escapes from the convent of Petit-Picpus (which is being watched by police who suspect that he's hiding inside) in the coffin of a nun who has just died, and is being taken out for burial.
• Scare 'Em Straight: Valjean attempts this on the foppish young criminal Montparnasse, by telling him of the horrors of prison life after Montparnasse dismissively says he'd rather be a lazy crook than an honest worker. It's a surprisingly thorough account, contrasting the relatively easy life of a poor but honest laborer with the endless toil of a galley slave. When that doesn't work, he mentions the damage it would do to Montparnasse's looks before he got out again — and this ends up startling him into a state of shocked pensiveness.
• Scenery Porn: Another one of Hugo's favourite tropes.
• Secret Identity: Valjean uses at least three false names through the course of the book, plus at least one more the reader doesn't know.
• Secretly Wealthy: Valjean has about 600,000 francs hidden in a forest. You wouldn't be able to tell from his lifestyle; after all, they didn't nickname him "The beggar who gives alms" for nothing.
• Self-Made Man: Valjean as M Madeleine.
• Sell What You Love: M. Mabeuf used to be a prominent horticulturist, but he lost all his money attempting to grow indigo. By the time he is introduced, he is now selling off his prized books one by one in an attempt to stay afloat.
• She Is All Grown Up: Marius noticing that the girl he's regularly encountered in the park for years, but in whom he has taken no interest, has suddenly developed a mysterious new nubile charm.
• Sherlock Scan: Javert does one on the mayor that leads him to suspect his identity. His immense strength, skill as a marksman, and having a bad leg (from being on the chain gang) arouse his suspicion, as does the fact that he made inquiries at Faverolles, where Javert knows Valjean's family lived.
• Shipped in Shackles: Convicts were transported to the prison Toulon (among others) chained by the neck in groups of twenty-odd people. This scene is described twice in the book; once when Valjean goes through the process of getting his iron collar riveted and again years later, when he and Cosette see the passing chain gang.
• Shout-Out:
  • Hugo's mention of Claude Gueux and The Last Day of a Condemned Man is close to advertisement.
  • A very early line mentions Mousqueton, Porthos' valet in The Three Musketeers.
• Shown Their Work: Oh, Hugo.
• Shrinking Violet: Marius. He's so shy that he can't muster up the courage to even speak to a pretty girl.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Sister Simplice.
  She was so gentle that she appeared fragile; but she was more solid than granite.
• Single Tear: At the death of Mabeuf the novel describes a single tear rolling down Enjolras' cheek.
• Slasher Smile: When Madam Thénardier tries to produce a friendly smile (towards Cosette), the author states she looks even scarier than usual.
• Sour Supporter: Grantaire.
• Spell My Name with a Blank: Minor characters only, such as the revolutionary G and the Countess R. Three city names, too, namely D—— (Digne), B—— (Brignolles), and M-sur-M (Montreuil-sur-Mer).
• Spell My Name with a "The": Inverted by Courfeyrac, who insists on people dropping the article.
• Spiritual Successor: What Les Misérables is to Claude Gueux and The Last Day of a Condemned Man. Only much longer.
• Spoiled Brat: Éponine and Azelma as long as their parents can afford it.
• Stalker with a Crush:
  • Éponine. Heavy focus on the word "stalker". Trying to kill him so that they can both die together is more creepy than romantic.
  • Marius. The behaviour he exhibits was seen as very romantic at the time but he does stalk Cosette.
• Straw Nihilist: Count ***, a senator from Digne who spends nine hundred words explaining why God, morality, and so on are illusions.
• Sword Cane: Courfeyrac has one.
• Take a Third Option: Rather than getting Thénardier arrested (against his father's Last Request) or leaving Valjean tied up at Thénardier's mercy, he throws Éponine's note ("The bobbies are coming") into the room, causing the criminals to flee.
• Taking the Bullet: Éponine for Marius. A soldier makes it in the barricade and aims his musket at Marius, but Éponine steps between them and takes the fatal shot herself.
• A Taste of the Lash: More a taste of the stick, but when Valjean thinks or talks about prison, stick blows will come up sooner or later as inevitable as the tides.
• Technical Pacifist: Valjean made a point of aiming for enemy soldiers' helmets. (Turning over an execution to this guy might not have been Enjolras's brightest idea.)
• Tempting Fate: Hugo cites a memorandum from the police prefect of Paris in the summer of 1817, assuring the king (Louis XVIII) that the people of Paris are lazy and content, and will surely never try another revolution...
• There Are No Therapists: Justified, as there really were none at the time.
  • Averted with Cosette, who somehow has no lasting damage from her frankly nightmarish childhood (she just forgot all about it).
  • Played straight with Valjean. He shows symptoms of PTSD complete with thousand-yard-stare, long before they were medically described.
• Title Drop: In Volume III, Book VIII, Chapter V.
  Besides, there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les misérables; whose fault is it? And then, when the fall is furthest, is that not when charity should be greatest?
• Together in Death:
  • What Éponine hopes will happen to her and Marius. Sadly (for her), he survives.
  • Averted with Grantaire and Enjolras. Though they die side by side holding hands, in death Enjolras dies standing up while Grantaire falls at his feet.
• The Tooth Hurts: Fantine — whose smile and hair are described as her two great beauties — sells first her hair to a wigmaker, and then her teeth to a denture-maker. And there is no suggestion that the removal of her teeth was performed with any anesthetic.
• Traumatic Haircut:
  • Fantine gets one to pay for her daughter.
  • Additionally, this happens by default to galley slaves, one of the many facts that Valjean uses to try to convince the foppish thug Montparnasse to pursue an honest life.
• Troubled Sympathetic Bigot: Inspector Javert starts out as a regular lawman, but is gradually shown to suffer from Black-and-White Insanity. In the end, he's quite sympathetic as he struggles with his worldview.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior:
  • Despite being only eleven or twelve years old, Gavroche eventually steals a gun and joins the revolutionaries at the barricade. When the gun he stole doesn't work, he badgers Enjolras for a new one. Somewhat lampshaded when Enjolras replies that the guns are for men first.
  • Cosette as a child shows signs of this, thanks to living in constant fear because of how badly she's been abused. When she overhears Valjean telling Thénardier that Fantine has passed away, she picks up the little knife she uses as a doll and rocks it while singing "My mother is dead! My mother is dead!" She also mentions using her knife to cut the heads off of flies. The narration says that at age eight, an observer might think she's growing up to be "an idiot or a demon". Fortunately, Valjean's love and care for her helps her psychologically heal, and she matures into a happy, well-adjusted young woman.
• Turn in Your Badge: Inverted when Javert attempts to present, of his own volition, his own resignation to Madeleine/Valjean as mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer for the egregious sin of suspecting him of being Jean Valjean; despite Javert's zealous plea for dismissal, Valjean persuades him that he may keep his post.
• Turn the Other Cheek
• Two Roads Before You: Any other person would have to choose between To Be Lawful or Good. Javert's conflict in morals is pretty different:
  He beheld before him two paths, both equally straight, but he beheld two; and that terrified him; him, who had never in all his life known more than one straight line. And, the poignant anguish lay in this, that the two paths were contrary to each other. One of these straight lines excluded the other. Which of the two was the true one?...
  ... There were only two ways of escaping from it. One was to go resolutely to Jean Valjean, and restore to his cell the convict from the galleys. The other . . .
• Unexpected Kindness: Former convict Jean Valjean is abused and untrusted even after serving all his sentence, so he becomes distrustful of anyone else. When a Bishop provides him food and shelter at his church, Jean steals the church's silverware and flees but is caught by the police. He is brought back and expects to be turned in by the Bishop, but instead the priest claims he gave the silverware to Jean and gifts him a pair of silver candlesticks for good measure. Jean is so moved by the Bishop covering for his theft that he resolves to become a better man from then on.
• Ungrateful Bastard: When Thenardier falls into poverty, Valjean pays them a visit and promises them regular financial support. Thenardier repays him by luring him into a trap, threatening to torture him, and trying to have Cosette kidnapped in order to extort a huge sum of money from Valjean at once. And there's no guarantee he wouldn't have killed Cosette the moment he got the money.
• The Unsmile: Javert has a very... strange smile.
• Unreliable Narrator: From time to time, the narrator will claim to not know some little detail or another. Not that it ever matters.
• Uptown Girl: Played with. The Impoverished Patrician Marius falls for the well-off commoner Cosette.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Several parts of the story are inspired by real life events Hugo witnessed, was a part of or was told about:
  • A convict rescuing a sailor who had fallen off a yardarm.
  • Hugo himself saved a prostitute from arrest for assault.
  • Marius' political Heel–Face Turn when getting closer to his father is based on Hugo.
  • So are parts of the love story between Cosette and Marius.
  • The June revolts of 1832.
  • Valjean's behaviour on the barricade is similar to that of Hugo on the barricades in 1851.
• Villain Ball: An entire chapter is dedicated to describing how Javert holding it allowed Valjean and Cosette to escape his clutches.
• Villainous Breakdown: Inspector Javert, after discovering who saved his life.
• Villain with Good Publicity: M. Bamatabois is widely-respected around town, which is why Javert refuses to believe he instigated the brawl with Fantine.
• War Hero: George Pontmercy (father of Marius) fought well enough in Waterloo to receive the title of Baron from Napoléon himself.
• Was It Really Worth It?: The narrator dismisses the battle of Waterloo as a waste of life and all it did was turn the place into a tourist trap.
• What Are You in For?: Averted; the bishop makes a point of not asking Valjean for any kinds of details.
• What You Are in the Dark: Jean Valjean all the way. His greatest sacrifices always happens after a long inner struggle, and all of them go unnoticed. He almost insists on slandering himself because nobody are supposed to know. Thus, he saves Champmathieu, ruining his name as a mayor, he takes Cosette out of the monastery only to set her in the path of Marius, whom he later saves from the barricades. In the last instance, he makes it pretty clear that Marius is meant to never find out who saved him. When he deliberately blows his cover for Marius after the wedding, he slanders himself even more, to a point where Marius mistrusts him and denies him access to Cosette (which nearly kills him). It takes the interference of Thénardier to set things straight.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: In the original edition, several towns were only identified by first letter (most prominently D and M-sur-M). Since it was rather clear what towns Hugo was talking about, modern editions don't hold with this nonsense.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Éponine, who dresses as a boy at the barricades.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Marius, but most of the Amis fit this a bit. Justified by the fact that most of them had already gone through all this before two years earlier, and come out triumphant. They have no reason to think they'll fail and/or die this time.
• Working on the Chain Gang: Valjean and Chenildieu "become friends" for several years while on a chain gang.
• Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him?: What Javert asks after being unmasked and captured by the students on the barricade. Answer: They don't want to waste ammunition... yet.
• Would Hurt a Child: Rare female example, as M Thénardier's cruelty towards Cosette is more along the lines of making her walk barefoot in winter. Only Madame Thénardier (regularly) kicks and beats Cosette. Just before Valjean takes her, however, she announces she's going to kick Cosette out the next day, which Thénardier is perfectly fine with, despite the fact that she would likely die if they did this.
• Wrongly Accused: Champmathieu when mistaken for Valjean. Later Valjean when the prosecutor manages to convince the jury that Valjean was part of a gang of highway robbers.
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • Fantine has finally been rescued from her misery and six months in jail by Madeleine, who promises to get her daughter. And then Thénardier refuses again and again to bring the child, and Javert arrests Madeleine right at her bedside, revealing that he's a wanted criminal. The shock kills her.
  • Valjean believes himself safe in his new identity, only for Javert to make the whole thing crumble and put Valjean in front of the terrible choice of going back to prison or let an innocent go to prison in his place.
  • Cosette and Marius have managed to get to Valjean when he's still alive – only for him to die ten minutes later.
• Ye Olde Butchered English: One English translation is especially guilty of this, introducing "thou" whenever the difference between "tu" and "vous" (that is to say, informal and polite pronoun) becomes important in French. It's especially ridiculous since the use of "thou" is not consistent throughout the text.
• You Always Hear the Bullet: When Prouvaire is taken hostage by the National Guard, he is shot before the rebels can arrange a hostage exchange. Everyone hears the guns, despite it sounding like a "volley of gunfire," which is strange considering they are in the middle of a combat zone.
• You Are Number 6: Although the book is not as crazy about this one as the musical, Valjean's two prison numbers even make it to chapter title, namely "Number 24601 becomes Number 9430." However, the only one ever to refer to Valjean by his prison number is the narrator.
  • "Number 9430 Reappears, and Cosette Wins It In the Lottery"
• Younger Than They Look:
  • Played with with Éponine, who's still noticeably 16, but at the same time has rather badly aged skin already due to her life of deprivation and poverty. By her second appearance as a teen, however, she's much happier, and accordingly is described as looking considerably prettier.
  • By the time Fantine dies at 25, she's frail and white-haired.
• You Shall Not Pass!: Éponine towards the Patron-Mignette when they try to rob Jean Valjean's house.

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