This transition is pretty wild. We go from seeing Jean Valjean at this intense crossroads, having a true crisis in the wake of his encounter(s) with the bishop, wondering what will happen next and Hugo zooms us way out to set the broader scene for what Paris was like at the time he is writing about.
This is almost comical to me when I think about the cultural distance we have from these particulars today and the way that relevance is actually found in the resonant themes. To draw a more direct line, it would be as though back in 2009 I had started working on a novel that would actually be published in 2026 that was set in 1981 in my city, Washington, DC.
In the first section of my novel I introduce one character who is this beautiful selfless man, then I introduce you to another, a tragic character who has been utterly destroyed by the system, and I then tell you about what happens when the two meet, and the second man arrives at a crucial crisis moment. You turn the page and a new section begins that tells you all about DC in 1981 - what was in fashion, what was happening in the social scene, what political arrangements looked like, random vignettes and references to people with varying degrees of notoriety.
Now, reading this in 2026, or even in the 2030s as a US resident the section may seem weird but you have a fair amount of touch points so it isn’t too jarring. That’s not where we are though. You gotta time travel to the year 2190, where you are currently living in some place within the European Union, reading a translation of my novel into your native tongue. I can only imagine your reaction matching mine today - “WTF is this?!?!”