This chapter gives us more detail around Fantine’s struggle to find work after the factory, and she ends up mending clothes for a mere 12 sous a day. The Thenardiers are charging her 10 sous a day to care for Cosette, so she begins to fall behind. She sells all she can but still finds herself about 100 Francs in the hole, unable to leave or to even provide basics for Cosette here she is stuck.
In the midst of this terrible set of circumstances we find a stark and rather unsettling line about Madame Victurnien, the woman responsible for Fantine’s job loss and current situation:
Madame Victurnien, seeing [Fantine] pass beneath her window and noting the wretched condition of the ‘creature’ who thanks to her public spirit had been ‘put in her place’, was highly gratified. The cruel of heart have their own black happiness.
Of all the things to be gratified by, the demise of another human should not be one of them. It’s easy to see this from the perspective we know, one where we are aware of Fantine’s struggle and the terrible circumstances that led her here, and think we would never behave like Madame Victurnien. I genuinely hope that is the case. However, if we step back and put ourselves in her shoes, and imagine the sort of narrative she had spun for herself about Fantine. Someone who had a secret ilegitimate child, someone we thought was “putting on airs” as though she was superior to others, someone trying to act as though she was different from the others working at the factory… It’s not too hard to imagine a situation where a person reduces the human who we might sympathize with into a “creature” who deserves the wretched condition they have fallen to.
We rarely know the full story of anyone, even those who may have hurt us or others we love deeply. Feeding cruelty in our hearts only harms us in the long run. I hope we can be people who find alternate forms of happiness, ones that don’t involve taking joy in another person’s destruction.