"To love another person is to see the face of God."

Victor Hugo devotes many pages to establishing the characters of Les Misérables. He writes fascinating and colorful backgrounds of the benevolent BIshop of Digne, the street urchin Gavroche, and Gavroche's rascally father, Thenardier. Each character represents a poetic truth.

The Bishop embodies goodness, but not implausible saintliness. He is kindness and wisdom and godliness in a charming human form. Thenardier represents crime, but he is never a caricature of evil incarnate; the man is all too human, with his greed, jealousy, opportunism and decietfulness. Yet his daughter, Eponine, proves that a child from such a background can nevertheless have her own kind of integrity and even nobility.

Javert is law — not justice, for justice is tempered with mercy. Indeed, Javert is not even the spirit of the law, but the letter of the law. Valjean is grace. These men are two sides of the same coin, which adds intensity to their conflict. Javert is not the "villain": he operates strictly within his own moral code.

The novel has a grand design and uses an epic canvas to depict such mighty events as the battle at the barricade and the heroic rescue through the underworld of Paris. But Les Mis is chiefly concerned with a different theme enitrely. That theme is conscience.

"To love another person is to see the face of God," Hugo writes. And as his key character, Jean Valjean, changes through the power of forgiveness and learns to love another, Valjean's eyes open to the reality of conscience. Hugo describes the inner struggle that follows inside Valjean's heart and mind:

There is a prospect greater than the sea, and that is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul. To make a poem of the human conscience, even in terms of a single man and the least of all men, would be to merge all epics in a single epic transcending all. ...To peer at certain moments into the withdrawn face of a human being in the act of reflection, to see something of what lies beyond their outward silence, is to discern struggle on a grand scale.

Yes, great events and stirring actions mark Les Misérables. But the truly epic nature of this story lies in the insights and glimpses it gives us into the human soul.