I am very surprised that I haven't seen more stuff about this topic: Jean Valjean's family. Anyway, note that I do not own them, or any of the other characters belonging to Victor Hugo.
Chapter 1: By Any Other Name
He was best known as Claude.
Whether he had any other name before this, whether a family name followed it, no one knew. However, the tall, broad-shouldered lad who lived on the Rue du Gindre was a friendly, if not familiar sight to the residents of that miserable quartier.
He and his mother had come to Paris some years before, when his mother was still healthy and worked as a book stitcher. Some time after Napoleon fell from power, a wave of consumption spread through the quartier, leaving Claude, then only sixteen, to mourn beside his mother's bier in the cemetery.
By the end of 1817 however, the memory of Mother Jeanne had been forgotten by everyone, save for this young boy.
One rather ordinary day, in the year 1823, the aged landlady of the Rue du Gindre saw Claude leaving the street with only a sack to hold his belongings in.
"Just where are you going, young man?" she scolded him sharply. "You haven't paid your rent!"
"The rent is under the doormat," the taciturn fellow replied. He was powerfully built and no man, woman, or child dared to cross him. "I have to be going."
"Where to?" the concierge demanded.
Claude shrugged. "Faverolles."
"Whatever for?"
"To see my uncle, if he's there."
The concierge bent over and muttered something about the foolishness of youth before turning to go back in the house. Claude scraped his old teamsters boots across the walk as he hurried to find the coach. All the while, he had clutched in his palm a paper that his dying mother had given him. A paper with only two words scrawled on it: Jean Valjean.