When Jean Valjean was twenty years old, he drove his friend to what he would later discover was a drug dealer's house. His friend offered him thirty bucks to drive him, thirty bucks which Valjean could use to buy groceries for his sister's three kids. His sister was twenty two. She had had her first child when she was seventeen. Valjean had been living with her in her tiny apartment over the laudromat since he was fifteen when their father had stepped in front of a train piss-drunk and their mother had slit her wrists in the bathtub after a bad trip. Valjean worked odd jobs and his sister worked as a bartender to support the kids. There was no father in the picture for any of them, something he and his sister acknowledged but never discussed.
The police showed up at the house where his friend was buying pot and arrested Valjean. He was sentenced to jail for five years, but his sentence was extended over and over again. He was released after nineteen years, angry, bitter, and alone. His sister and her son were dead and his nieces had disappeared. Valjean did not waste much time searching for them.
He could not find any honest work and fell into a restless pattern of welfare checks and begging for coins on the side of the road. He hated himself a little more every time a coin dropped into his cup.
One day he was begging outside of a church when the priest appeared and invited him in. He let Valjean stay in the upstairs room for the night. Valjean had never been inside of a church before in his life. He had not concept of the holiness that is a sanctuary. In the middle of the night, he crept down into the church and stole the offering and the priest's keys.
He was pulled over for a busted taillight, of all things, and brought back to the church to return the stolen items, where the priest astounded everyone by giving Valjean everything he stole and more, writing him a check for all the church's administrative duties he carried out. Afterward the priest, whose name was Myriel, told Valjean that he should not thank him. He should thank god.
Valjean was a different man after that. He used Myriel's money for a plane ticket and moved halfway across the country, breaking his parole and changing his name in the process. He started a small business, hiring mostly young women from impoverished families to help keep them off the streets. He sent a quarter of his profits every year back to that little church in the city. It wasn't his idea to run for mayor, but he was eventually persuaded by the idea of passing legislature to help children in need find good work. He was successful, but he was modest. He still rented his tiny house in the middle of the town, and he kept mostly to himself, managing to stay an aloof benefactor to his entire community for years, until a police officer on the verge of a nervous breakdown was transferred to his town. A policeman named Javert.
Javert had been one of Valjean's prison guards. He had been moved out west partly as a promotion and partly to get him out of the city, where he was bringing bad press to the local police for some brutal arrests.
Valjean was even more solitary after Javert arrived, but on one of his late night walks through the slums of his town he could see Javert arresting a young woman, barely more than twenty, who looked, even from the distance from which he watched, ill and tired. He intervened, learning that the girl, whose name was Fantine, was working in the strip club down the street and getting picked up by the customers for money. He attempted to convince her to come to the hospital, but she spit in his face, saying that she only ended up here because she was fired from his business and had to support her daughter somehow. Horrified, Valjean made it his mission to save her, but too late. Fantine died from the AIDS virus in the hospital a few weeks later.
Javert recognized Valjean as an ex-convict and attempted to have him arrested before learning that another "Jean Valjean" had been found and was currently on trial for several robberies. Horrified at his mistake, he informed Valjean of this, who was possibly even more horrified. After a long debate, he decided to fly to New York to save this innocent man, leaving Fantine in the hospital. After confessing, he returned to his town in time to watch Fantine die, swearing that he would take care of her daughter in her place. Javert, vindicated at last and seeing Valjean as his ticket back to his previous position of power in the city, arrived to arrest Valjean, who escaped and found Cosette at the hotel owned by the Thenadier family, abused and belittled. He quickly whisked her away, leaving behind Eponine, Azelma, and the infant Gavroche, something he had begun to regret upon hearing about Eponine from Cosette.
Technically, he was guilty of identity theft, tax evasion, and fraud, and had been since that fateful night Myriel offered him the first bit of kindness he'd ever known. He was smart and soon gained a teaching position at a catholic school in the city, the place he figured no one would look for him. Cosette went to school there for the rest of her career. She wasn't lonely, but she didn't have many friends, and this worried Valjean. He loved Cosette more than anything else in his world. She was his sun and his moon and his stars. All the love he had been storing up all his life burst forth onto this little girl when he had taken her away from the Thenadier household. Four years after she began at the catholic school he transferred to the university she now attended and was known as Dr Fauchevault.
And yet Valjean was like all good fathers. He only wanted what was best for Cosette. Unfortunately, he didn't think that what was best for Cosette was Marius Pontmercy, because one day as he was wandering about campus he had seen Marius speaking earnestly with none other than Inspector Javert.
Valjean could not help it. He was suspicious. He did not know that Marius was arguing that his friend Enjolras should not be arrested and that Jehan had every right to be in that tree. He was still a criminal, even if he had done no harm in over twenty years. He thought like a criminal, and a criminal never forgets those who have done him wrong. He did not trust Marius, suspecting that Javert may have been using the boy to get close to him. Paranoid, maybe, but perhaps not, because Javert, too, never forgot. All Valjean knew for certain was that he wanted Cosette away from Marius.
And so it was that when she received a text from Marius Pontmercy at about noon he picked up her phone from where it was lying on the counter, read the following text: Don't go to Paris. I love you too, grabbed his coat, and headed off to the rally to find this boy.