Les Miserables: Volume 4, Book 5 Summary & Analysis

Chapter 1 Cosette’s grief has finally begun to ebb. One week, she notices a handsome young officer begin to pass her gate each day. The lieutenant, whose name is Theodule Gillenormand, dismisses his friends when they say that a girl is making eyes at him from the garden. Meanwhile, Marius still despairs about Cosette. He’s the sort of person who never emerges from sorrow, unlike Cosette.

Chapter 2 In April, Valjean takes one of his habitual journeys of one or two days—going somewhere that not even Cosette knows, and usually when money is lacking. It’s 10 p.m., and Cosette thinks she hears footsteps in the garden. She looks out the window, but the street is deserted. The next day towards nightfall, she’s walking through the garden when the moon rises and illuminates another shadow, a man with a round hat, nearby. She is terrified, but stands up resolutely and turns around. There’s no one there.

The next day Cosette tells Valjean, who’s just returned, what happened; though he reassures her he grows anxious himself. Valjean passes the next two nights in the garden. On the third night, Valjean calls down to her: a shadow in the garden made by a sheet iron chimney-pipe does look quite like the shadow of a man with a hat. Cosette doesn’t ask herself why this shadow should have retreated in alarm when she looked back at it, and she thinks no more about it.

Chapter 3 One evening later that month, Valjean has gone out, and Cosette is sitting on the garden bench thinking. She stands up and wanders around the garden, but upon her return, she sees a large stone, which had not been by the bench a moment before. She rushes indoors, asking Toussaint if she’s very careful to close the shutters with bars at night. Toussaint says she is, adding how awful it would be for someone to sneak into the bedrooms at night and try to cut their throats. Cosette tells her to be quiet.

The next day Cosette’s fears seem ridiculous, and she thinks she dreamed about the stone. But when she returns to the garden, it’s still there. Pale, she lifts it up, and finds an unsealed envelope filled with writing.

Chapter 4 The narrator calls love the reduction of the universe to a single being, and the expansion of a single being to God, who lives in all. It was excruciating for Marius not to know the address of his very soul, which the narrator links to the infinite and to spiritual goodness. It is grand to be loved, and grander to love, making one’s soul heroic and lofty.

Chapter 5 Cosette reads the letter, 15 pages long, and daydreams. At one point the handsome officer passes by, but now she finds him hideous. The manuscript seems to reveal to her all of life: love, sorrow, destiny. It’s an anonymous love letter, but Cosette knows it could have only been written by one person. All day she feels bewildered, thinking that heavenly chance has brought the young man back to her.

Chapter 6 That evening Valjean goes out and Cosette makes herself up more prettily than usual, though she’s not expecting a guest. She goes out to sit on the bench, and suddenly sees Marius. He is thinner and paler, with shadowy eyes but a face illuminated by the sunset. Cosette backs away, but he asks for her to forgive him: he had to come. He says that he followed her to her previous home nearly a year ago. Now, often he stands beneath the house and can hear her singing through the shutters. He adores her, he says.

Cosette is about to faint, but Marius catches her, feeling love, not lust, for her. Marius asks if she loves him, and she says he knows she does. They kiss, and then look at each other. Slowly, they begin to tell each other everything about their pasts, their childhoods and illusions. At the end, they ask each other’s names.