Les Misérables Volume I Book 2 Chapter 6 - Jean Valjean

In which we learn of Jean Valjean’s early life marked by poverty and duty, a modest tree-pruner who, driven by desperate necessity to support his sister’s large family, commits a small theft that irrevocably changes his fate. His ensuing years in the galleys reveal the harshness of the law and the slow hardening of a once gentle spirit under the weight of suffering and injustice.