This volume centers on Marius Pontmercy, a young man who has rejected his royalist family to live in poverty among the Parisian poor. Through Marius, Hugo renders one of literature's most vivid portraits of the gamin the street child of Paris whose joyful, rough existence embodies both innocence and hard-won wisdom. As Marius falls deeper into poverty, he also falls in love with Cosette, and Hugo transforms their courtship into a meditation on youthful idealism confronting class-divided Paris. The revolutionary students who will shape the novel's climax make their first appearance, their noble naivety already visible. Here Hugo argues that the young see a world not as it is but as it should be and that this blindness, far from being weakness, is the very engine of social progress.
