29 Faces For February

OK, then -- MORE of "Les Mis" sketches!  
(If you haven't been following, the "first installment" is the entry just below this one.)


After Jean Valjean's epiphany to become a better man, he broke parole and worked for awhile without the papers he'd had to present to warn people he was an ex-convict.   When a factory went up for sale, he purchased it.  He was no longer known as Jean Valjean, since he had left that identity behind.  He employed many people who needed honest wages, did good works, and was respected enough to be elected the mayor.  One day, a new police officer presented himself for duty, to the mayor -- it was none other than the same guard Javert, who had warned Valjean to remember him-- and he did!  Terrified that he'd be recognized by Javert,  distracted, he ignored a scuffle on the factory floor, involving some women.  He turned the matter over to the foreman, a petty, vindictive man, and a young woman who desperately needed her job was dismissed and tossed out onto the street.  She needed those wages to support her small child, whom she boarded elsewhere with an innkeeper and his wife.

Inspector Javert.   His passion for upholding the law is an obsession.  It's his sense of structure, and is as fixed as the stars are in their seasonal movements in the sky.  He is portrayed by Russell Crowe.  

                                           

 

"Monsieur Le Mayor" is distracted, trying not to panic, when he sees Javert in his factory office.  Played by Hugh Jackman.

The young woman, Fantine, was driven by need to send money for her child's upkeep. She sold a treasured locket, her lovely long hair, then a tooth -- and eventually her body to the randy sailors and rakes that frequent the waterfront for such business.   She recounts her fall into shame, tells us of how she fell in love years ago, and, pregnant, was abandoned.   Her naive dreams were killed -- by Life.
Portrayed by Anne Hathaway.