Coincidence rules Hugo's world

It is about 1832.

Marius pities a family of begging con artists, the Jondrettes, to whom he gives money.

Of course, so does Valjean.

Through them, Marius finds by chance Cosette, whom he loves but has never met and whose name he knows not, and her supposed father, Valjean.

He had fallen in love from seeing her and her supposed father sitting and chatting at the Luxembourg.

Valjean, noticing Marius following them, had moved house and stopped going there, and thus escaped him, to the despair of the young man.

Months later, at their first meeting in the beggars' wretched flat, secretly observed by Marius, Jondrette, who is Thenardier, recognizes Valjean, though it had been 8 years.

He keeps it to himself, even as Marius, astonished, recognizes the girl of the Luxembourg and her supposed father.

Valjean suspects nothing.

Hugo's portrait of Jondrette and of more dangerous criminals recalls Dostoevsky.

Or the other way around.

The Thenardiers were repulsive long before they were poor.

Poverty has not ennobled them, but it has not made them worse.

There is something to the idea that society has made them poor.

But it did not make them bad.

It did not have to.

Les Miserables.