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A portrait of Jean Valjean, Victor Hugo's hero in Les Miserables - convicted for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his children; sentenced to 19 years in the galleys in Toulon, duly released, now risen to wealth and society by force of character, despite much suffering, entered into a new life as the Mayor of the provincial industrial town of Montreuil-Sur-Mer; a man with a new name (he is now called Pere Madeleine), a new persona, a new reputation, and without a past.

Of his gifts to those who were less fortunate, Hugo writes:

"The hospital was under financed; he had endowed ten more beds. Montreuil was divided into an Upper and Lower Town. The Lower Town, where he lived, had only one school, of which the ancient building was crumbling in ruin. He built two new schools, one for girls and the other for boys, and out of his own income doubled the meager official salaries of the schoolmaster and mistress. To someone who expressed surprise at this, he said this, 'The first two servants of the State are the nurse and the teacher.' He established an old peoples' home, a thing then almost unknown in France, and a fund for the assistance of old and infirmed work people. With the building of the new factory, a new residential area had sprung up around it in which there were a good many poor families so he installed a free apothecary's shop . . .

"He performed countless acts of kindness with as much precaution as though they were misdeeds. He would secretly enter a house after dark and go furtively up the stairs; and some poor devil, returning to his attic, would find that his door had been opened, and even forced, in his absence. His instant thought would be that he had been robbed, but then he would find nothing gone and a gold piece lying on the table. The 'miscreant' was Pere Madeleine."

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