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The winners of our episode, Siobhan Thompson and Grant O'Brien!

Welcome back, Hilda Hilda

They've both been crushed by societal forces, forced to take desperate measures to keep their family alive, and are subsequently saved by selfless people. I'm rereading Les Mis currently and it struck me this time that the timing of Fantine's plight shows Jean Valjean that he's not infallible even after his reformation, which is why it's so especially crushing for him and can explain why he commits to an all-out response of personally raising Cosette himself; although so much has changed, even now he is culpable in "robbing" another person and failing someone he was responsible for. Fantine teaches Valjean this, and I love how they're thrown together by fate and end up parenting Cosette together, separated by time, linked through a unique relationship that isn't romantic but is characterized by deep kinship. Victor Hugo traces Fantine's mental journey after Valjean's intervention in a way that echoes Valjean's, especially "Valjean's Soliloquy" in the musical: "He had saved her after she had most outrageously insulted him! Could she have been wrong? Must she now change her very heart?" Earlier, she also says, "I had Cosette to think of, so I was forced to become a bad woman." Switch out a few key words and you get a perfect line for Valjean. Hugo goes so far as to explicitly link them together through sheer proximity of words; another paragraph goes, "What is the true story of Fantine? It is the story of society's purchase of a slave. A slave purchased from poverty, hunger, cold, loneliness, defenselessness, destitution. A squalid bargain: a human soul for a hunk of bread..."