There’s a scene early in the first act of Les Miserables when released convict Jean Valjean is offered a meal and a place to stay by a local bishop, the only person he encounters who treats him as a fellow human being. Valjean repays him by stealing his silver and sneaking away in the night. But when he is caught, the bishop declines to have him thrown back in prison, instead backing up Valjean’s story that the silver was a gift. He goes further, giving Valjean a set of candlesticks to go with the serving pieces he stole. When the police and crowds leave, the bishop tells Valjean that the gift comes with a price: He wants Valjean to use the valuables to turn his life around and become “an honest man.” That’s really the struggle the rest of the play tries to resolve: what does it mean for Valjean to be an honest man? How can he do that, when he is pursued at every turn by the dogged Inspector Javert? If he hadn’t shed his identity, he would never have been in a position to adopt and protect Cosette, the orphaned daughter of a woman who dies after being forced to live a cruel life. As a convict, Valjean couldn’t get so much as a full day’s wages for a full day’s work, or find a bed in an inn even when he could pay for it. After he breaks parole — in itself a crime — he makes a fortune and is able to give Cosette a comfortable life. He tries to keep his deception from hurting others; more than once he acknowledges his identity to save other people, but always runs away and starts over before he can be taken up again. Near the end, he runs even from Cosette, now grown and married to a man who loves her. In some ways, Valjean’s plight reminds me of the undocumented immigrants in our midst. Like them, Valjean committed his original crime — stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving nephew — out of desperation. Like them, he finds himself in a situation where his crime is simply existing as himself, and no matter how exemplary a life he leads, he will never be safe because of the road he took to get there. It’s not until the end of the play — the bishops’ silver candlesticks on his table — that he tells his Cosette who he is before he, too, goes to meet the Lord. By then, he is safe from Javert, whom he set free when he had orders to kill him. Javert, unable to live with the mercy of a criminal, killed himself. Javert always saw himself as the agent of justice, but it was a justice that not only did not include mercy, it could not comprehend it. Valjean, on the other hand, lives his life with love and generosity, and, with the help of other good people, is able by the end to own who he is and to share his story. Would that we all could have a conversion so complete.