I am watching BBC TV Series ‘Les
Misérables’ (2018) on Tata Sky. This is based on a novel by Victor Hugo with the same name.
This is one of the most moving stories I have ever come across. There are many
characters but within the first three episodes, the story of Fantine Thibault, one
of the characters, is over and hence I want to briefly write about it.
Fantine is a beautiful young lady who
is out with her friends and there is a group of rich young male students who take
interest in them. They become friends, choose their partners and start spending
time together. Fantine becomes pregnant due to her boyfriend Felix, a baby girl
is born and she gives her baby girl to someone for care. It was going fine and
the girls were expecting that the boys would propose one day for marriage. But
one day, Felix and his other male friends disappear after sending a letter
to the girls, telling them that it was "all over". The girls feel stupid, but Fantine
is most devastated because she had a baby to take care of now, as a single parent and without marriage or family protection. Young people are stupid. What happens
next gets more devastating with time.
With boyfriend gone, Fantine had to
find a job in order to be able to support herself and the baby. After her baby girl
turns 3 year of age, she leaves Paris and goes to a smaller town where she
takes rest in an Inn and finds its owners having twin baby daughters of her own
daughter’s age. The owners behave nicely with her, while actually they are evil
people, and she falls into their trap. She proposes that she would go out for
work in the town while the couple could take care of her daughter along with their
own twin daughters. She thought her daughter will be safe under protection of
this “family”. In exchange, the couple extract good money from her and agree on
a monthly “fee” for taking care of her daughter. She leaves her daughter crying.
She is able to find work at a place,
earns good salary and sends some money back to the couple to take care of her
daughter. She thinks that her daughter is safe; but in reality, the couple had
made her daughter a servant, beat her, treated her badly and she was always scared or crying.
It was pitiful to see such a small girl wipe the floor with a piece of cloth. The
couple keeps asking for more money by writing letters to Fantine; telling her stories
about her daughter not keeping well. Time passes but Fantine is not able to bring
her daughter back with her, fearing how she would be able to take care of her
since she was all alone.
After some time, Fantine loses her
job. At the same time, the evil couple taking care of her daughter ask her for
some more money saying that the baby was ill. She is trapped and finds no ways to get
money. Then she comes across a road-side amusement truck, where a weird guy
asks her to sell her hair to him and also two teeth for 50 bucks. She has no other
means of earning and hence decides to sell. In a horrible scene, her beautiful hair
is cut; several of her teeth are taken out brutally with the help of a metal tongue; and she is left bald and
bleeding. She gets money which she sends to the couple. She is still not able
to find any job and hence as suggested by someone, she goes into prostitution.
Since she is a road side prostitute, she has no support, is treated brutally
and is under-paid. Whatever she earns, she sends it for her daughter’s care. Then
on one occasion she gets into fight with a rich person who beats her up and
then the Police arrest her.
But her former employer who is the Mayor of the town comes to her rescue and takes her home and promises to bring
her daughter back. By then because of living under pitiful conditions in prostitution,
she had contracted tuberculosis and becomes sick. She wanted to see her
daughter before her death, but her daughter could not be brought back and she
dies alone and crying, longing for her daughter.
After she is dead, her body is thrown
into a public grave and her baby daughter keeps working at the Inn as a slave servant.
It is one of the most wretched
stories I have ever come across. And then there are more such stories in this
TV series.
- Rahul Tiwary
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