Looks Can Be Deceiving - Maybe It's Time to Look with Eyes of Love
Susan Boyle Singing "I Dreamed a Dream"

The lyrics follow from this heartfelt song, "I Dreamed a Dream", (composed by Claude-Michel Schönberg with lyrics by Alain Boublil) taken from the musical based on one of the most beautiful novels ever written, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.

Fantine, abandoned by the father of her unborn child, sings this lament in the musical.

I Dreamed a Dream

How Far Can an Act of Kindness Go?

Hugo’s novel expresses a very wide range of human emotion, suffering, cruelty, and goodness.

In Les Miserables, Hugo tells of Jean Valjean, whose only crime had been the theft of a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving children. After serving nineteen years (longer than his original sentence due to several desperate escape attempts) he was released from the galleys. On his trek to the town he had been assigned to, he found the innkeepers unwilling even to rent him a room for the night because he had been a convict. Finally a gentle woman pointed him to the simple home of a good old bishop, who kindly invited him to supper and let him sleep in the small guest room for the night.

That night Jean Valjean stole the bishop's silverware and slipped out, but was soon caught and returned by the gendarmes. The bishop reacted in a way that dumbfounded Jean Valjean and ultimately changed his life:

"Ah! here you are!" he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. "I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?"

Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

"Monseigneur," said the brigadier of gendarmes, "so what this man said is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this silver--"

"And he told you," interposed the Bishop with a smile, "that it had been given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back here? It is a mistake."

"In that case," replied the brigadier, "we can let him go?"

"Certainly," replied the Bishop.

The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.

"Is it true that I am to be released?" he said, in an almost inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.

"Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?" said one of the gendarmes.

"My friend," resumed the Bishop, "before you go, here are your candlesticks. Take them."

He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women [the bishop’s sister and their housekeeper] looked on without uttering a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the Bishop.

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks mechanically, and with a bewildered air.

"Now," said the Bishop, "go in peace. By the way, when you return, my friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with anything but a latch, either by day or by night."

Then, turning to the gendarmes:--

"You may retire, gentlemen."

The gendarmes retired.

Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.

The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:

"Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man."

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything, remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered them. He resumed with solemnity:

"Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God."

Jean Valjean did use the money from the sale of the silverware to begin a new life, an honest one. The bishop had called him, who had been treated little better than an animal for nineteen years, “friend” and “brother.” His benefactor gave him not only the financial means with which to start anew, but a new way of looking at himself as capable and worthy of doing so.

The bishop’s kindness also led Jean Valjean to a brand new spiritual start. The bishop was the “Bible bound in shoe leather” that showed this illiterate man the love of God in action.

Victor Hugo describes Valjean’s journey of the heart towards this tranformation in these words:

He was indistinctly conscious that the pardon of this priest was the greatest assault and the most formidable attack which had moved him yet; that his obduracy was finally settled if he resisted this clemency; that if he yielded, he should be obliged to renounce that hatred with which the actions of other men had filled his soul through so many years, and which pleased him; that this time it was necessary to conquer or to be conquered; and that a struggle, a colossal and final struggle, had been begun between his viciousness and the goodness of that man.

The very day of the old man’s forgiveness and kindness to him, Jean Valjean experienced an epiphany. First, he stole one last time, then wept bitterly, and emerged a changed man -- one who, like the first fellow human being who had called him “friend” in decades, made it his life’s work, from that moment on, to live up to the light that was now in him by helping others as he had been helped.

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