When considering adaptations of Les Misérables, the most obvious and expected statement is that the story follows the destiny of Jean Valjean. However, there exists another historic cinematographic tradition in which Les Misérables is not the story of a character, but rather that of a pair of objects: the “Bishop’s Candlesticks”. In this article, I will retrace this tradition, exhuming several key films. I will start with one of the first adaptations of the novel by Albert Capellani in 1906 and then move on to an adaptation by Lewis Milestone in 1953. The majority of my analysis will focus on Milestone’s film whose originality rests on its conservative – in the North American sense of the term – interpretation of the novel. It is also the latest incarnation of the tradition of the “Bishop’s Candlesticks”.