If I had learned to read I should not perhaps have stolen the bread. You see, I could not learn to read. When I was at the galleys, I learned. There was a school for convicts.
Valjean isn’t making excuses; he’s tracing the chain that led him to crime. The irony is brutal: he receives education only after the state has already destroyed him for being poor. In his story, stealing bread begins as survival, but society insists on reading it as pure wickedness. That misreading hardens into a sentence, and the sentence hardens into a life-long brand. The plain phrase “I could not learn” carries a whole childhood of closed doors and missing chances. The emotion is Regretful because you can hear him imagining an alternate life where one basic tool changed everything. It also reveals the novel’s larger argument that prevention is more humane than punishment. If you’ve ever mourned the person you might have been with one small advantage, this line hits that exact nerve.