by Victor Hugo
Book Seven: Patron-Minette
4 (p. 415) the descending ladder: L’échelle des êtres renders the English “the Great Chain of Being,” the concept that all created things are arranged in an infinite hierarchy of relative perfection, each rung separated by the least possible degree of distance, but with an infinite distance between the highest of the angels, and God. Hugo believes in successive reincarnations: we rise or fall according to our merits in each life. At the end of time, all beings, even Satan, will be redeemed by suffering and taken up into the bosom of God. To begin the paragraph, Hugo half-playfully and half-seriously ranks a series of theologians and philosophers according to the relative spirituality of their doctrines.
Book Eight: The Criminal Poor
5 (p. 433) “Sometimes I go away at night.... When one has not eaten, it is very queer”: Hugo, who was relatively insensitive to women, had diffi culty portraying them in interesting ways. This paragraph is an exception. Eponine describes an altered state of consciousness, brought about by starvation, in which her hallucinations show her haunted by guilt, and fearing death on the gallows. The stars seem accusing spotlights focusing on her; but they seem to be guttering out like candles (as did the stars around Satan when he fell into the Pit in La Fin de Satan). For God to be absent would be even worse than His accusing presence. The horses would be those of the mounted police pursuing her.
6 (p. 464) Nos amours ... devrait durer toujours: Our love lasted for an entire week; / How briefly the moments of joy descend! / A love that short was not worthwhile to seek! / The time of our love should have known no end! / Should have known no end! Should have known no end!
7 (p. 474) “No more than before”: Hugo can dramatize the combination of an emotional reaction and of perfect self-control only with an absurdity With the next remark, “Marius did not hear this answer,” Hugo drops the pretense of seeing everything through the young man’s eyes, in order to dramatize the intensity of Marius’s reaction to the revelation of Thénardier’s identity. “Could anyone have seen him ... in that darkness” introduces an episodic observer who is incapable of observation, because Hugo wants to intensify “the reality effect” of the events by multiplying the numbers and the viewpoints of the spectators.
8 (p. 477) David desired to immortalise that feat of arms: Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) dominated French painting for the last forty years of his life. He was Napoléon’s official painter, working in the “Neoclassic Stoic” style that evoked heroic feats under the ancient Roman Empire and the Roman Republic. He never would have bothered to immortalize the deeds of an obscure person such as Thénardier, even if the latter had been a soldier rather than a scavenger. To exalt his importance, Thénardier promotes Pontmercy by at least one grade in rank (from Colonel to General), and by two grades of nobility (counts outranked viscounts, who outranked barons).
9 (p. 481) all this... was awkward for Marius, and painfully astonished him: This detail prepares for the final chapters. Until just before the very end, Marius feels uncomfortable with Jean Valjean, and will suspect him of having stolen the 600,000 francs he offers Cosette, and of having murdered Javert at the barricade to exact revenge. Thus, having married Cosette, Marius will progressively discourage Valjean from seeing her.
Part IV: The Epic on the Rue Saint-Denis and the Idyll of the Rue Plumet
Book One: A Few Pages of History
1 (p. 499) A capital error which led that family to lay its hand upon the guarantees “granted” in 1814.... our rights: As early as 1830, Hugo had bluntly warned the French monarchs at least to accept gracefully the compromise of constitutional monarchy, comparing the People, on the march, to a rising tide: Rois, hatez-vous! Rentrez dans le siècle où nous sommes,
Quittez l‘ancien rivage!—À cette mer des hommes
Faites place, ou voyez si vous voulez périr
Sur le siècle passé que son flot doit couvrir !
[Kings, hasten to reenter our age, / Leave ancient shores!—To human seas in rage / Give way, or realize you’ll soon have died / On outmoded strands covered by that tide!]
Book Eight: Enchantment and Despair
2 (p. 581) “Why does life continue afterwards?” Hugo thinks sadly of his passionate devotion to his childhood playmate Adèle Foucher, whom he married at twenty. They had four children in eight years. Exhausted by her pregnancies, she refused to have sex with him any longer, and soon betrayed him with his best friend, Sainte-Beuve. The Hugos stayed together but were never any more than friends thenceforth, whereas Adèle’s affair with Sainte-Beuve continued secretly, on and off, for decades.
Part V: Jean Valjean
Book One: War between Four Walls
1 (p. 686) On est laid à Nanterre ... C‘est la faute de Rousseau: These lines and the ones that follow translate as: “They’re ugly in Nanterre / It’s the fault of Voltaire, / And dumb in Palaiseau, / It’s the fault of Rousseau. // I’m not a notary, / ... / I am a little bird, /...// Joyous my character, / ... / Poverty my trousseau, / . . . // I have fallen down, /... / My nose in the gutter, / ... //
INSPIRED BY LES MISÉRABLES
Musical
“I thought it would last two or three years,” Cameron Mackintosh, producer of the record-breaking musical adaptation of Les Misérables, told the New York Times. So much for theatrical fortune-telling. The Broadway production of “Les Miz” was one of the most successful musicals of all time. The show originally opened on September 17, 1980, in Paris and in 1985 premiered in London, directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird of the Royal Shakespeare Company. On March 12, 1987, the London production came to Broadway. Like Hugo’s novel, the musical was initially greeted with mixed reviews, but it was soon embraced by the theater-going public. The New York production ran for sixteen years, until March 15, 2003. Les Misérables is the second longest running musical in Broadway history, second only to the T. S. Eliot-inspired Cats.
The musical Les Misérables was created by Claude-Michel Schönberg (music) and Alain Boublil (original French lyrics), who together wrote the songbook; Herbert Kretzmer wrote the lyrics for the American version. The three-hour spectacle features fluid costumes that are simultaneously ragged and glamorous, revolving sets, sweeping lights, and a showcase of memorable numbers. The production is passionate, ecstatically energetic, and ultimately uplifting.
Les Misérables has been produced in thirty-eight countries and twenty-one languages, and has received numerous awards the world over. In the United States, it won eight Tony Awards—Best Book, Best Score, Best Set Design, Best Lighting, Best Actor (Michael Maguire), Best Actress (Frances Ruffelle), Best Director (Trevor Nunn), and Best Musical. Les Misérables also won two Grammys: one for a 1988 cast recording and another for a 1991 symphonic recording, one of a total of thirty-one recordings that have been made.
Film
The first feature film based on the novel was Charles Pathé’s version of 1909, the same year J. Stuart Blackton filmed Les Misérables in England. Indeed, France’s first film to find a wide international audience was Albert Capellani’s faithful screen version of 1912. Fredric March played Jean Val jean and Charles Laughton was Inspector Javert in Richard Boleslawski’s superbly staged version of 1935. Les Misérables has been filmed more than twenty times, including musical productions.
In the mid-1990s a suite of film adaptations appeared, perhaps prompted by the hugely popular musical. Writer and director Claude Lelouch’s brilliant 1995 retelling of the novel is a layered epic that takes Hugo’s novel as its central reference point, much in the same way that Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours draws on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Set during the Nazi occupation of France, Lelouch’s Les Misérables focuses on Henri Fortin, an illiterate boxer turned furniture mover who comes to see parallels between himself and Jean Valjean. The film moves between Fortin’s tale, the story of his father, and scenes from Hugo’s novel. Fortin is played by legendary French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, now aged and creased, and convincingly miserable; he als
o plays Fortin’s father and Jean Valjean. Belmondo’s exemplary performances and Lelouch’s skillfully woven cinematic tapestry unify all three stories, rendering them incarnations of one story: the common man’s struggle against the implacable powers that be.
Director Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror and Smilla’s Sense of Snow) remains strictly faithful to Hugo’s text and sets his 1998 film of Les Misérables in early-nineteenth-century France. This sweeping costume drama, which stars Liam Neeson as Valjean, avoids political overtones and concentrates instead on the adversarial relationship between the persevering Valjean and Geoffrey Rush’s icy Javert, characters who are more similar than different. The all-star cast includes Uma Thurman as a pallid Fantine, Claire Danes as Cosette, and Hans Matheson as Marius.
In 2000 director Josée Dayan, screenwriter Didier Decoin, and actor Gérard Depardieu collaborated in a faithful, made-for-television adaptation. The three talents, who had collaborated on The Count of Monte Cristo and a bio-pic of Balzac, convey the grit, grimness, and grime of pre-Revolution street life. The film stars Depardieu as Jean Valjean and John Malkovich as his nemesis Javert.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables through a variety of voices and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE
Fantine, the first of five novels under the general title of Les Misérables, has produced an impression all over Europe, and we already hear of nine translations. It has evidently been “engineered” with immense energy by the French publisher. Translations have appeared in numerous languages almost simultaneously with its publication in Paris. Every resource of bookselling ingenuity has been exhausted in order to make every human being who can read think that the salvation of his body and soul depends on his reading Les Misérables. The glory and the obloquy of the author have both been forced into aids to a system of puffing at which Barnum himself would stare amazed, and confess that he had never conceived of a “dodge” in which literary genius and philanthropy could be allied with the grossest bookselling humbug. But we trust that, after our American show man has recovered from his first shock of surprise, he will vindicate the claim of America to be considered the “first nation on the face of the earth,” by immediately offering Dickens a hundred thousand dollars to superintend his exhibition of dogs, and Florence Nightingale a half a mil lion to appear at his exhibition of babies.
The French bookseller also piqued the curiosity of the universal public by a story that Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables twenty-five years ago, but, being bound to give a certain French publisher all his works after his first cel ebrated novel, he would not delight the world with this product of his genius until he had forced the said publisher into a compliance with his terms. The publisher shrank aghast from the sum which the author demanded, and this sum was yearly increased in amount, as years rolled away and as Victor Hugo’s reputation grew more splendid. At last the publisher died, probably from vexation, and Victor Hugo was free. Then he condescended to allow the present publisher to issue Les Misérables on the payment of eighty thousand dollars. It is not surprising, that, to get his money back, this publisher has been compelled to resort to tricks which exceed everything known in the whole history of literature....
From the bare abstract, the story does not seem to promise much pleasure to novel-readers, yet it is all alive with the fiery genius of Victor Hugo, and the whole representation is so intense and vivid that it is impossible to escape from the fascination it exerts over the mind. Few who take the book up will leave it until they have read it through. It is morbid to a degree that no eminent English author, not even Lord Byron, ever approached; but its morbid elements are so combined with sentiments abstractly Christian that it is calculated to wield a more pernicious influence than Byron ever exerted. Its tendency is to weaken that abhorrence of crime which is the great shield of most of the virtue which society possesses, and it does this by attempting to prove that society itself is responsible for crimes it cannot prevent, but can only punish. To legislators, to Magdalen societies, to prison-reformers, it may suggest many useful hints; but, considered as a passionate romance, appealing to the sympathies of the ordinary readers of novels, it will do infinitely more harm than good. The bigotries of virtue are better than the charities of vice. On the whole, therefore, we think that Victor Hugo, when he stood out twenty-five years for his price, did a service to the human race. The great value of his new gospel consisted in its not being published. We wish that another quarter of a century had elapsed before it found a bookseller capable of venturing on so reckless a speculation.
—from The Atlantic Monthly (July 1862)
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
In Les Misérables ... there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary restraint that Hugo has ever made: there is here certainly the ripest and most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention of this great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be—for such awakenings are unpleasant—to the great cost of this society that we enjoy and profit by, to the labor and sweat of those who support the litter, civilization, in which we ourselves are so smoothly carried forward. People are all glad to shut their eyes; and it gives them a very simple pleasure when they can forget that our laws commit a million individual injustices, to be once roughly just in the general; that the bread that we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death—by the deaths of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out with labor, and the deaths of those criminals called tyrants and revolutionaries, and the deaths of those revolutionaries called criminals. It is to something of all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men’s eyes in Les Miserables; and this moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence with the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilization to those who are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad between its formidable wheels with the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the street lamp, recognizes the face of the detective; as when the lantern of the patrol flashes suddenly through the darkness of the sewer; or as when the fugitive comes forth at last at evening, by the quiet riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting stolidly for vice and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The whole book is full of oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the great cause of oppression. We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand, the prejudices of Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the barricade, and the throned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then we have the admirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who had made a religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when he learned that there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just creation, over which the reader will do well to ponder.
With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water
, stands in admiration before the illuminated booth and the huckster behind “lui faisait un peu l‘effet d’etre le Père éternal?” The pathos of the forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation of the Santa Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is nothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of Cosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our profound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are few books in the world that can be compared with it.
—from Cornhill Magazine (August 1874)
NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS
Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” represents the first attempt in fiction to show that if sin dims the divine image, conscience disturbs the soul with sore discontent, while Christ never despairs of making bad men good, but toils ever on until publican and outcast alike stand forth, clothed in every courage, every heroism, and every virtue, being of goodness all compact.
—from Great Books as Life-Teachers: Studies of
Character Real and Ideal (1898)
GEORGE MCLEAN HARPER
It has always been impossible for [Hugo‘s] English and American critics to find common ground. Matthew Arnold, for example, could say of him, in that apparently casual and parenthetical manner which veils some of his most audacious assumptions, that if the French were more at home in the higher regions of poetry “they would perceive with us that M. Victor Hugo, for instance, or Sir Walter Scott, may be a great romance-writer, and may yet be by no means a great poet.” In the eyes of Mr. Swinburne, Hugo was “the greatest Frenchman of all time,” “the greatest poet of the century,” “the spiritual sovereign of the nineteenth century,”—no less! Mr. Dowden, in an eloquent and sympathetic essay, considers chiefly Victor Hugo’s public aspect,—his relation to politics, his patriotism, his character as a representative Frenchman. Throughout at least the early half of Hugo’s career a large part of our public knew him as a dramatist and romancer almost exclusively. And yet, of the eminent French writers who, in this hundredth year from his birth, are estimating his place and importance in their literature, it is unlikely that many will take his romances into very serious account, or treat his dramas as if they possessed much vital and intrinsic excellence. Already, too, as in the case of Coleridge, it is being said of Victor Hugo that his value lies in the innovations which he made and the impulse he gave to other writers as much as in the power or the beauty of his works.
