by David Bellos
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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
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For my students
Author’s Note: On Reading Les Misérables
A lot of people come across the stories of Fantine, Cosette, the Thénardiers, Valjean, Javert, Marius and Gavroche in some form or another when they are young. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t part of the crowd and I didn’t encounter Les Misérables until much later on, in circumstances that aren’t very creditable in the life of a professor of French. I was actually looking for a light but long book to take with me on a hike, to read by lamplight in the tent, and a one-volume edition of Hugo’s novel printed on Bible paper sitting unread on my shelf struck me as having the highest reading-to-weight ratio in the universe. I slipped it into a little bag and took it along. The camping trip on a long-distance trail in the Alps turned out to be a disaster. It rained and it snowed, I caught a cold and then gave up. We trudged down a mountain path and found a hotel, where I wrapped myself in warm blankets and in Les Misérables.
I was entranced. I stayed ill rather longer than necessary in order to follow this moving, challenging and immensely engaging tale to the end. I had never before read a work so extraordinarily diverse yet so tightly wound round its central thread. Les Misérables may be a monster in size, but there’s nothing baggy about it. I don’t think I’m allowed to urge you to take sick leave to repeat the experience that I had, nor do I dare suggest you abandon your holiday plans to make time to consume a 1,500-page novel in one gulp. But I doubt you’ll regret it if you do.
Fortunately, there is a more practical way to enjoy Hugo’s novel within a busy life. Les Misérables consists of five ‘parts’, divided respectively into 8, 8, 8, 15 and 9 ‘books’, making 48 in all. Each ‘book’ consists of a number of chapters, varying from none at all (Part V, Book 4, conventionally designated V.4, counts as a chapter all on its own) to 22 (III.8, the longest ‘book’, which ends with the dramatic denouement of the ambush at 50–52, Boulevard de l’Hôpital). The divisions weren’t made until the final preparation of the manuscript for printing in the winter of 1861–2, and Hugo never let on, or perhaps never consciously registered, what the underlying numerical design of his book was. But the fact is that Les Misérables is made of exactly 365 chapters. You can therefore read one chapter a day – most of them are quite short – and complete Hugo’s vast novel of love and revolution in the time that it takes planet Earth to complete its revolution around the sun.
‘Everything in a work of art is an act of the will,’ Hugo wrote in an introduction to his own son’s translation of Shakespeare into French.1 What makes Les Misérables such an amazing work of art is that despite its length, its complexity and its vast scope, every detail and every dimension – even if not made explicit – was designed, calculated and decided by the author.
* * *
Nineteenth-century France was a turbulent and frequently violent place, but it was also uncommonly generous to the rest of the world. From the Revolution of 1789 to the dawn of the twentieth century it gave away many treasures for free – the Rights of Man, decimal currency, knowledge of hieroglyphics, photography, cinema, the Statue of Liberty, pasteurized milk … the list could go on and on. Its painters and composers set new standards that we still admire, and its writers still dominate our ideas of what poetry and fiction can be. But among all the gifts France has given to Hollywood, Broadway and the common reader wherever she may be, Les Misérables stands out as the greatest by far. This reconstruction of how this extraordinary novel arose, how it was published, what it means and what it has become is my way of saying thank you to France.
Translations and References
There are many translations into English of Victor Hugo’s novel, done in different countries at different times. In this book, quotations from Les Misérables are taken from the most recent translation, by Christine Donougher, published by Penguin in 2013, with occasional adaptations of my own, which are signalled when they arise.
References are expressed in alternating Roman and Arabic numerals referring to Part, Book, and Chapter number, so the rough place of a quotation can be found in any complete edition. The page number following takes you directly to Christine Donougher’s English translation.
Translations of other sources quoted are my own, unless otherwise indicated in footnotes or in the works cited at the end of this book.
France After Waterloo
The Journey of Les Misérables
Introduction: The Journey of Les Misérables
The Commodore Clipper, a 14,000-ton roll-on roll-off ferry, leaves Portsmouth early in the morning, glides through the naval dockyards at walking pace, gathers speed as the Isle of Wight passes on the starboard side and reaches twenty-two knots in the open waters of the English Channel. The swell can toss small boats up and down, but the ferry’s stabilizers deceive you into thinking the sea is made of rippled gelatine. Before long, the westernmost tip of the Cotentin peninsula comes into view; then the ship clears Cap de la Hague to port, heads for the low bar of Sark and, after skirting round Herm and picking its way among jagged rocks breaking the surface of a blue-green sea, enters the harbour of St Peter Port, on the island of Guernsey. The countryside around it is lush and green. The first daffodils bloom before January is out.
Victor Hugo landed here at around ten in the morning of 31 October 1855, after a shorter but rougher crossing in wind and rain on a 300-ton paddle steamer from St Helier, in Jersey. But even the tiny Courier was too big to dock at St Peter Port in those days. The poet and his party had to clamber down ladders into small boats to be rowed ashore. Dock hands took care of the baggage, including the all-important manuscript trunk.1
Anyone landing in much greater comfort and safety on the Commodore Clipper nowadays sees much the same quaint townscape as Hugo did. It’s only a short walk from the new harbour to the steps up to High Street, and from there the same lane takes you to Hauteville Street, lined with three-storey town houses built in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Halfway up is a large, plain, double-fronted mansion now marked by a tricolour flag and a nameplate declaring it to be the property of the City of Paris and the Maison de Victor Hugo. That’s because Hauteville House, at St Peter Port, Guernsey, is the unlikely location where the most extraordinary novel ever written in French was made.
How did a tiny feudal outpost of the British Crown come to serve as the workbench for a vast panorama of nineteenth-century France? There’s barely a word that refers to the Channel Islands in all of Les Misérables, yet it is hard to imagine how it could have been brought to completion without the sanctuary provided by Hauteville House. The story of the long-drawn-out composition of this very long book is almost as dramatic as the story it tells.
Victor Hugo didn’t land on Guernsey in 1855 in search of a comfortable writer’s retreat, but because he had nowhere else to go. Despite his celebrity status on the European stage, he was a migrant and a refugee – in the l
anguage of the day, a proscrit. Les Misérables is a novel of the poor, the downtrodden and the outcast. It was expanded on Guernsey from a draft into a masterpiece by a man who was an outcast himself.
From the day of its publication on 4 April 1862, Les Misérables has remained at the forefront of bestseller lists the world over. It has been read in French and in hundreds of translations by millions of people in any country you care to name. It was turned into a play within weeks and has been adapted for radio and the cinema screen over the last century and a half more than any other literary work. But the unique adventure of Les Misérables as a global cultural resource did not come about by chance. From his roof terrace with its wonderful view of Sark and the sea, Victor Hugo always intended his great work to speak far beyond the borders of France, and beyond the pages of a book. Most plans to conquer the whole world with a story go awry. Les Misérables is a wonderful exception.
But the popularity of the story and the characters Hugo created and their frequent reuse in mass-market entertainments have had a depressing effect on attitudes towards his book. Judging Les Misérables by the sometimes inept adaptations of it in comic strips, cartoons and stage musicals, serious readers have often turned up their noses at a work they assume to fall below the level of great art. It’s not a scientific survey, but I think it’s significant that a higher proportion of baristas and office staff than literature professors I’ve met have read Les Misérables from end to end. However, the modern division of ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ fiction had hardly been invented when Hugo wrote it. ‘I do not know whether it will be read by all,’ he told the publisher of the Italian translation, ‘but I wrote it for everyone.’ It did not occur to him that a masterpiece could not be a blockbuster too, and he saw no reason why ‘everyone’ should not be served the same fare as literary connoisseurs. To have done anything less would have been contrary to the moral and political aims of his book.
* * *
Les Misérables is divided into five parts. Part I, ‘Fantine’, focuses on an abandoned single mother who loses her job and falls into prostitution, a brush with the law and an early death. Part II, ‘Cosette’, foregrounds Fantine’s daughter, who is cruelly exploited by foster-parents and then rescued by the novel’s hero, who brings her up to become a young lady. Part III, ‘Marius’, features a middle-class student who joins a group of political idealists and fights with them in a failed attempt to overthrow the monarchy. Part IV, ‘The Idyll of Rue Plumet and the Epic of Rue Saint-Denis’, alternates between the love affair of Cosette and Marius that blossoms in the garden of a house in Rue Plumet and the students’ barricade in a small street off Rue Saint-Denis, in the heart of old Paris. Part V is entitled ‘Jean Valjean’ after the ex-convict whose life-story from the age of forty-five to his death twenty years later is the narrative backbone of the novel.
Valjean’s life before 1815 is told in a few paragraphs. A sturdy, uneducated peasant from Faverolles (a village in Brie, to the east of Paris), he is sentenced to hard labour in his mid-twenties for stealing a loaf of bread. He emerges from prison after nineteen years inside, and the novel really begins with his release a few weeks after the Battle of Waterloo. Rejected by innkeepers in a small town on his route north from Toulon because he is an ex-convict, Valjean is offered hospitality by the local bishop, Monseigneur Myriel. He is overwhelmed by the unexpected kindness of the priest and resolves to become a better man. Valjean uses the bishop’s charitable gift to go into business under the assumed name of M. Madeleine at Montreuil-sur-Mer, a small town on the Channel coast. He makes a fortune, earns respect and is pressed into accepting the position of mayor. That is where he encounters Fantine.
Fantine’s back-story is more extended. A child of the streets from Montreuil-sur-Mer, she goes to Paris to find work and then becomes the lover of a heartless student, Tholomyès, with whom she has a child. In 1817, he abandons her without a penny. She returns to her hometown because she has heard there are jobs to be had, leaving her child to be fostered by the Thénardiers, innkeepers she comes across at the village of Montfermeil. (All the place names are real and can be found on a map of France.) Fantine has a few months of relative comfort in her factory job but she is sacked when her supervisor discovers she has an illegitimate child. She tries to survive on sewing but when piecework rates sink, she has no choice but to go on the streets. One winter’s night, she is accosted by a middle-class lout called Bamatabois. She fights back and is arrested by the local police chief, Javert. Mayor Madeleine (that is to say, Jean Valjean) intervenes to save her from a prison sentence. When he learns that her plight is the indirect result of his own factory’s policy, he promises to look after her child.
At Montreuil, Javert, who had formerly worked as a prison guard, suspects he has seen the mayor before and is even more suspicious when Madeleine displays formidable strength in rescuing a local carter, Fauchelevent, from under his overturned waggon. These suspicions as to the true identity of the taciturn factory boss are swept away when a vagrant, arrested for stealing an apple-tree branch, is identified as the missing ex-convict Valjean. Madeleine now faces a terrible choice: to let the vagrant take the rap, or to give himself up. After a night of soul-searching, he bursts into the courthouse in Arras and declares his true identity. He is sent back to the hard-labour jail in Toulon for life.
He makes a daring escape and recovers the savings he had put in a buried chest. He persuades the Thénardiers to let him take Cosette away from their brutal care and settles in a quiet corner of Paris, where he brings her up as his daughter (she never learns his real name and calls him ‘father’). He lives modestly, but in emulation of the good bishop who had transformed his moral perspective, he never fails to give alms to the poor. Rumours about the existence of a ‘rich pauper’ in the area reach the ears of the newly appointed chief detective – none other than Javert, promoted from his previous position at Montreuil-sur-Mer. Javert sets a trap and nearly catches Valjean, who escapes the dragnet by climbing over a high wall and hoisting up Cosette after him.
Valjean and Cosette don’t know where they are in the dark, but suddenly a man recognizes them: it is Fauchelevent, now working as a gardener in the Convent of the Perpetual Adoration. He is the only man tolerated in this all-female cloister, but out of gratitude for the former mayor who had saved his life he takes on Valjean as assistant gardener, claiming him as his younger brother, Ultime. Cosette is admitted to the convent school, where she is given a regular education. The pair live on in their impenetrable sanctuary for five years and leave it only when Cosette has turned from a girl into a beautiful young woman.
Valjean then rents a well-hidden house in Rue Plumet. On walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, Cosette is noticed by a handsome student, Marius Pontmercy. Marius’s back-story is more elaborate and told at greater length. He is the son of a soldier in Napoleon’s army who while lying wounded after the Battle of Waterloo was saved but also robbed by a camp-follower called Thénardier. His mother had died when he was an infant, and his father, constantly absent on military campaigns abroad, had had no choice but to let him be cared for by his maternal grandfather, Gillenormand, an aged eccentric who insists on dressing, speaking and behaving as if the French Revolution never happened. He hands on to Marius his own reactionary and royalist views, but when the young man discovers who his father really was, he becomes a passionate admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte. Marius picks a fight with his grandfather and storms out of the house to live on his own. He is befriended by a group of student activists who call themselves ‘The Friends of the ABC’ – but he also falls head over heels in love with the girl he has seen in the park.
The Thénardiers, meanwhile, have lost their inn and moved to Paris, where they live in the same squalid lodging house where Valjean and Cosette had lived years before, and where Marius now also resides. They use their daughters, Azelma and Éponine, to operate a scam: they hand letters written under false identities to well-off people in the streets, hoping to elicit charitable
gifts.2 Valjean falls for one such approach, and agrees to visit the allegedly starving family under one of its many pseudonyms. He takes Cosette along with him so she can experience the practice of giving alms to the needy. The paupers’ neighbour, who is none other than Marius, sees his beloved in the room next door through a gap in the wall. After her departure, he also hears the Thénardiers plotting to rob the white-haired gentleman because they reckon he is a millionaire. Marius is in a bind: he has to save Cosette’s father from an ambush, but he also realizes that the crook in the next room is the man who saved his own father’s life. When Valjean returns to complete his charitable gift, he is tied to a chair and tortured by Thénardier and his sinister gang. Marius has alerted the police to the planned ambush and lets off a warning shot. In the ensuing arrest of the criminals, Valjean, who remains Javert’s most wanted prey, escapes yet again.
Marius doesn’t know who the beautiful young woman he so desires really is or how to find her again. However, Thénardier’s daughter Éponine has a crush on him as well as contacts in the underworld. She leads Marius to the house in Rue Plumet where Cosette lives. A touching teenage romance ensues, through late-night meetings in the lush and secluded garden of the house.
Meanwhile, unrest is brewing among the working people of Paris. Riots erupt after the funeral of a well-known republican general. However, Marius realizes that his grandfather will never allow him to marry Cosette; worse still, Cosette reports that her father plans to move to England to keep her safe in case the looming strife turns into a violent revolution. In lovelorn despair, Marius throws in his lot with his student friends and goes to get himself killed on a barricade. Valjean intercepts the correspondence between the two lovers and decides that, however much it pains him to lose his adopted daughter, he has a duty to save the life of the man she loves. He sets off to bring Marius back from the barricade.
