The Novel of the Century

by David Bellos

  It’s possible that Boleslawski knew this – he had been trained in theatre and film at the Moscow Academy of the Arts and most likely understood French very well – and chose to misinterpret the words to justify a much more dramatic prison sequence than any that Hugo provides; but as ‘galley-slave’ has never been an English code-word for ‘convict’ it’s also possible that he simply didn’t know what the words referred to at the time Valjean was sent down.

  The ‘maritime mistake’ incorporated into Boublil and Schönberg’s musical set Tom Hooper an interesting problem when he came to make a film version of it in 2012. His crafty solution was to replace the opening scene below decks with a grand view of convicts hauling a ship into dry-dock beneath the cruel eye of their overseer, Javert. A back-breaking task of that kind is historically plausible – Valjean and his comrades were put to mending roads, breaking stones and shifting ammunition around the naval dockyard (Hugo saw them at it himself when he visited the bagne at Toulon in 1839); and it is also true that in the absence of powered tools the only way of getting a ship into dry-dock was to use a large crew of strong men. A reasonably full circle is therefore now complete, taking Valjean from his actual prison to an imaginary seafaring one and back to dry land again.

  Hugo barely mentions it, but there was a maritime aspect to the hard-labour prison all the same. Convicts were for the most part housed on decommissioned naval vessels and brought ashore each morning by rowboat to do work on land. It solved the problem of housing so many men, and the idea was copied in England, where men sentenced to transportation were parked on rotting hulks in the Thames until there was a vessel ready to take them to the end of the world. One more thing that Dickens’s Magwitch has in common with Jean Valjean.

  3.

  The First Draft

  On 17 November 1845, Hugo took a fresh sheet of writing paper and wrote: ‘In the first days of October 1815, about an hour before sunset, a traveller walked in to the little town of D.’ Since this very sentence opens the second book of Les Misérables there is no doubt that the manuscript page marks the start of the work completed on Guernsey sixteen years later.

  Why did Hugo begin Les Misérables at that time? Why did he choose to write Les Misérables at all? His daughter’s diary entry from December 1855 tells us that the social issues raised in the story of Fantine had been present in his mind ten years before. Pairing the story of a fall into prostitution with a story of a man forced into a crime makes Valjean the male complement of Fantine, if we go by Hugo’s claim in Claude Gueux that poverty was the underlying cause of both catastrophes. He must have been as aware as Balzac was of the immense appeal of Sue’s saga of the underside of the city in Les Mystères de Paris, which deserved a response from his own very different artistic and moral perspective. He also had a contract with his publishers for a ‘second novel’ to follow on from Notre-Dame de Paris, but as he had been steadfastly ignoring it for thirteen years that commitment may be the least important of the reasons why he set himself to writing Les Misérables. But among these various factors there must also have been the sense that, having now accepted responsibility for the nation as a member of its legislature, he had a duty to exercise it in a way that he was uniquely equipped to do: by writing a book.

  All this is speculation, for Hugo left no direct trace of what led him to invent Les Misérables, nor did he leave any record of how he began. There’s no sketch, plan or preliminary synopsis of a novel about a convict, a priest, a prostitute or an orphaned child – at any rate, no such document has been found, and because Hugo hung on to every last scrap he ever wrote, it’s not at all likely he threw any such thing away. Hugo was such an obsessive keeper of his own writing that he even archived notes written on the backs of envelopes. One, addressed to him at the Chambre des pairs (therefore written after April 1845), has the nearest approximation to an ‘idea’ for Les Misérables scrawled on it. It is very short:

  The story of a saint

  The story of a man

  The story of a woman

  The story of a doll25

  The ‘saint’ is presumably Bishop Myriel, the ‘man’ must be Jean Valjean, the ‘woman’ Fantine, and the doll must be the one that Cosette admires and that Valjean buys for her from a stall at the Christmas bazaar at Montfermeil.26 But this jotting isn’t necessarily the ‘first origin’ of Les Misérables. It could equally well be a retrospective checklist of topics noted down when the writing of the novel was already underway.

  The year 1845 was marked by Hugo’s rise to a position of great honour and also by an embarrassing fall. Since 1833, he had pursued a stable and not at all secret extramarital liaison with a former actress, Juliette Drouet, who loved him dearly and stayed by his side for the rest of her life. But he was also a serial philanderer. On 4 July, he was found ‘in crumpled attire’ by two officers of the law in an apartment rented under the name of ‘Mr Apollo’. His consort, Léonie Biard, was a married woman. Because adultery was a criminal offence in France at that time, both lovers faced a trial.

  Adultery abounds in novels of all periods and is especially prominent in French fiction of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, trials for adultery are almost unheard of in fiction and they were quite rare in real life too, principally because disappointed spouses were reluctant to make their marital misfortunes public knowledge. But this case was different. Léonie was already seeking a divorce on grounds of cruelty, so her husband – a painter of no great importance – seized his wife’s affair with a celebrity as an opportunity to strike back. He pressed the charges that the law allowed him to make. Léonie was tried, found guilty and sent to the women’s prison at Saint-Lazare, then confined to a convent for several months. She wasn’t free until the end of the year.

  The name of the co-respondent in the trial of Léonie Biard was supposed to be secret because he was such a prominent man, but it was leaked very soon, and then everyone knew who it was. Within months, Balzac started on a novel about sexual obsession and resentment centred on the life of an obsessive skirt-chaser called Hector Hulot. One episode in Cousine Bette is borrowed directly from life when the hero is found in bed with a woman by police tipped off by her wretch of a spouse; the sergeants in the novel follow exactly the same procedures as the real ones did on encountering ‘Mr Apollo’ in bed with Léonie Biard. The name Balzac chose for his philanderer is so close to that of Victor Hugo as to make the source of the story quite obvious. Libel laws didn’t apply in the same way as they do now, but Balzac was lucky not to have had to face a duel.

  Hector Hulot arranges to have the husband of his mistress paid to drop the legal charges against him. Victor Hugo did not face a trial either, but for a different reason. As a pair de France he could only be tried by his peers, that is to say, in the Chambre des pairs. The king was furious. He did not want parliamentary time wasted on a trivial scandal, and he did not want his judgement called into question by the trial of a man he had only just elevated to high rank. He took immediate action by giving Léonie’s husband a commission for wall-paintings at Versailles. It was the order of a lifetime, and Biard accepted the sole condition – to drop charges against Hugo. The miscreant lover, for his part, was told to make himself scarce and leave town.

  Hugo told his wife Adèle what had happened. Perhaps surprisingly, she took it in her stride. She invited Léonie to dinner at Place Royale once she was out of jail. Adèle even seems to have liked her – at any rate, she treated her as an improvement on Juliette Drouet, who was kept in the dark about the whole affair. But Hugo was incorrigible in that domain. Throughout 1846 and 1847 he weaved his way between three wives. Balzac’s imagination of the sex life of Hector Hulot was not far from the truth about Victor Hugo.

  In the course of the summer, there were rumours that the poet had started a book about a saint, and people joked that he must be doing penance for his unsaintly behaviour. I don’t believe Hugo really suffered pangs of guilt about his sex life at that time or any other. He was certainly emb
arrassed and confused by seeing his lover go to jail while he was let off because he was of high rank. He didn’t think he should be above the law, even if the law was so stupid as to make amorous passion a criminal act. Some commentators have presented the ‘Biard Affair’ as a shipwreck in Hugo’s personal and social life that led him to take refuge in an uplifting tale, but I’m sceptical of that moralizing approach. Hugo’s colleague and fellow poet Alphonse de Lamartine put it more rationally with his famous quip ‘On se relève de tout, même d’un canapé’ (‘You can disentangle yourself from anything, even bed sheets’). Hugo overcame that awkward affair very fast.

  But Les Misérables is unusual among nineteenth-century French novels for not talking at any point about adultery or even sex. Its main characters are celibate: Valjean never marries, falls in love or has relations with a woman; Javert likewise; and the only mistress the idealistic Enjolras entertains is Patria, the feminine Latin noun meaning fatherland.27 Marius and Cosette are virgins before their marriage, and although Gillenormand likes to boast of amorous exploits in times gone by, he doesn’t indulge himself in that way in the course of the novel’s action. That, surely is the main impact of the Biard Affair on Hugo’s intention as he started the first draft of Les Misérables: to write about everything except that.

  Hugo wrote the first draft in fits and starts over twenty-seven months, between November 1845 and February 1848. At times his engagement with the project was so intense that he didn’t get to bed until 1 a.m., which was very late for him (he always rose at dawn). Although the chronology of its composition can be tracked fairly precisely from Hugo’s routine of dating his manuscript sheets, the first draft itself no longer exists as a physical entity. Its pages were overwritten, moved around and woven into the far longer manuscript of the final version, completed twelve years later in a hotel room in Belgium overlooking the site of the Battle of Waterloo. However, a century of scholarly endeavour has allowed the ‘original’ version of Les Misérables to be reconstituted to a high degree of certainty. Thanks to Guy Rosa and his team at the University of Paris-VII, a typeset image of Hugo’s first draft is now accessible to all on the web.

  The reconstructed first draft shows that the story that Hugo invented when he was one of France’s most eminent men is not significantly different from the plot of Les Misérables. The released convict, the charitable bishop, the model factory, the single mother, the evil innkeepers, the exploited waif, life under cover, the escape to a convent, a hesitant courtship, the cheeky urchin, the ambush, the band of students with high ideals, the rumblings of discontent, the riot and the construction of the barricade are all there. Of course, a lot is missing, since the story in first draft is incomplete, stopping before the barricade is assaulted, and therefore prior to the escape through the sewers, the reconciliation of Marius with his grandfather and all that follows. In addition, many of the subplots and all the essay chapters of the corresponding parts of Les Misérables are absent, and few of the characters have the name by which we know them now (the principal exception being Thénardier). Even so, it is a substantial work of around 200,000 words, which would make a 600-page paperback doorstopper nowadays. As it is incomplete, it seems clear that Hugo intended it to be a very long book from the start.

  Once Victor Hugo had got his teeth into a plot that he must have worked out in broad outline in his head near the start, life came up trumps and threw in his path material of just the right kind. But he was also a co-conspirator with happenstance, taking more or less conscious steps to get hold of the right details in time.

  ‘I can’t say why the idea occurred to me’, he wrote, but on 10 September 1846, on his way home from a meeting at the Chambre des pairs, he dropped in at the Conciergerie, the prison next to the law courts on Ile de la Cité. He showed the medal he carried to prove he was a pair de France, and the prison director, Lebel, promptly gave him a guided tour of the gothic pile, with a running commentary on the obscene graffiti, the old torture chamber, death row, the women’s quarter and the section where under-age children were kept, often for trivial offences like stealing peaches from a tree. Lebel also told him about a spectacular escape. A prisoner had jammed his back into the corner made by two walls meeting at an angle of ninety degrees. Using only his elbows and heels as levers, he had hoisted himself to the roof by muscular strength alone. The anecdote went straight into the work in progress, but not for a prison escape. It explains how Valjean got himself into the convent of Petit-Picpus ‘as surely and steadily as if he had ladder rungs under his feet’.28

  Not long before or after his visit to the central prison, as he was crossing the courtyard of the building where the Académie française met, Victor Hugo was accosted by a white-haired fellow in rags who claimed to know him well. He had to look twice to remember: it was an old schoolmate of his, called Joly. What a change! At school, Joly had been a pretty, pampered boy who always gave freely to his friends. He was the only child of rich parents who had died young, leaving him a fortune of 800,000 francs. After his school years, however, Joly spent and gambled it all away and then got into debt. Too accustomed to idleness to get a job, he turned to forging the money he liked to throw about. Short of murder, forgery was the most heavily punished crime in nineteenth-century France. Joly was caught, convicted and given the obligatory sentence of hard labour. He wrote to his old school friend Hugo and asked him to intercede. Ever generous, Hugo approached the minister of justice, who reduced Joly’s sentence by four years. On his release, the ex-convict was given a residence order confining him to the small town of Pontoise (north-east of Paris), just as in Les Misérables Valjean has a residence order for Pontarlier, an industrial town on the Swiss border. However, Joly took no notice of it and went to live among vagrants in Paris. (Valjean also disregards his residence order and settles in Montreuil-sur-Mer, hundreds of miles to the north.) To keep out of sight of police patrols at night, he slept under the bridges on the muddy and often dangerous banks of the Seine (as Paris’s famous quais hadn’t yet been built, the river had rapid rises and falls, depending on rain). When Joly had finished his tale, Hugo put his hand in his pocket to give the man a coin, but the ex-convict stopped him. A hand-out could be construed as begging, and begging was a crime that could have him sent down for life because it would be a second offence. (The same consideration applies in Les Misérables to the man mistaken for Jean Valjean, put on trial for stealing the branch of an apple tree.) Hugo asked Joly to call on him at Place Royale, where he could give alms more discreetly. The reprobate came more than once and soon proved to be an insistent and insolent scrounger. Hugo urged him to mend his ways and was quite baffled by Joly’s resistance. He went on giving money to the old crook for months, but by the end of 1846, Hugo had had enough.29

  The story of Jean Valjean looks like Joly’s turned upside down. Starting from the bottom not the top, guilty of a lesser crime but paying a higher price, Valjean is a model of upward, not downward social mobility, and an example of moral improvement, not of persistence in low life and crime. It is likely that Hugo learned or checked up on details of prison administration and the constraints placed on ex-convicts in conversation with Joly, but it is not possible that he invented the entire story of Valjean as a response to this striking example of a fall, since he had already written quite large parts of what is now Part I of Les Misérables. However, when he was revising his presentation of the student activists and of the barricade scenes in Parts IV and V at Hauteville House in 1861, the story of Joly came back to his mind, because he told it all again over dinners at Hauteville House to his wife Adèle, who put it down in her precious account of ‘Victor Hugo as told by a witness of his life’. Perhaps in memory of the peculiar fellow, Hugo borrowed his name for one of the ‘Friends of the ABC’.

  Hugo gathered other material more actively, by asking for stories and details from people he knew. In June 1847, at Hugo’s request, a naval officer he’d come across wrote down a gripping account of the heroic action of a convic
t working on a naval vessel undergoing repairs at Toulon. A sailor aloft in the rigging loses his footing and nearly falls to his death but manages to cling on to a spar. None of the crew – press-ganged fishermen all – dares go to his aid, but a convict on the chain-gang that was also in the dockyard at the time asks permission to rescue the sailor. He’s detached from his chain, clambers up the mast, ties a rope around the man’s waist, winches him up to the yardarm and then carries him in his arms back to the forecastle. After performing this extraordinary and generous feat, he goes back down and is reattached to his chain.30 Hugo copied this note by Roncière le Noury almost verbatim in II.2.iii, the chapter explaining how Valjean escaped from his second incarceration at Toulon, but he gives it a different ending. Instead of going down to rejoin the gang, Valjean jumps into the sea and disappears.

  Hugo knew he could not write the convent episode without help, because no man could know what life was like behind those high walls. He turned to his beloved Juliette Drouet and also to Léonie (who had resumed her maiden name d’Aunet after her divorce from Biard), with whom he was still having a parallel affair. Juliette wrote out four pages of notes on her life at school in the convent of the Dames de Sainte-Madeleine; Léonie, who had been educated by nuns as well, supplied Hugo with a longer description of the convent of the Perpetual Adoration of the Holy Sacrament, situated at 12, Rue Neuve-St-Geneviève, also in the Latin Quarter.31 Her description of the convent garden is repeated almost verbatim in Les Misérables, but her other memories are blended with Juliette’s to produce an account of convent life that would not strike convent-educated readers as far-fetched or false.

  Two women, a school friend, a naval officer, a prison governor … there were surely many others who, knowingly or not, gave Hugo a detail, an episode, a memory or a piece of technical information that found its place in Les Misérables. Within a decade Émile Zola would build a whole ‘theory of the novel’ on data trawling of just this kind. Hugo never claimed to have a system, but his magpie approach brings Les Misérables closer to the documentary novel than might at first appear.