by David Bellos
Some of the Guernsey children who had lunches at Hauteville House were still living when the French government shipped over a striking monument to the author of Les Misérables in 1914.
The statue was put up in Candie Grounds, and there was a lot of talk about it. Up to the last minute some people was saying it didn’t ought to have been allowed. I like the statue myself. He is standing on the edge of a rock with his coat-tails flying in the wind, and looks as if he was alive. The trouble was that at the top of the gardens there was a statue of Queen Victoria, and all she could see of Victor Hugo was his backside … It’s alright now, because they have built a pavilion between the Queen and Old Victor, so she doesn’t have to look at his behind for the rest of her life.3
However, not quite everyone appreciated Hugo’s invention of the dîner des pauvres in 1862. Charles was the first to raise objections to his father’s idea of how to be good. He accused him of wanting to reinstate the role of a feudal lord, and, worse still, of turning his house into a church because the children were required to say ‘Blessed be God’ at the start and ‘Thanks be to God’ at the end.4 Charles was outraged even more by the fact that Hugo had had photographs taken of the group of poor children gathered around him, and that these Father Christmas scenes were on sale at bookstores in St Peter Port. Charity should not be used as advertising, he thundered. Hugo agreed that the giving of alms should always be discreet, but he insisted that ‘expressions of fraternity’ could only serve as models for others to follow if they are seen. The whole dispute made Charles think that Bishop Myriel in Les Misérables was less a version of the real-life Bishop Miollis than an attempt by his father to portray himself as he wanted to be seen. Charles was not a bad judge of his father, though a harsh one. His understanding of Hugo’s work and life could not but be entangled in emotions ranging from filial pride to resentment, jealousy and even hate.
* * *
Printing of the Paris edition proceeded at a feverish pace at Claye’s works on behalf of the bookseller Pagnerre, who received the corrected proofs direct from Brussels only after Hugo had approved them as ‘good for press’. The plan was to have copies go on sale in Paris the same day they were released in Brussels, Leipzig, London, St Petersburg and other major cities in Europe. Stock was dispatched in advance under guard from Brussels and Leipzig to booksellers outside of France, but it was the Paris edition – the largest printing of all – that was the most fraught with political risk. A last-minute push by Claye meant that the launch date could now be set for 7 April 1862.
Then came a foreseeable disaster: copies of an unauthorized printing of volumes 1 and 2 turned up in Belgium, presumably sold on by a worker in the printing house. There was no time to find the culprit or to use the law, and in any case, no sanction would put the clock back. If the story was out, then out it had to come. Printing was accelerated to a record-breaking rush, and publication brought forward to 4 April.
On 2 April, the editor of the Paris daily Le Temps inserted an announcement over his own name on the imminent appearance of a work that would ‘combine the splendour of Notre-Dame de Paris and the analytical power of Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné [The Last Day of a Condemned Man]’ and its rival La Presse boasted:
the chief work of the greatest creator and greatest writer of the age. All the painful problems, all the raw issues of the nineteenth century are compressed into these ten volumes in the living and dramatic form of characters who will enter universal memory and never leave it.5
These and other papers were also given short extracts to print on their front pages on publication day. Less widely distributed literary and regional periodicals took puffery to even greater heights, referring to Victor Hugo as ‘illustrious master’, ‘the master of masters’ or even ‘the MASTER’ in upper-case oversize font. Such a monument, such a mountain, such a masterpiece simply could not be criticized by the mortals, by the dwarves that we are, wrote Alfred Delvau in Le Junius a few days later. This synchronized hallelujah had two main effects. It raised the hackles of critics, even of friends; and it sold a lot of books. Old allies of Hugo found transparently weak excuses not to attend the launch dinner that Paul Meurice organized for 4 April: George Sand said she was on a diet, Théophile Gautier claimed to have the flu, Jules Janin an attack of gout … But the dinner went ahead. Lacroix came down from Brussels and sat next to Pagnerre. The businessmen were all smiles. Adèle reported to Victor:
‘Les Misérables seems to be doing well?’ I inquired.
‘Madame’, Pagnerre replied, puffing out his fleshy cheeks, ‘by four this afternoon there were 3,500 copies in readers’ hands.’6
By the next afternoon, in fact, the first Paris printing of 6,000 copies was sold out (at six francs per volume, it generated receipts of 72,000 francs). The next day, second-hand volumes (already) were fetching twelve or even twenty francs. A thousand copies from Brussels were relabelled ‘second edition’ and shipped to Paris overnight; the second Paris printing, misleadingly called ‘third edition’, went on sale on 17 April. Lacroix calculated the ratio of direct exports of ‘Fantine’ to the size of national populations, producing a rank order of Hugonic fandom and a map of the distribution of literacy in French: 1 Belgium, 2 France, 3 Portugal, 4 Italy, 5 England, 6 Germany, 7 Spain (though there were rumours that the shipment had been confiscated), 8 Russia.7
Superlatives really are in order. Lacroix had invented at Hugo’s behest the first truly international book launch with an infrastructure that was barely ready for it: paddle steamers, a rail network that still had more gaps than connections, four-horse diligences and maybe, on the approaches to St Petersburg, a jingling three-horse sleigh. Thanks to Adèle and her helpers, the book had been trumpeted in all the media then available in a country that the author refused to enter. Despite the obstacles and the political cloud hanging over their heads, the first two volumes of Les Misérables sold out in two days.
* * *
So ‘Fantine’ was out, and sold out, but the fair copy of Parts IV and V wasn’t even finished, let alone set, corrected and good for press. As Juliette and Julie carried on making the fair copy, Hugo had a mass of proofs for Parts II and III on his hands. He rapped Lacroix on the knuckles repeatedly about paragraphing and punctuation, and his nightly responses to first, second and sometimes third proofs aren’t much fun to read:
p. 85
line 1
after chassait
insert
semi-colon
line 2
after accroissait
insert
semi-colon
p. 86
line 16
for coupable
read criminel8
and so on, page after page. Hugo avoided colons, and considered suspension points and long dashes beneath contempt; but as rules about the use of commas in French were not yet set in stone, he was often ‘corrected’ by compositors, who had to be brought back into line.9 On occasions, he picked up mistakes of gender made by Belgian compositors (pendule, for example, which is masculine in the sense of ‘pendulum’ and feminine in the sense of ‘grandfather clock’) and had to negotiate disagreements about the use of the subjunctive.10
Now that Lacroix knew how the story would unfold on the barricades, he got increasingly nervous about the political backlash the novel might unleash. Rumours that the French government was planning to impound the book arose immediately on the release of ‘Fantine’. Lacroix didn’t dare talk openly about a possible ban or seizure of stock, for which he used the code of l’éventualité, ‘the potentiality’ or ‘the maybe’. There were warning shots: on 11 April, a student was sentenced to a month in prison for having read aloud Hugo’s incendiary poem ‘L’Expiation’ in a café; and a newspaper that had printed a picture of Hugo had its run of 6,000 copies pulped.11 Lacroix’s anxiety increased when, after a suspicious delay of three weeks, the Journal des débats published an outright attack on the political meaning of ‘Fantine’ over the signature not of its editor
Bertin or its regular literary columnist, but of a member of the imperial establishment, Armand Cuvillier-Fleury, the brother-in-law of the foreign minister, Thouvenel. It looked like a signal. Adèle went to remonstrate with the editor, and Hugo wrote a courteous but very firm letter to the critic, protesting that Les Misérables was not a pamphlet but a work of literature.12 Cuvillier was swayed by the letter or perhaps pushed by higher authority, and published a follow-up piece giving Hugo credit for his story-telling gifts, but no further articles appeared in the main national daily on publication of the following volumes of Les Misérables. Hugo himself didn’t think the authorities would dare take action against him and tried both to reassure Lacroix and to urge him to even greater haste: ‘As for the éventualité, you have to exploit the book’s dazzling success, which cloaks it in a degree of literary inviolability.’13
Hugo was not directly exposed to venomous gossip in Paris and Brussels, so perhaps it was easier for him to take the Olympian view. His distanced judgement of the risks turned out to be right and indirectly set a standard for how France handles its troublesome giants. When Sartre broke the law in 1960 by signing a public appeal to French soldiers to disobey orders in Algeria, de Gaulle let him be on the grounds that ‘You can’t jail Voltaire.’ Actually, the ancien régime might well have flung Voltaire into a dungeon. De Gaulle would have been closer to the mark if he’d said, ‘You can’t ban Les Misérables.’ Napoleon III and his ministers realized that they would only reap the whirlwind if they took action against a book with such powerful mass appeal.
* * *
Les Misérables was received with enthusiasm by readers, but it took a beating in the press. Right-wing papers slated it, as they had to, but democratic journals responded with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. Most of the leading critics of the day didn’t review the book, and major dailies ranked it lower than Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Mystères de Paris. Hugo could afford to disregard the critics, but they hurt him nonetheless.
There is a strange misapprehension about this book. It is a work of love and pity; it is a cry for reconciliation; I stretch out a hand from below on behalf of those who suffer to those who think and are my brothers too.
Why is it that some of the people I thought I could count on to cooperate in this useful work of concord greet me with a kind of hatred? The needs of our age will emerge and time will wash this away, but I am sad to see cold shoulders where I hoped to see helping hands.14
One objection raised by a hostile critic was that the basic plot of ‘Fantine’ was impossible. According to him, a hard-labour convict like Valjean would have letters branded on his shoulder. Javert could therefore have resolved any doubt about the identity of M. Madeleine by having the mayor take off his shirt. As a result, the Champmathieu affair and the court case in Arras were artificial episodes, cooked up without regard for historical truth to make a false plea for socialistic penal reform.
But this is wrong. It is true that in the eighteenth century convicts sentenced to hard labour were branded with the letters GAL before being chained and dispatched to Toulon – but no less true that this humiliating ritual was one among many of the barbarous practices of the old regime that was abolished by the revolutionary government in 1789. Valjean was convicted in 1796. He did not have a brand. And as Javert knew this full well, he had no reason to ask the mayor to take off his shirt.
However, the idea that Valjean was branded has made its way from politically motivated attacks on Hugo in 1862 to the West End musical in which the lead tenor reveals his identity by ripping open his shirt to reveal the letters GAL stencilled on his chest. Barbey d’Aurevilly, the writer who fished up this red herring, would have been on firmer ground if he had reviewed the show, not the book.
The bad press made not a jot of difference to the readers of Les Misérables. Their craze reached fever pitch by the time the four volumes of ‘Cosette’ and ‘Marius’ went on sale in May. The heat was turned up by an advertising campaign just as intense as the one heralding the launch of ‘Fantine’. Engravings of Valjean, Myriel, Javert and Cosette were in every bookseller’s window display, and large placards announcing the sequels were posted on walls all over town. Advance extracts – ‘make sure you use the “Waterloo” chapters,’ Hugo insisted – were appearing in several daily newspapers, and Pagnerre was putting his entire book stock into storage to make room for a mountain of Misérables. The print-run of the Paris edition of Parts II and III was twice that of Part I. The stack of 48,000 octavo volumes was big enough to build a barricade, Adèle thought. Pagnerre was worried that his floor would collapse from the strain.
Before dawn on 15 May 1862, a queue began to form in Rue de Seine. Mme Pagnerre appeared in a dressing gown on the balcony to plead for patience until opening time at 6.30 a.m. Even with a policeman keeping the shoppers in line, tempers began to fray. When the doors opened outward on to a street jam-packed with cabriolets, fiacres, handcarts, wheelbarrows – with every and any means of carrying off books – the crush verged on a riot.
Nothing like it had ever been seen in the history of bookselling; and no such scene had ever been presented to the people of Paris before. Other shopkeepers in the street stood gaping in wonderment, they had no clue what was going on and kept on asking what it was all about.15
What was going on was a sell-out. New printings followed within days, and almost by the day. It was a major annoyance to many. As no other books were being bought because Les Misérables was sucking the market dry, Flaubert put off publishing Salammbô for six months. In vaudeville theatres and satirical journals instant parodies in verse and prose mocked and also confirmed the tidal wave of popular enjoyment of Les Misérables. When the word misérable was pronounced on stage in a quite unrelated play, the audience stood up to cheer.16
Just as reports of the triumph of the second instalment of Les Misérables reached Guernsey from Paris, a no less important victory was celebrated at Hauteville House: Juliette Drouet and Julie Chenay completed the fair copy transcription of the manuscript of Parts IV and V. They could now sit back and rest their eyes. The final dispatch left Guernsey on 20 May, with a covering note to Lacroix saying that ‘if this ending doesn’t move people to tears, I’ll give up writing for good’. Hugo, who logged anniversaries with superstitious obsession, also noted that it would get to Belgium on 22 May, exactly 365 days after he had started writing those same chapters at Mont Saint-Jean.17 Before he had the final volumes set in type, Albert Lacroix gathered his workers together and read them the last part of Les Misérables aloud. There were maybe as many as fifty men standing or sitting in the strangely silent printing shop that day – steam engineers, maintenance men, cleaners and shifters, typographers and proof correctors, accountants and stock managers.
I wept. I read it aloud to my associates, and twenty, thirty times I was overcome with emotion, my voice broke, I felt I was present at the death of a dear and beloved friend and I had to stop and suspend the reading, and my associates could not restrain their emotions which brought tears to their eyes too.18
And yet they still had plenty of work to do, and Hugo likewise, under time constraints that had never been so tight. For months, Lacroix had been urging a move to Brussels to make the correction of proofs more secure and more speedy. Now the end was in sight, he repeated his plea to the great man to come and live next to the printing shop.19 But Hugo would not budge. And while a move may have seemed sensible and practical to Lacroix, Hugo was surely wise to resist. He had always been a celebrity, but now that the first six volumes of Les Misérables were an international sensation, he would have been besieged by journalists, well-wishers and petitioners for every imaginable cause in any place less remote than St Peter Port. He kept as close a watch as he could on what was being said about him in the press, but the delay of a few days or a week in his access to diatribes and put-downs made it easier for him not to react off the cuff. It was also fortunate that the nasty gossip in the small world of French letters wasn’t loud enough
to reach ears on an island cliff, for some of it would have raised welts on the thickest of skins. Charles Baudelaire wrote a favourable review of ‘Fantine’20 but told his mother that it proved only that he’d mastered the art of the lie, because Les Misérables was ‘filthy and inept’.21 Gustave Flaubert let out his spite in several letters to friends: ‘This book is written for catholico-socialist shitheads and for the philosophico-evangelical ratpack’ is just one example.22 He objected to the digressions, to the ‘intolerable chattering’, to the ‘stupid twits of the ABC’ … Prosper Mérimée, a gifted writer who had acquired an almost official position at court, reckoned that popular enthusiasm for Les Misérables only showed that humans were less smart than apes.23 Even Alexandre Dumas groused about having to wade through Les Misérables – it was like ‘swimming in mercury’, he said, or wading through mud.24 French writers were a quarrelsome lot, but worse was to come. Alphonse de Lamartine, Hugo’s companion in literary arms since 1820, his friend and his political ally in more recent times, now a ruined man from his disastrous five-month career as president of France, was making a living from an educational enterprise, the Cours familier de littérature, a weekly serial that anthologized extracts from great works and suggested how they should be read. When he dealt with Les Misérables towards the end of 1862, he wrote a devastatingly snide put-down of the entire literary project of Victor Hugo. By that time, however, Hugo had given up trying to fight his corner in the undersize ring he was supposed to be in. He dismissed Lamartine’s attack as doing him no more injury than a bite from a swan. He had already taken an opportunity to insert in the proofs of Part V a sentence that explained why his work was the object of such venomous spite: ‘Genius attracts insult’ (V.1.ii, 1,060).
