PENGUIN BOOKS
LES MISÉRABLES
VICTOR HUGO (1802–85) was the most forceful, prolific and versatile of French nineteenth-century writers. He wrote Romantic costume dramas, many volumes of lyrical and satirical verse, political and other journalism, criticism and several novels, the best known of which are Les Misérables (1862) and the youthful Notre Dame de Paris (1831). A royalist and conservative as a young man, Hugo later became a committed social democrat and during the Second Empire of Napoleon III was exiled from France, living in the Channel Islands. He returned to Paris in 1870 and remained a great public figure until his death: his body lay in state under the Arc de Triomphe before being buried in the Panthéon.
NORMAN DENNY was educated at Radley College, and in Vienna and Paris. He has written a great many short stories under different names and several novels. Among his many translations are Prometheus: A Life of Balzac by André Maurois, My Life and Films by Jean Renoir and The Future of Man, by Teilhard de Chardin.
Victor Hugo
LES MISÉRABLES
TRANSLATED AND WITH
AN INTRODUCTION BY
NORMAN DENNY
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1862
This translation first published by the Folio Press 1976
Published in Penguin Books in two volumes 1980
Reprinted in a one-volume edition 1982
This edition published 2012
Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2012
Translation copyright © The Folio Society Limited, 1976
All rights reserved
The footnotes by Professor Marius-François Guyard are used by kind permission of Éditions Garnier Frères
ISBN 978-1-101-61277-4
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Contents
INTRODUCTION
Part One: Fantine
I. AN UPRIGHT MAN
II. THE OUTCAST
III. IN THE YEAR 1817
IV. TO TRUST IS SOMETIMES TO SURRENDER
V. DEGRADATION
VI. JAVERT
VII. THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR
VIII. COUNTER-STROKE
Part Two: Cosette
I. WATERLOO
II. THE SHIP ORION
III. FULFILMENT OF A PROMISE
IV. THE GORBEAU TENEMENT
V. HUNT IN DARKNESS
VI. LE PETIT-PICPUS
VIII. CEMETERIES TAKE WHAT THEY ARE GIVEN
Part Three: Marius
I. PARIS IN MICROCOSM
II. A GRAND BOURGEOIS
III. GRANDFATHER AND GRANDSON
IV. THE ABC SOCIETY
V. THE VIRTUES OF MISFORTUNE
VI. CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS
VII. PATRON-MINETTE
VIII. THE NOXIOUS POOR
Part Four: The Idyll in the Rue Plumet and the Epic of the Rue Saint-Denis
I. A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY
II. ÉPONINE
III. THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET
IV. HELP FROM BELOW MAY BE HELP FROM ABOVE
V. OF WHICH THE END DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING
VI. THE BOY GAVROCHE
VIII. ENCHANTMENT AND DESPAIR
IX. WHERE ARE THEY GOING?
X. 5 JUNE 1832
XI. THE STRAW IN THE WIND
XII. CORINTH
XIII. MARIUS ENTERS THE DARKNESS
XIV. THE GREATNESS OF DESPAIR
XV. IN THE RUE DE L’HOMME-ARMÉ
Part Five: Jean Valjean
I. WAR WITHIN FOUR WALLS
II. THE ENTRAILS OF THE MONSTER
III. MIRE, BUT THE SOUL
IV. JAVERT IN DISARRAY
V. GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER
VI. THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT
VII. THE BITTER CUP
VIII. THE FADING LIGHT
IX. SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN
APPENDIX A: The Convent as an Abstract Idea (Part Two, Book VII)
APPENDIX B: Argot (Part Four, Book VII)
Introduction
I
VICTOR HUGO was born in 1802 at Besançon, now capital of the department of Doubs in eastern France. His father, a career officer in Napoleon’s army, was at that time a major, but he rose eventually to the rank of general and was created a count. His various garrison appointments occasioned a number of removals, and the education of the youthful Victor-Marie was in consequence diversified, taking place in Italy and Spain as well as in Paris, at the Maison des Feuillantines. This was certainly good for him. There may be some doubt as to whether he could really read Tacitus at the age of seven, as he claimed, but he received a very thorough grounding in the humanities.
Hugo was, in short, the precocious son (the youngest of three brothers) of well-to-do middle-class parents. His literary vocation was very soon manifest. A poem written while he was still at school won a literary prize, and in 1819, with his brother Abel, he launched the Conservateur Littéraire, a review which, although it survived for only two years, achieved some prominence as a mouthpiece of the Romantic movement.
He shared with nearly all major writers the quality of abundance. The works poured out in an uneven flood, good, bad and indifferent, splendid at their best and, at their worst, lamentable: some twenty volumes of poetry, of which the best known are Les Châtiments (1853) and Les Contemplations (1856), nine novels, ten plays, mostly in verse (Hernani, Ruy Blas) and a huge amount of general writing, literary, sociological and political. Hugo was always, in the French word, engagé, deeply concerned with the social and political developments of his time. His politics might change in the light of events and as a reflection of his own growth, but his essential position remained unchanged. He was first and foremost, by nature as well as by conviction, a romantic. It was an attitude to life expressing itself in all life’s activities, above all in the arts but a
lso in politics, where it bore the name of liberalism. As time went on and he outgrew the Bonapartism inherited from his father and the royalism inherited from his mother, this liberalism took the form of outspoken republicanism. Universal suffrage and free (compulsory) education were to become the basic tenets of his political creed.
He was greatly afflicted by the death, in 1843, of his daughter, Léopoldine, and for some years there was a pause in the flow of purely literary work; but his political career and his growth as a national figure both continued to progress. Although he was becoming increasingly disenchanted with monarchism he contrived to be on good terms with Louis-Philippe, for whom, as his account in Les Misérables shows, he had both liking and respect. He was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1837, was elected to the Académie Française in 1841 and created a pair de France (a life peer and member of the Upper House) in 1845.
Three years later, when the revolution of 1848 drove Louis-Philippe from the throne, he became a member of the Constituent Assembly of the newly formed republic; but he could not stomach Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire (1851), and since his condemnation of it was too loud to be overlooked he was forced to leave France. After staying for a time in Brussels, he moved to the Channel Islands, first to Jersey and then to Guernsey, where he lived with his wife and family for fourteen years, with the actress Juliette Drouet, his lifelong mistress, close at hand. It was here that he wrote, among other things, Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) and completed the novel which is generally considered to be his masterpiece, Les Misérables, published in 1862.
II
The brothers Goncourt, at that time the high priests of literature in France, were not impressed by Les Misérables. ‘The lack of firsthand observation,’ they wrote, ‘is everywhere painfully manifest. Hugo has built his book, situation and characters alike, on the appearance of reality, not on reality itself.’ This was their conclusion after reading the first volume. Having read the whole book they likened the author to ‘those English preachers who harangue strollers in the parks on a Sunday’.
Professor Marius-François Guyard, from whose meticulously edited and annotated text (Garnier Frères, 1963) this translation has been made, and to whom the present translator is immensely indebted, answers the Goncourts by citing some of the novel’s more unforgettable characters – Jean Valjean, the Thénardiers, Fantine, Javert and, above all, the splendid street-urchin Gavroche. He is silent however on the subject of Marius, that singularly lacklustre young man who is supposedly a portrait of the youthful Victor Hugo himself.
The Goncourts were both right and wrong, right in the narrow sense but not in the large one. They were right about the realism which Hugo strove so laboriously and, on the whole, so unsuccessfully to achieve. No one could have worked harder at it. He read and read, he pored endlessly over maps and documents, and the fruits of his researches so encumber his book that many readers beside the Goncourts must have found themselves unequal to the effort of pursuing it. But this factual realism is constantly at war with the poet. Imaginative realism is another matter. Les Misérables, with its depth of vision and underlying truth, its moments of lyrical quality and of moving compassion, is a novel of towering stature, one of the great works of western literature, a melodrama that is also a morality and a social document embracing a wider field than any other novel of its time, conceived on the scale of War and Peace but even more ambitious.
That is the trouble. The defects which the Goncourts saw, and which no one can fail to see, since they are as monumental as the book itself, may be summed up in the single word, extravagance. Hugo, although as the final result shows he was masterly in the construction of his novel, had little or no regard for the discipline of novel-writing. He was wholly unrestrained and unsparing of his reader. He had to say everything and more than everything; he was incapable of leaving anything out. The book is loaded down with digressions, interpolated discourses, passages of moralizing rhetoric and pedagogic disquisitions.
One reason for this is that it was written over a period of nearly twenty years. A first unfinished novel entitled Misères was written during the three years from 1845 to 1848; it was then put aside for twelve years, to be completed in 1860–62 as Les Misérables. (An untranslatable title: the first meaning of the French misère is simply misery; the second meaning is utmost poverty, destitution; but Hugo’s misérables are not merely the poor and wretched, they are the outcasts, the underdogs, the rejected of society and the rebels against society.)
As to the digressions, many of them are in fact interpolations. Much had happened in the world during the twelve years that the book was laid aside and much had happened to Hugo himself. He had moved steadily away from his right-wing bourgeois origins to the point where he was not only an avowed republican but could openly proclaim himself a socialist. It is not surprising that that earlier work required considerable amendment if it was to conform to the changed viewpoint of the Hugo who returned to it in 1860.
But some of the digressions, or interpolations, are still indefensible, the most flagrant being the account of the Battle of Waterloo, which occupies the third book of Part Two. It is subdivided into nineteen chapters filling sixty-nine pages of the closely printed French text, and only the last chapter, seven pages long, has any real bearing on Hugo’s story. The rest is entirely concerned with the battle. Hugo, as he tells us, had tramped over the battlefield, presumably when he was living in Brussels in 1853; he had studied maps and army-lists and such professional records as were available to him, and out of this he concocted his own elaborate and poeticized layman’s version of an event which, tremendous though it was, had no more to do with the story of Les Misérables than any other major historical event that had occurred during the century.
This is the largest of the digressions, and it is reasonable to assume that the bulk of it was written long before Hugo returned to his novel. The present English version has retained it, very slightly abridged, in the place it occupies in the novel, partly because it is a magnificent piece of writing and also because the episode described in that final chapter is crucial to the story.
Two other long digressions, however, have been treated with less respect. The first is in the seventh book of Part Two, entitled Parenthèse, in which Hugo discourses upon the subject of strictly enclosed religious orders, of which he disapproved (he himself, although he was broadly and sincerely religious, subscribed to no particular orthodoxy). This parenthesis follows immediately upon another, the meticulous (and fascinating) account of life in the Petit-Picpus convent, so that the story, at a highly dramatic point, is left in mid-air for some fifty pages. Hugo’s publisher, Lacroix, feeling that this would be trying the reader’s patience altogether too high, urged him to take it out; but Hugo refused, as it seems for purely personal reasons: his cousin Marie, to whom he was attached, had taken the veil in 1848. This section has accordingly been removed from the body of the book and transferred to the end as Appendix A.
The discourse on argot (Book Seven, Part Four) has been similarly treated and is relegated to Appendix B in Volume II. Here little explanation is needed. In so far as it related directly to the argot (Paris underworld slang) of Hugo’s day, his discourse, with its numerous examples, can be of interest only to specialists; where it spreads into the wider field of the general significance of thieves’ cant (a digression within a digression!) it is more interesting; but in any event it does nothing to advance the story.
The other digressions, homilies and disquisitions, or simply over-large elaborations, have been left where they were, but in some cases, particularly those of over-elaboration, they have been somewhat abridged. And here I must abandon any suggestion of the editorial ‘we’ and state as plainly as I can my personal approach to the translation of Les Misérables and the liberties I have felt justified in taking with Hugo’s text.
III
There are three earlier English renderings of Hugo’s novel, of which I have seen only one. I shall not disclose which one,
or make any comment except to say that I found it very heavy going. It was made at the turn of the century and the translator, conscientiously observing the principles of translation at that time, has made a brave attempt to follow Hugo in the smallest detail, almost literally word for word. The result is something that is not English, not Hugo and, it seems to me, scarcely readable. It reads, in short, like a translation and it does no service to Hugo. I am told that the other English versions, which I have not seen, are not very different.
The principles of translation have greatly changed in the past twenty or thirty years. It is now generally recognized that the translator’s first concern must be with his author’s intention; not with the words he uses or with the way he uses them, if they have a different impact when they are rendered too faithfully into English, but with what he is seeking to convey to the reader. This, of course, embraces a great deal more than literal meaning or the plain statement of fact: feeling, colour, poetry, humour, irony, all these are elements which the translator may on no account ignore; he must catch them as best he can. But there is an overriding intention, larger than all others. The author – each and every author – writes because he wants to be read. Readability must be the translator’s first concern. Sometimes he is set an impossible task. There are writers who may fairly be termed unreadable. But Victor Hugo is not one of them. He is in many ways the most exasperating of writers – long-winded, extravagant in his use of words (it is not uncommon to find eight or ten adjectives appended to a single noun), sprawling and self-indulgent. At times (the vanity for which he was famous may account for it) he was, with all his high-minded earnestness, extraordinarily lacking in self-criticism. There are passages of mediocrity and banality in Les Misérables, as in all his work, which may cause the reader to lose all patience with him and put the book aside, without having ever reached the nobility of spirit that inspired it.
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