Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

1 (p. 14) a senator of the empire... wrote to M. Bigot de Préameneu: The Senator who complains of Myriel’s asking 3,000 francs annually for “carriage expenses” had been rewarded with a rich estate for supporting Napoléon’s quasi-legal coup d‘état of the dix-huit Brumaire (May 18,1804), by means of which he became Emperor. The name of the Minister of Public Worship, Bigot, means a narrow-mindedly, excessively religious person.

2 (p. 21) Some admire it, like Le Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria: Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), a far-right Ultramontanist, advo cated for restoring supreme authority in all church matters to the Pope. He was the leading polemicist against the French Revolution, characterizing its disorders as Evil being forced by God to cleanse itself with its own hands (through the deaths of rival revolutionary leaders during the Reign of Terror in 1793). He believed that constitutions and all human institutions derive from God. The English writer Edmund Burke was his Anglo-Saxon counterpart. Cesare de Beccaria (1738-1794), an economist and criminologist, wrote the influential Traité des délits et des peines (A Treatise on Felonies and Their Punishment), which had great influence on eliminating the death penalty in certain places, and in securing a more humane treatment for prisoners. Hugo greatly admired his work.

3 (p. 26) This man . . . had been a member of the National Convention: The Convention Nationale, a revolutionary legislative body, ruled France from September 21, 1792, till October 6,1795. It proclaimed the First French Republic, defended France against royalist insurrections in the Vendée (the Loire valley and Brittany) and the South, forced the coalition of European monarchs to sign a peace treaty, and condemned the King to death for treason after he tried to flee France secretly to join these Allied Powers. The old conventionist whom Myriel goes to visit had served in this assembly. He did not vote for the death of the king, but royalists considered every member of the Convention to be a bloodthirsty regicide.

4 (p. 32) “What do you think of Bossuet chanting the Te Deum over the dragonnades?”: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), Bishop of Meaux and the most influential French cleric during the Classical Age, supported and blessed the Dragonnades, the systematic persecution of Protestants (then called Huguenots or Réformés) by royal troops, in several regions of France before and after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed religious tolerance (1681-1685). Most of the Protestants fled abroad. Today we would call these Catholic actions “ethnic cleansing.”

5 (pp. 37-38) the stone bench which General Drouot mounted on the fourth of March, to read... the proclamation of the Golfe Juan: General Antoine Drouot (1774-1847), one of Napoléon’s most loyal supporters, followed him into exile on the island of Elba. When the Emperor escaped to France, he landed at the Mediterranean beach resort le Golfe-Juan, near Vallauris, and proclaimed his return to power. The statement was read aloud in various towns along his route north.

6 (p. 76) Paris has no longer the same environs.... a city which has France for its suburbs: Fécamp is an Atlantic beach resort near Le Havre, about 170 miles from Paris; Saint-Cloud is a park on the Seine near Versailles, about 14 miles from Paris. Hugo means that mechanized rapid transport—steamboats and railways—shrinks space by a factor of 12, and that Paris becomes an ever-more-dominant center as a result.

7 (p. 78) Love is a fault; be it so. Fantine was innocence floating upon the surface of this fault: Despite his frequent use of the symbolism of light and darkness to connote good and evil, respectively, Hugo’s moral portraits are always complex and subtle. Until near the end of his life, the virtuous Jean Valjean must struggle against impulses to resentment and selfishness; the vile Thénardier in other circumstances might have become a decent if not a virtuous man rather than a monster; and Fantine, the “fallen woman” condemned by her hypocritical society, becomes an unwed mother through innocent devotion. Later she prostitutes herself only to save her child.

8 (p. 112) It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past: The word “sombre” has special meanings in Hugo’s cosmology. It refers not to a dark (evil) but to a provisionally darkened state, to the human condition in which moral insight has been obscured by what the Cabalists called “occultation.” In order to preserve human free will and the resulting opportunities for meritorious and redemptive choices, God “withdraws” the fullness of His essence from the material world. If God revealed Himself fully, we would have no choice but to do His will. The stars are the masks of God. Once reincarnated as animals, plants, or inanimate objects, however, souls see God clearly and suffer redemptively from their distance from Him. See the poems “Pleurs dans la nuit” and “Spes” in Hugo’s poetry collection Les Contemplations (VI, 6 and 21).

9 (p. 155) Forms Assumed by Suffering during Sleep: Like other romantics, but more richly than most, Hugo depicts “second states” of consciousness-supernatural visions, dreams, madness, and hallucinations caused by insomnia, terror, starvation, or illness—to represent his characters’ intuitions of a spiritual super-reality.

10 (p. 156) Obstacles: The repeated breakdowns of Jean Valjean’s carriage, and the delays occasioned by various obstacles on the road tempt him to abandon his plan to exonerate the innocent Champmathieu and to condemn himself to life in prison instead. These delays exemplify the tentatio probationis (temptation as an ordeal) that tests and refines one’s faith—as opposed to the tentatio subver sionis (temptation to submit to evil). For an example of the latter, on an outwardly similar, difficult journey, see Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772), with Satan as a luscious, amorous woman seeking sex before marriage to the hero.

11 (p. 172) When he was tried, God was not there: During Jean Valjean’s original trial, “God was not there” both literally (the image was gone) and spiritually (mercy and forgiveness were unavailable to the prisoner). Compare the last paragraph of “Fantine”: “Happily, God knows where to find the soul.”

12 (p.193) Without a wrinkle in his duty or his uniform: This phrase is an example of the daring rhetorical figure called hendiadys (“one from two”). When criticized by classicists for using this device in his poetry (for example, vêtu de candeur et de lin blanc—“clothed in candor and in white linen”), Hugo triumphantly produced many examples from classical Greek and Roman literature, which he knew far better than did his detractors.

13 (p. 197) she distinctly saw an ineffable smile beam on those pale lips ... full of the wonder of the tomb: Suggested strongly here by the dead Fantine’s smile, Hugo’s faith in the Afterlife will be expressly articulated by Eponine as she dies at the end of chapter 4 (6), book fourteen, part IV (“We do meet again, don’t we? ... Promise to kiss me on the forehead when I am dead. I shall feel it.”), and once again by the author, when Jean Valjean dies: “Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.”

Part II: Cosette

1 (p. 214) Some of the newspapers... held up this commutation as a triumph of the clerical party: Moved by blind partisanship, some left-wing commentators inaccurately see the commutation of Jean Valjean’s death sentence as undue interference by the Church in secular affairs. “The clerical party” refers to the Congrégation, which throughout the 1820s was feared to be a Catholic secret society controlled by the Pope, seeking to end the “Gallican liberties” that allowed French rulers rather than the Pope to make many decisions regarding the French Catholic Church, and to dominate European politics. For a fully developed dramatization of this supposed international Jesuit conspiracy, see Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830).

2 (p. 252) “Monsieur owes twenty-six sous”: After preparing a padded bill for Jean Valjean’s room and supper, for twenty times the proper amount (which he can implicitly blame on his wife, because Jean Valjean did not see who drew up the bill), Thénardier suddenly reverses his strategy. He realizes that Jean Valjean badly wants to take Cosette with him. He quickly adjusts. By now telling his guest what he truly owes, Thénardier lays the groundwork for portraying himself as a scrupulous person, who could not possibly hand over a child in his care to a stranger... without receiving a substantial bribe.

3 (p. 268) as he was fifty-five: Ten years later, at the conclusion, Jean Valjean is described as being eighty. To salvage chronological coherence, we must assume that Hugo means his emotional sufferings had suddenly aged him so that he looked like eighty.

There are autobiographical elements in Hugo’s characterization of Jean Valjean’s relationship with Cosette. The author loved his grand-children deeply, and devoted a volume of poetry to them, called L‘Art d’être grand-père (1877).

4 (p. 277) The sufferings of the first six years of her life had introduced something of the passive into her nature: The critic Nicole Savy severely criticized Cosette as a nonentity (see “For Further Reading”). She is correct, but at this juncture, Hugo clearly explains why this is so. To be sure, Hugo’s female characters often lack substance—but the masterful depiction of the monstrous Mme Thénardier, for example, proves him capable of imagining a woman with a forceful personality.

Part III: Marius

1 (p. 359) the God-man: Commonplace in English, but usually unid iomatic in French, this combination of two nouns modifying each other is Hugo’s métaphore maxima, which is typically associated with moments of religious revelation; he used it frequently in his visionary poetry from Les Contemplations (1856) on. It blurs two familiar categories into a new, unprecedented one.

2 (p. 367) the first of these two places of rendezvous was near the working-men, the second near the students: Left-wing alliances of workers with students, usually no more than a distant dream in the United States, have been much more common in France, in part because nearly free access to higher education in France narrows the financial gap between the two groups, while militantly Socialist or Communist labor unions narrow the ideological gap with some intellectuals. “Les Événements” of 1968 provide a prime example.

3 (p. 370) You cannot pick the mark out of a nation as you can out of a handkerchief: Feuilly’s respect for national sovereignty means that he, like all the other members of “Les Amis de l‘ABC,” opposes Napoléon’s politics of conquest. One can readily predict a confrontation with Marius, who has come to idealize his Napoleonic father. This evolution, and Marius’s later move toward democratic ideals, echoes Hugo’s own political trajectory in his youth, as Marius’s passionate love for Cosette echoes Hugo’s love for Adèle Foucher before her betrayal.

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.

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

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!]

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

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, / ... //

Part I: Fantine

Part II: Cosette

Part III: Marius

Part IV: The Epic on the Rue Saint-Denis and the Idyll of the Rue Plumet

Part V: Jean Valjean