Episode Extras

As promised, some recommendations about selecting an edition to read:

First of all, I will repeat and recommend as strongly as possible that you read an unabridged edition.

Even though this podcast is in English, if you think you can read it in French, by all means do. That is, without a doubt, the best version, because it’s the one Hugo wrote--he didn’t speak or write English. If your French is middling, but not fluent, it still might be worth trying. Hugo uses a lot of words--the book is about 1500 pages long, and has a varied and occasionally antiquated 19th-century vocabulary--but he aches to be understood, which means his language is not esoteric or complicated, even when his subject matter is. My students have often been surprised at how readable he is. Maybe give it a shot, and switch to a translation if it doesn’t work out.

However, this podcast will not assume that you know French. When I quote the book, I will give the French for those who may understand it, as well as my own English translation. I will be re-reading the French edition as I create my content, and the text’s Frenchness will always, inevitably, be close at hand as I comment, including some points that might offer challenges in translation, and deserve more discussion than simply reading your translator’s final choice, or mine.

As for translations, I will translate passages I use here, but am not a professional translator, and have not and will not produce a full translated edition myself. But if you know the French text is out of your reach, you have many versions to choose from, and each has its advantages and disadvantages. A couple of links to comparisons of the translations if you’d like some help choosing:

https://letterpile.com/books/Best-Translations-of-Victor-Hugos-Les-Miserables

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/706700-which-translation

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Best-Translations-of-Victor-Hugos-Les-Miserables

There are also unabridged audio editions that might pair nicely with this podcast for commuters and other devotees of the spoken word, available wherever you get your audiobooks.

Above: Victor Hugo, The Hanging of John Brown, 1860

Hugo was an artist as well as a writer, and he created many ink drawings like this one. Many were related to his crusade against the death penalty, and there are at least three others that closely resemble this one. One of these, which Hugo seemed to favor particularly, was entitled Ecce Lex (Latin: "Behold the law.") 

Louis XVI--certainly not a Revolutionary!--with the bonnet rouge added, an image likely made before the Revolution took far greater liberties with his head. There are multiple possible interpretations of such an image.  (source)

This episode didn't contain specific references to anything in particular that needs elaboration here. 

The only exception might be that I made quite a few references to the musical.... for those who don't know it well, and would like to hear what I'm talking about, here and here are the first two tracks, which cover what's happened in the book so far. 

In 1895, 10 years after Hugo's death, Edmond Biré undertook to explain the chapter "L'année 1817"/"The Year 1817" line by line. Here is the result. It is in French; to my knowledge, no translation exists. But, I don't happen to think that the English-speaking world loses much by that fact--this is the sort of analysis that can't see the proverbial forest for the trees. In my opinion, at least. Still, it's an impressive monument to his persistence.

The poem "Melancholia" from Les Contemplations is often called Les Misérables in miniature. It includes a character that we might consider a "draft" of Fantine (including plot points we haven't seen yet--consider yourself warned), as well as a story similar to the horse we saw in this section. This link is in French only, I'm afraid; I haven't found a translation I like yet--that's especially challenging with poetry. 

Here is an interactive site for exploring global and historical data on literacy (and other issues, if you follow the links once you're there). 

And while we're still thinking about house pets, here are links to versions of the fable of the Wolf and the Dog: an English version, and Jean de la Fontaine's 17th-century French version. The Fables of La Fontaine are commonly assigned for memorization in French schools, even today.

If you were intrigued by the discussion of the study of Paris's prostitutes in the early 19th century, here is an academic article I wrote that delves much more into the topic and provides references for further reading. 

Here are links to the full text of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid (in French and in English); I compare Jean Valjean's deliberation in I,7,iii to Rodrigue's in Act I scene 6 here. 

And once again, a great many thanks to Dezirae Shukla and Alana Minor for their contributions to this episode!!

Here and here are links to pages with more information about horse-drawn vehicles, for those who might be curious. The first one is in French, but it is a simpler list of pictures accompanied by the name of the type of vehicle, and it might be more useful to you even if you can't read all the French text. The second link is a much more detailed Wikipedia page. 

Here are the promised links to Jean Racine's Phèdre: in French and in English translation. The "action" scene I mention is Act V, scene 6. One can understand why Hugo would have wanted to see the monster! 

(This is the play that was so soporific for the pets of Hauteville-House in the Episode 09 extras....)

Nothing in particular for the extras today, so I thought I'd share links to some other folks who are reading and talking about Les Misérables online these days.

(Note: this is getting an update in 2024....)

Have a look at #lesmisreadalong on the website formerly known as Twitter; in 2018, they were taking inspiration from the fact that the novel has a total of 365 chapters to read one each day for the year. They were being led by Nick Senger, who leads regular online read-alongs; here's his blog.

This subreddit reads Les Misérables together every year! 

And here are a few other Les Misérables bloggers as well:
http://buttontapper.com/blog/
https://emeraldcitybookreview.com/2018/03/les-miserables-the-first-three-months.html
http://bronasbooks.blogspot.com.au/2018/03/finally-facing-our-waterloo.html

https://www.hyperborea.org/les-mis/ 

And one more thought that a listener reminded me to point out (the following adapted from my response on Facebook in 2018): the cavalry charge into the sunken road is fiction – or at least, greatly exaggerated, as they did not fall in there in the numbers, or all at once, mid-charge as Hugo describes. But the location was real, so I suspect that something about seeing the place on his visit to the battlefield made him want to create a climactic moment there to place his characters in. It’s impossible to know for sure what was in Hugo’s mind – at least, I don’t know of any writings where he tips his hand – but we can make any number of guesses. The first thing to come to mind for me is something that I mentioned in this episode: the resemblance between a sunken road filled with bodies and the common grave where we had just seen Fantine buried. I don’t want to give away anything that’s coming, for those who may be encountering the story for the first time, but Georges Pontmercy and Fantine will have more than just this in common – except, of course, that this is not Georges’s final resting place, thanks (?) to Thénardier. And, of course, there’s the horror/grotesque of the idea, the masses of dead and dying in one place, the idea that one could be at the bottom of such a thing and still be alive, but without hope, or with hope only in the form of someone like Thénardier… Hugo also had a long history of evoking this kind of unthinkably horrible image. (The most famous similar example is probably Montfaucon at the end of Notre-Dame de Paris.) Another possibility is that it serves as kind of a barrier – a kind of God-sized line in the sand – in a situation where his broad argument about Waterloo is that the battle was just that: the point beyond which Napoleon would not be permitted to go. And/or, the element of visual deception appealed to him: Hugo was intrigued by visions and optical illusions, on their own and for the metaphorical possibilities they offered, and the idea that they wouldn’t have seen the sunken road until it was too late, even though it was a permanent, unavoidable feature of the landscape, strikes me as the sort of thing that would have grabbed Hugo’s imagination. In fact, it has been suggested that, in reality, it would have been quite improbable for them not to see it, which seems to me to point to this element of the story having some importance in his mind, if (in adapting the story to his purposes as we discussed in the episode) he stretched the truth of the landscape to include it! 

For those who might be interested in old sailing warships here is a bit more information about the Orion.

And if you'd like to read the section of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) where the Greek word ἈΝΆΓΚΗ and the spider metaphor make their first significant appearance, you can find it here (book 7, chapters 4 and 5): in French and in English. That novel's Preface (in French and in English) sets this word up as the foundation on which the whole novel is based. 

And of course, here is the scene from the 2012 movie musical of Les Misérables that is most closely associated with Young Cosette. Note now they filmed her "behind bars" through the gate, recalling the association between her forced labor and Jean Valjean's (who wouldn't have been literally behind bars, but symbolically, in the vernacular of the film's audience). Also, now that we've thought about the various meanings of the big beautiful doll, which we see for a moment here, it's especially poignant when she has the rag she's using for a doll whisper in her ear.... 

Everything I have for today is geographical, so have a look at the Maps page. On the 1823 map of Paris, the locations in this section are on the southern edge of the city.

I mentioned Chateaubriand's René; here it is in French and in English.

Another famous example of the convent as a place of retreat from the rigors of worldly love is in the late-eighteenth-century novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. It's a lot of novel for that one thing, but it's darkly enjoyable in its own right. (And, of course, there is the 1988 movie, which is relatively faithful to, if simplified from, the novel.)

And finally, here again is the Preface to Cromwell, in French and in English. 

No particular extras for this episode, but I did mention in passing the Preface to Cromwell, linked to most recently in episode 20's extras. Next time, we'll return from this heavily philosophical digression to one of the most charming sections of the novel!

Once again this time, no particular multimedia extras. Episode 23 will come with some cool stuff though--stay tuned! 

Marianne, the most common allegorical representation of the French Republic (sources: First Republic, 1848, 1871). The representation of Liberty in the Delacroix painting (above) is not explicitly Marianne -- the painting celebrates the July Revolution, which did not result in a Republic -- but the resemblance is plain.

Not a ton in the way of visual extras today, but perhaps you'd like to peruse what Marius was reading?

Here's an idea of what Le Moniteur would have looked like. Marius was likely reading later editions as well, but a full archive does not seem to be digitized. This is an issue from January 1799.

Here's an example of a Bulletin de la Grande Armée. This is the first one, from 1805.

Here is the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. It was published in multiple volumes; this is the link to volume 1. 

Lots of politics today, a subject that it's hard not to distort when simplifying or summarizing. I prioritized what you need to know for Les Misérables, but if you want to know more in this area, I recommend looking beyond Hugo's rather idiosyncratic view. There are lots of good books on this topic; I suggest a general history of France, or something focusing on the "long nineteenth century" (1789-1914) to start with. For the more listening-inclined, I will again recommend the Revolutions podcast; there are series on the (first) French revolution and on the Revolution of 1830, with a lot of the politics of this period explained in the latter in particular. He also has an extensive bibliography on the topic on his website. For those who like a visual chronology, here is a concise summary of the 19th century in France from a political perspective. 

And here are links, if you're interested, to the Henri Murger novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (French) / Bohemians of the Latin Quarter (English) 

Here are links to a trailer and a clip of the French film adaptation that I mention here, as well as full information about it. 

And finally for a bit of fun, a song that Marius surely would have been singing in this section if he had known it! (Since there's some chance you've managed to get this song out of your head after episode 15....)

Here are the chapters of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) that first brought us Hugo's spider metaphor, in French and in English (here and here).

The locations in this episode are not new to us, so they're already on our Google map, but you'll have to look for them in the Part II layer.

And finally, here's a website with some pictures of the sort of small pistol that is probably quite similar to the ones that Javert would have given to Marius in this section. 

The faubourg Saint-Antoine is not only marked on our Google map, but it is also labeled on the historical maps, all here.

Since we've mentioned The Sorrow of Young Werther again, here is a link to the text in English. 

And for the items on the Maps for this week, the 1823 map will be especially helpful, I think.

Just the Maps again this time!

We mentioned the chaining of the convicts at Bicêtre here again, so I will again link to Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) in French and in English; the chapter describing such a chaining is chapter 13.

Bicêtre is on our Google map in the Part 2 layer, and in the current Part 4 layer, I have added the approximate spot where Jean Valjean and Cosette watched the chained convicts pass, at the Barrière du Maine. 

Just one link for the extras today: to Blaise Pascal's Pensées, in French and in English. 

If you'd like to learn more about Éponine's song in this section, browse the complete works of Pierre-Jean Béranger. The lyrics are (of course) in French, and each song has a little player that lets you hear the tune. Here is Ma Grand'mère, which we see her sing here. 

Fans of the musical will recognize this moment as the end of Act I. Here's one of the zillions of renditions of this moment as we see it on stage. 

And here's a bit of fun with it that helped us all get through the early days of lockdown in 2020.

Here is a link to a blog where you will find excellent and detailed map work on these sections of Les Misérables.

Our 1830 map will give you a better view of the streets around Les Halles at the time, where much of the action of the next few sections will take place. 

Just one extra: our Maps page, where you can follow along with Marius's route through Paris.

If you're interested in learning more about the fascinating life of George Sand, this book is a good place to start. Or, for a shorter commitment, encyclopedia articles here and here.

If you're interested in the details of the matter of the discrepancy between the letter Marius reads and the one Jean Valjean sees in the mirror, here is the manuscript page with Marius's version, and here's the one with the version Jean Valjean sees.

I promised to once again link to the fable of The Wolf and the Dog, here, La Fontaine's version in French, which Hugo would likely have known best, and here, Aesop's version, translated into English.

And here is the full text of "Souvenir de la nuit du 4." The text is here in French first, and, although translating poetry is always a tricky business, this same page also offers an English translation of the poem, if you scroll down.

Nothing in particular in the way of informative extras today, so I'll give you just a taste of the vast fandom that Enjolras and Grantaire have online.

Maps again: the 1830 map again for your convenience, if you'd like to try to locate Jean Valjean's approximate trajectory through the sewers.

And the details of that journey are too much for our Google map (and my mapping skills), but I have marked, in the Part V layer, the point where Jean Valjean enters the sewer and where he leaves it, as well as la Madeleine, which he (significantly) passes along the way. 

No particular extras this time. If you're itching for more, have a look at my comments on the BBC/PBS adaptation, which was airing in the US around this time in the original run of the podcast.

Just one extra tidbit today: the promised information about the corbeille de noces, or corbeille de mariage. 

No particular extras for this section...

Today, too, there's nothing in particular outside the text to send you to for further exploration.

I think it's interesting that this starts to be the case at this point--the novel, like Jean Valjean's life, starts to contract, and be more closed in on itself, rather than expanding in every direction into the real world....

In addition to writing, Hugo could do other things with ink--here are some of his drawings, along with a bit of discussion of them. 

You can see here that Hugo originally had a different epitaph, which he crossed out. It reads:

"Il dort paisible après un sombre et long martyre.

Quand il n'eut plus son ange, il mourut sans rien dire;

La chose simplement d'elle-même arriva,

Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s'en va."

The last two lines of this draft are the same as in the definitive version, but the first two are different. They translate approximately as:

"He sleeps peaceful after a dark and long martyrdom.

When he no longer had his angel, he died without saying anything." 

As you may be able to tell in the French (I couldn't render it in English), the other big difference between the first two lines in the draft and the final version is that this draft doesn't have the poetic features I discussed in the podcast episode; they're relatively regular alexandrines that don't create the uneasy feeling through their rhythm and internal rhyme.

Here's some more information about Victor Hugo's Poor Children's Dinners.

Now that we're "done" (we'll never be done) with Les Misérables, is there something else you'd like to see in this feed? Let me know!

It's been a pleasure reading with you!

Here is a video of Colm Wilkinson (whom we just saw as the Bishop), performing Jean Valjean's soliloquy "Bring Him Home" from later in the show.

As for the video of Anne Hathaway, of course, since Matt Lauer was exposed and fired from the "Today" show, the Internet has come to see the moment I was thinking of with new eyes. Many of the readily available versions of it have edited it to make it about him and put it in the larger context of his patterns of behavior, etc. This one was published in 2012 and, while it includes some commentary about him, it allows us to see her full answer and showcases her impressive clarity about the connections between Fantine's story and our culture today. (Skip to about 1:08 if you don't want to listen to Sam Seder's intro.)

(No extras for the other two parts of the film commentary.)