Transcripts

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and in every episode, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece.

In this first episode of our podcast, which I’m calling “Preface squared,” we’ll look at the novel’s brief preface and what it tells us about what’s to come. But first, I want to provide my own preface--to this podcast, to give you an idea of why I’m starting it, how it’ll be organized, and some recommendations on how best to get started with the novel. 

First, why am I doing this? I am an academic specialist on Hugo -- I research, write, and teach on his work, mostly this novel. My students are wonderful, and academic writing and publication are certainly an interesting challenge, but I wanted to do more to help Americans in 2018 understand and connect with this book. Really, I just want as many people as possible to read it, to take the time to really absorb what it has to say about exclusion and oppression, love and loss, poverty and prejudice, progress and regression, despair and hope. 

But I know it’s daunting. It’s a LONG book, it’s full of digressions that don’t always seem relevant, and it’s FRENCH--and even in translation, it feels foreign to us Americans. Plus, it’s deeply embedded in historical events and in a bygone culture that not many Americans know much about. But, if you can dig through all that it suddenly snaps into a kind of familiarity and relevance, even urgency.

So, that digging? That’s my job. In this podcast series I will work through the whole book with you, in order. In each episode, I’ll offer my insights about the novel’s contexts and interpretations, and I hope I will enhance your experience with it. My comments will be both informational and interpretive--informational about Hugo, his life and other works, and the times and places that provide the book’s context, and interpretive about some of the meanings that may be hiding in the story. If you want to offer your own thoughts and interpretations -- you can visit the podcast’s website at readlesmis (with an s) .com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com to submit them. It’s always exciting when a text that is so familiar to me takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so other listeners and I will look forward to reading your comments and responding, and there’s a chance you might get mentioned in a future episode!

Just a few nuts and bolts first:

Each episode I will discuss a section of the book, allowing you to read a bit, then listen to the corresponding episode, then read a bit more, then listen, and so on. 

I will title each of my episodes to correspond to the section of the book I’ll discuss -- Les Misérables is divided into five parts, each part is divided into books, and each book into chapters. In a text this vast, those Part, Book, and Chapter numbers will serve us well as a navigational aid, so you’ll see them in the episode titles.

I will briefly summarize the section I plan to discuss at the beginning of each episode to orient you, but it probably won’t be an extensive enough summary to allow you to forego reading--I will be structuring my discussions assuming that you’ve just read. However, if you read the book a while ago, and your memory is good, you’ll probably keep up.

This podcast is primarily about the book, but I won’t shy away from references to other forms of the story that an English-speaker might know. The most famous of these is, of course, the musical, both on stage and in the 2012 Tom Hooper/Hugh Jackman movie. I’m a fan of these too, and I’ll say right away that I actually think they are pretty good adaptations, suited to their respective genres. The musical will not be an elephant in this room; there will be no shame in fandom, nor any derision or disparagement about popular culture. I’ll leave that to other scholars -- although, they will probably be quick to tell you that all the criticisms that are routinely made of the movie -- that it’s bombastic, unrealistic, hyper-emotional, that it romanticizes suffering and political violence and whips up irresponsible passions -- all of those criticisms apply to the book too, and were part of the early critical response to it. Guess the apple really doesn’t fall far from the histrionic tree. Still, though, if you’re familiar only with the adaptations, you might find yourself lost in my discussion of the book. Better to let your love of the adaptation motivate you to pick up the book!

Then, of course, the question is which book to pick up…. That is, of translations and editions. You’ll want to be sure you have one whose language is manageable for you, be it the original French or one of the many translations on offer -- published as early as 1863 and as recently as 2008, with quite a few in between available in digital, print, or audio formats. I’ve put some more extensive advice on the website, if you’d like help choosing.

I won’t assume you know French or that you’ve chosen any particular edition. When I quote the novel here, I will give the original French for those who might understand it, then I will give my own translation of that quote. 

The key, no matter which version you choose, is to get an unabridged edition. Because the book is 1200-1800 pages long depending on the edition, or 60-70 hours in audio format, abridgments are popular, but that’s not what we’re about here. In fact, it is often the sections that are most commonly removed that are the most interesting subjects of analysis and interpretation; I will be devoting quite a bit of attention to them, and if your edition doesn’t include them, you’ll be lost at those points.

So with all that said, let’s turn to the book. If you don’t have your copy yet, that’s fine; what I’m commenting on today is so brief that I’ll read it in its entirety, which I usually will not do.

First, what does the title mean? It is often left untranslated -- although one version has taken the title “The Wretched,” which is an intriguing choice. I think many English-speakers imagine it means something like, “The Sad People” -- the English word “miserable” tends to focus our attention on the experience of suffering -- in everyday language, we say that we are “miserable” if we feel very bad in some way -- if we have the flu, or are in some sort of emotional distress. The French word has a slightly different nuance -- or, rather, two different nuances. On the one hand, it is closely related to the condition of la misère, which is not exactly misery. It refers to something more like poverty, or deprivation; it is, as we’ll see in the multiple forms it takes in the novel, rooted in a lack of something basic and necessary. The word “les” just means “the,”so in that meaning, Les Misérables refers to people living in that state -- broadly, the poor. On the other hand, a “misérable” can also refer to someone who is untrustworthy, immoral, or criminal -- in modern French, this pejorative meaning is actually more common. So, you can see right away the fraught sort of ambiguity in the meaning of the title. Is the book about people who are suffering deprivation, or people who are seen to be immoral, or…. Is it both? I think we’ll come to feel that this is very much on purpose.

So then, after the title, before he begins telling his story, Hugo offers us a one-sentence preface. We’re going to spend the rest of today’s episode looking at this preface extremely closely. We won’t read every sentence of the book like this, but this one is of particular importance, because it lays out the themes and purpose of the book as Hugo wants us to understand them. Now, we are under no obligation to accept this frame as he lays it out, but we should at least consider it, as a starting place and a point of comparison and contrast for our own observations and interpretations.

In French it reads (p. 2):

Tant qu’il existera, par le fait des lois et des mœurs, une damnation sociale créant artificiellement, en pleine civilisation, des enfers, et compliquant d’une fatalité humaine la destinée qui est divine ; tant que les trois problèmes du siècle, la dégradation de l’homme par le prolétariat, la déchéance de la femme par la faim, l’atrophie de l’enfant par la nuit, ne seront pas résolus ; tant que, dans de certaines régions, l’asphyxie sociale sera possible ; en d’autres termes, et à un point de vue plus étendu encore, tant qu’il y aura sur la terre ignorance et misère, des livres de la nature de celui-ci pourront ne pas être inutiles.

Hauteville-House, 1862.

And then, my English translation : 

So long as there exists, owing to law and custom, a social damnation that artificially creates hell in the midst of civilization and complicates destiny, which is divine, with human inevitability; so long as the century’s three problems, the degradation of men by the proletariat, the degeneration of women by hunger, and the atrophy of children by [in] darkness, are not solved; so long as, in certain places, social asphyxia is possible; in other words, and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and deprivation exist on earth, books of this nature may not be without use. 

Hauteville-House, 1862. 

That is one long sentence, divided into four parts, each introduced by the phrase “tant que” “so long as…,” and each presenting a condition in which “books of this nature may not be without use.” To paraphrase each of these:

• So long as there is this thing he’s calling “social damnation”

• So long as three specific problems, which he describes, are not solved

• So long as there is this other thing he’s calling “social asphyxia,” and

• So long as there is ignorance or deprivation

In other words, what Hugo is offering us here is his impetus for writing this book, and the reasons why he thinks it matters: there is needless suffering, and a social reality placing people in circumstances worthy of comparison to damnation or asphyxia. 

In just a moment, we’ll dig into this preface piece by piece, to get a clearer understanding of what Hugo sees as the usefulness of Les Misérables.

[Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.”

Today, we’re looking at the brief Preface to Les Misérables. 

So let’s take a closer look, and try to understand more specifically what he means. He writes:

So long as there exists, owing to law and custom, a social damnation 

There’s already a lot in this first phrase. Most importantly, here, he has introduced the plane on which his novel will operate: that of law, custom, and the social; those things that govern our lives together. Les Misérables declares its intention from the outset: it will speak into situations where law and custom create what he calls social damnation.

So what is “social damnation?”

The translation of the French “damnation sociale,” is pretty straightforward, but the phrase is curious in both languages. “Damnation” is of course a religious word -- a punishment handed down by God, an irrevocable sentence of eternity in Hell. In this religious context, the rules are clear -- commandments have been given by an all-powerful divine being, and breaking them, committing sins, leads to damnation. 

But when he adds the adjective “social,” it raises some questions. In a social damnation, who is the judge, and where does he/she/it get that power? What are the commandments? What is the nature of the hell to which one is sentenced, and for how long? Is it always an eternal damnation? 

We’ll have to wait for the story to answer some of these questions, but others are answered by the two other terms here: law and custom; the literal laws on the books, and spoken and unspoken rules that govern just as powerfully. Laws and customs of all sorts put people in a situation every bit as dire as damnation, but on the social plane, somehow, not the spiritual one. 

Continuing, then. This is a social damnation….

that artificially creates hell in the midst of civilization, 

This is the most pointedly critical word we’ve seen so far: “artificially.” This damnation is not only appropriated outside its proper, religious context by the social, but it is fake, unnatural, artificial. There are lots of ideas of Hell in various traditions, too many to go into here--an interesting exercise might be to imagine various ideas of Hell reinterpreted socially as Hugo suggests--but in the Christian tradition that Hugo drew most from, it is a place of suffering and torment, where hope and God are absent. Social damnation not only populates, but creates its own hell, its own separation from the world above, and from hope. 

This hell is also, he tells us, in the midst of civilization. “Civilization” is a significant word in the context of the Nineteenth Century, and we can really only scratch the surface of that significance right now. On the one hand, we have the century’s broad belief in “progress” -- this belief in human ingenuity of all sorts continuing to improve the quality of human life, with no upper limit in sight -- “civilization” was the outcome of this progress. To live at the center of civilization -- which Paris, in particular, was often taken to be -- was to live the best, most comfortable, most prosperous, most elegant life available to humankind. It was to rise above the barbary of the past, of the uncivilized provinces of their own country and of the uncivilized parts of the world. Now, this third contrast, of course, hints at another frequent association with the word “civilization” -- the colonial discourse. In that way of thinking, European nations were bringing “civilization” to parts of the world that they were also, as it happens, exploiting. Hugo has surprisingly little to say about colonialism, and what he does say is ambivalent. France was already in Algeria in his politically active years, but it was not something he said much about. We will see him speak in clear terms in Les Miserables against exploitation and slavery, but he did also occasionally echo this colonialist discourse about spreading “civilization.”

But Hugo is also somewhat of a holdover from the Romantic movement, of which he was France’s best-known figure in the 1820s and 30s. For the Romantics, “civilization” was not all it was cracked up to be. They were more likely to see civilization as a force that corrupted people more, the more it separated them from their natural state. A city like Paris, this beacon of civilization, was a place where you were likely to lose your soul to intrigue, ambition, and cynicism. They imagined the primitive as pure, whether it was in their own past, in their own countryside, or in the parts of the world that didn’t share Europe’s mix of Christian tradition and emergent industrialism and capitalism. 

Both of these ways of understanding the divide between “civilized” and “uncivilized” were of course fictions anyway, but they can help us understand all that is evoked when Hugo says that civilization has a hell in its very midst. When Parisian readers at the time read the word “civilization” here, they may have thought of a light shining in the darkness or an overdeveloped set of social codes that was corrupt and corrupting precisely because of the comfort it provided. But either way, Hugo asks them to see it as containing and concealing, and maybe depending on, this social hell where their fellow human beings were suffering.

So this social damnation creates its own hell, and also….

complicates destiny, which is divine, with human inevitability

The word that I translated “inevitability,” in French, is fatalité, or “fate.” This has been a significant word in Hugo’s work since The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in 1831, and we’ll see some references to that later in the novel. But he applies the adjective “human” to it, and sets it in clear opposition to divine destiny; in other words, he sees human beings as having a path that God has chosen for them, and that is “complicated” by inevitabilities that other human beings and human society impose -- by this social damnation. The word “complicates,” which is virtually the same word in French, comes from a combination of Latin words that literally mean “with folds;” he creates the image here of individuals’ lives, or the collective life of a group or society, having unnecessary but unavoidable twists and layers -- complications -- because of this social damnation. 

So let’s back out to the level of this whole “so long as” phrase, because it was long. We have the suggestion we saw a moment ago that this social damnation and its hell are somehow “artificial,” plus the contrast between divine destiny and human inevitability -- this casts the human laws and customs that he puts at the root of all of this in an increasingly negative light. By presuming to impose something akin to damnation, by interfering with divine destiny, human laws and customs seem to overstep their bounds, to take what belongs to God alone.

Then, the next phrase:

so long as the century’s three problems, [which he names] are not solved

This second “so long as” introduces some of the preface’s most specific claims, where he names specific social problems, rather than broad or metaphorical problems like “social damnation” or “hell on earth” -- he tells us that three specific social ills are worthy of particular attention, and he sets their persistence, their not being solved, in parallel to his other broad metaphorical statements. We’ll come back to what these specific issues are – they’re really interesting – but first, I’d like to look at what he calls them: “les trois problèmes du siècle.”

I’ve translated this as the “century’s three problems,” but the French word for “century” is worthy of a bit more attention. The word is “siècle,” and it is the common word in French for what we understand as a “century” -- that is, a period of 100 or so years. Hugo may well be thinking about the specific social, economic, and political problems of his century, and we have plenty of evidence, even right here in this preface, that that’s the case. But he quite clearly doesn’t do what I just did; he doesn’t say “the problems of our century or this century” -- he says “the” century. That’s a little weird. 

But here’s the thing: the French word for “century,” it turns out, is more complex than the English word. Instead of having the Latin for 100 (cent) right in it, it is rooted in the Latin word saeculum, which carried another meaning in addition to what we translate as “century” -- it was the world, the mortal coil, the opposite of eternity, especially in religious language of the early church. These are “the century’s” problems, but also, “the world’s” problems. In other words, in a sense, his perspective is broader than the problems of his century, connecting the problems of his century to problems that have always, and may forever, plague humanity. He tells us that he is turning his attention to the problems not only of his own age, but also problems that take one form or another across the ages, that are endemic to human societies, or even, to humanity itself. 

Before we continue on to the next “so long as,” let’s look at what Hugo calls the “century’s three problems.” I think we’ll find that these aren’t the only problems in the book, but they are important enough to make this short Preface, so they’re worth trying to understand:

Problem 1 is the degradation of men by the proletariat.

The word proletariat here is interesting, as much in French as in English; and for the same reason. The word has strong Marxist connotations for us today, meaning, briefly, the class of workers, as opposed to capitalist owners. Hugo and Marx were contemporaries; Les Misérables was published after the Communist Manifesto, but before Das Kapital, and while the Communist Manifesto was translated into French shortly after its initial publication in 1848, it was not well known until much later. In short, it is unclear how much Marx might have influenced Hugo’s use of this word. It is likely, though, that Hugo understood the word etymologically. He knew his Latin, and would likely have known that the Latin word from which “proletariat” is derived refers to a Roman citizen of the lowest and most insignificant class, whose only contribution to the state was his children.

As with the word siècle, this older, etymological meaning, combined with the much newer, Marxist meaning, paints a grander picture -- man is degraded, because he is valued not for something inherent to him such as his soul or his humanity, but only for what he can produce, be that manufactured goods or lots of poor Romans to become laborers. Thinking of these two meanings together, trying to synthesize them, also points to the intractable or universal nature of the problem -- think of this phrase that gets repeated, “so long as,” and the ambiguity we saw in that word siècle. He sees the injustices of his own time as one and the same with Antiquity’s, the ancient and the modern as guilty of the same sins.

Problem 2 is the degeneration of women by hunger.

The problem pertaining particularly to women, according to Hugo, has its root in hunger -- remember that meaning of “misérable” that relates to poverty and lack. 

The word for that problem, which I have reluctantly translated “degeneration,” is, in French, déchéance. This word is related to the idea of falling or diminishment. In the religious sense, it can mean a fall from grace. In a broader sense of quality, it can mean falling into an inferior or weaker state. In an older meaning, it was used for ships that had gone off course at sea. 

So this second problem is hunger driving women in particular to some kind of fall, or diminishment, or weakening, or loss of their way. Might we understand déchéance as sin? As loss of humanity? As loss of the fullness of their womanhood? Of the literal weakening and wasting caused by hunger and disease? Those of you thinking ahead to Fantine’s story will anticipate what this may mean. We will also have occasion, there and elsewhere, to unpack why this might be considered to pertain to women in particular, or to women differently than to men. What is clear is that once again, poverty and lack make people less than they might be.

Problem 3 is the atrophy of children by darkness.

Atrophy is a more specific word than degradation or déchéance; it refers specifically to a weakening or wasting through lack of use. Here, it applies not to muscles, but to children, who, Hugo implies, must be exercised, trained, kept active to reach their potential strength.

My first and most compelling thought in interpreting “darkness” here is of education, be that of mind, body, spirit, or all three -- it wasn’t until the end of the Nineteenth Century that secular public education was available to all in France, but progressives, including Hugo, were calling for it by the time he wrote Les Misérables. 

You’ve probably noticed that all three of these problems are expressed in the same parallel structure: the degradation of men by the proletariat; the degeneration of women by hunger; the atrophy of children by darkness. This word that I have translated “by,” in French is the word “par,” which actually is a bit more ambiguous than it might seem, and it turns out that that ambiguity makes a difference. The word “par” or “by” can tell us who did something -- this novel was written by/par Victor Hugo--but it can also sometimes mean something more like “via,” -- this can happen occasionally in English too, such as when we travel by car or by train -- the car or the train are the means by which a thing happens, but they don’t do that thing, exactly. In each case here, that double meaning introduces a deeper ambiguity to the whole phrase. If we understand the word one way, it sounds like the last word in the phrase -- the proletariat, hunger, darkness -- is the thing that causes the problem. But in each case, that rings a bit strange. 

The strangest, probably, is “the degradation of men by the proletariat” -- does he mean that the class we call the proletariat, the workers, degrade man? The broader context of the novel makes that seem wrong. That context suggests a meaning more like “being in the proletariat;” I have seen this phrase translated as “the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labor,” which seems sensible, if  a bit wordy. Another way of understanding this phrase is to think of par as “via” here, rather than “by” -- ”the degradation of men via the proletariat.” In this way of looking at it, men, perhaps all of humankind, are degraded by something or someone else, unnamed, through the existence of an underclass, or through its oppression. In this interpretation, the proletariat is not the source of the problem, but rather, the means by which some other entity degrades man -- like the train is the means by which you might travel. And that other entity becomes the target of a fairly serious accusation. This same logic makes the other two problems much more serious accusations as well: hunger is no longer an impersonal phenomenon, nobody’s fault, that brings about women’s fall all on its own, but it is the means by which women are diminished by some other unnamed entity. And if we understand “darkness” as a lack of education for children, seeing darkness as the means by which atrophy is imposed on them is a clear and direct attack on the opponents of free, secular, public education--they use ignorance to diminish poor children.

In just a moment, we’ll look at the last two parts of this sentence, and see what conclusions we can draw from this preface before I send you off to embark on the novel itself.

[Music]

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis (with an s).com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file to share, and extras, like pictures and related texts that don’t fit in each episode, plus a discussion board for your ideas. And if you would like to support this work financially, I welcome you to click “Donate” while you’re there. I do not do this to make living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content -- equipment, music, web hosting, and the like--and anything you can contribute will help offset them. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So far, we’ve worked through the first two “so long as” phrases of the novel’s preface, and so now, let’s head to the third. It reads:

so long as, in certain places, social asphyxia is possible

Here again, we have the word “social” applied to something that is, in its most common understanding, not social. Only this time, it’s not religious, but medical -- asphyxia, of course, being the interruption of respiration. So how can a person stop breathing... socially? It might be kind of isolation, closing off from the most basic needs for sustaining life -- in this case, social life. If we take it as he presents it, in this parallel structure with social damnation, then we start to see a theme. Hell can be seen as separation from God, and asphyxia as separation from... oxygen, if you will, so perhaps this state is a kind of separation from the fullness of social life. Hugo gives us no other clues to his meaning here, only adding, unhelpfully, that social asphyxia is possible “in certain places.” But, as we make our way through the novel, we can keep an eye out for images that might shed light on this phrase -- images of stagnation, of enclosure, drowning, suffocation -- and their context might give us more insight into the idea of social asphyxia.

So, on to the final “so long as” phrase, and the end of the preface…..

in other words, and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and deprivation exist on earth, books of this nature may not be without use. 

So…. we’ll have to get used to this kind of thing; Hugo doesn’t shy away from the grandiose. What people either love or hate about him is that he portrays the world from 50,000 feet, from the perspective of the gods, with utter confidence in his vision. Anywhere on earth, anytime the intractable eternal problems of ignorance and deprivation crop up, he says, see below.

And yet, at the same time, we have the convoluted double-negative “may not be without use” or, literally, but much more clumsily “will be able not to be useless” -- pourront ne pas être inutles. It is possible, if we choose to emphasize Hugo’s well-documented sense of self-importance, to read this as an understatement for effect, a way of disguising his opinion that his most significant novel is not just not useless, but a critically important prophetic voice. However, we’ll also find as we progress through the book that he doesn’t offer simple, practical answers. He doesn’t think he’s solved poverty, if only people would listen to him. At the risk of spoilers, I’ll go ahead and say, the century’s three problems are not solved within the plot of the novel, and he doesn’t offer easy solutions that we can apply outside of it. Instead, all he can offer is a change in mentality and perspective that is, he recognizes, more easily said than done. So perhaps he is, uncharacteristically, equivocating on the “use” of books of this nature. 

And then finally, the place and date, Hauteville House, 1862. Hauteville House is Hugo’s exile home on the channel island of Guernsey. During the French Second Empire, from 1851 to 1870, Hugo lived outside of France, in Belgium and the Channel Islands. He was a vocal dissenter of France’s government at the time and its Emperor, Napoleon III, and was unwelcome in France for the early years of this period, but then he remained in voluntary exile in protest even after an 1859 amnesty that would have allowed him to return; he wrote, “Quand la liberté rentrera, je rentrerai” -- “When freedom returns, I will return.” (Actes et Paroles). Now, as he publishes Les Misérables, he’s 60 years old -- which was older then than it is now. He’s not sure he will outlive the Empire and ever see his home city and country again, but he continues to write as its prophet and visionary. Les Misérables is not set during the Second Empire; it will be set principally in the years between 1815 and 1833. Hugo is looking back from three decades later and a tiny island that feels like the end of the world, and seeing the same problems persist. Still, perhaps without hope of seeing his century’s problems solved, perhaps recognizing that they are so essential to humanity that they can’t be solved, perhaps wondering if he can even be heard from his rock in the middle of the sea, he continues to try to point the way forward. 

So it is with this reflection that we embark on Les Misérables in 2018. It is a book that may not be without use in any time or place where we can find ignorance, deprivation, social isolation, or living hells in the midst of comfortable and prosperous civilizations--including, perhaps, our own.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll start with the beginning of the book, and discuss the character of the Bishop of Digne. In the meantime, happy reading.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 1, book 1, chapters 1-9, “Why a Bishop?”

In these chapters, we take a deep dive into the character of Monseigneur Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel, Bishop of Digne, and I’ll help you to sort out the context, cultural references, and other difficult points, and we’ll think a bit about why it may be that Hugo begins his novel in this way. 

But first, an overview of the section involved. The first 14 chapters, all of book 1, are actually a lengthy portrait of the (of course, fictional) Bishop of the city of Digne in 1815; we learn that he was unusually humble and charitable, and rejected many of the trappings of the Church’s wealth, power, and political affiliation. This character makes only a brief appearance in most adaptations, but he is far more complex here than there, in a way that gives his actions--and the rest of the plot that he sets in motion--a much more subversive meaning.

The title of this first book of Part I, “Un Juste”--usually translated “A Just Man” or “An Upright Man,” imposes an interpretation on what follows. Hugo takes sides immediately, just as he immediately, in the Preface, situated his book in the realm of the social. He tells us to see the Bishop as a good man. This is an interesting choice, since the Preface associated the book very closely with progressive causes, and religion often tended, in Hugo’s time as now, to be a conservative force--in 19th-century France, ideas of justice were still closely associated with the atheistic and violent Revolution. So, Hugo is also taking a position right away on religion’s place in the problems at the book’s heart--as practiced by a just man, he is showing us, religion is not at odds with progressive goals and social justice. So today, we’re going to look carefully at what Hugo does and does not say about the Bishop, and think about how we can understand this religious entry point.

For starters, let’s talk a little bit about the way he narrates these chapters.

The narrator does something here that may seem curious to the modern fiction reader: he cites his sources. Now, this book is purely fiction; it is believed that Myriel was loosely based on Monseigneur Miollis, the real Bishop of Digne around the same period, but the differences in the details of their lives and character are considerable, and the documents he provides are pure fiction. He claims to have heard rumors about the bishop, to have looked through his papers and reproduced his budget and some of his notes, and to have reproduced the entirety of the letter from Mlle Baptistine in chapter 9. WHY?

A possible answer lies in the conventions of the genre of the novel – which is a genre of fake, made-up stories that take a long time to read – and the ways novels made themselves believable and interesting to readers. There had been a convention in novels up until around the turn of the 19th century of giving a purported source for the text: novels were often presented as something that an author didn’t just make up; instead they were collections of letters, or a found text like an anonymous diary, or a story that the narrator heard and wrote down. Narrators tended not to exist without explanation, they didn’t just start telling a story on page 1 out of the blue. That’s a strange thing to do, when you think about it--to just up and start telling a story to who-knows-whom, about people the readers have never met--and in the absence of the accepted modern convention of the novel, it’s easy to understand it not being taken for granted. 

They also almost always told you why they were telling the story. This may in part have been because novels were seen as frivolous, or even dangerous, and so they needed a raison d’être. There would be a preface saying, “I found this packet of papers,” or “this guy told me this story,” and “it was edifying to me in the following way--I think there’s a lesson to be learned here, so maybe you’ll agree.” 

None of this was common anymore by 1862, when Les Miserables appeared. The novel as genre had won its prestige, and its conventions were taken for granted more or less as we know them today: people read novels because people read novels, and they found them interesting, important, and valuable even though the stories weren’t true. But Hugo seems to be gesturing to this older tradition, anchoring the story in reality via these supposed sources, rather than by doing what many of his contemporaries were doing--which was literary realism. It prized an invisible narrator and a world that resembled reality as much as possible--Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is the best-known French example, George Eliot’s Middlemarch is often cited in the British tradition. As we make our way through the book, we’ll see that it didn’t serve Hugo’s purposes to imitate every day reality as they did--at the end of chapter 2 here, he intervenes in his description of Myriel, making the narrator personal in a way that realism did not do, to say, “Nous ne prétendons pas que le portrait que nous faisons ici soit vraisemblable; nous nous bornons à dire qu’il est ressemblant.” (p. 10) -- “We do not pretend that the portrait that we paint here is believable; we limit ourselves to saying that it is true to life.” His characters and situations are extraordinary by design. As we saw, the title of Book 1 suggests that the Bishop is an ideal, an example. Hugo is not interested in adhering to Realism’s Rule #1--that novels should describe the world as it is, or, as it is sometimes said, hold a mirror up to society. Instead, he wants his characters to serve emotional or philosophical purposes, and that tends to make them take on interesting, if unrealistic, forms. So he makes the novel “feel real” in other ways, including creating these sources.

The first of these sources is the rumors about Myriel. These rumors play an interesting role in the brief biography of the Bishop that occupies the first couple of pages. Hugo insists that rumors are unreliable--a fact of life in “une petite ville où il y a beaucoup de bouches qui parlent et fort peu de têtes qui pensent” (p. 4) -- “a small town where there are a lot of mouths talking and very few heads thinking” and ultimately he says they are just words, and that they fall into oblivion after a few years. So really who knows what the bishop’s life had been like? His past is obscured by his present.

And the most basic fact of that present, a few pages later, is supported by another supposed source (also entirely fictional), that of Myriel’s budget, which the narrator claims to reproduce directly from the original. An original document is, of course, a more reliable source than rumor. We know for certain what the Bishop is now, even as no one is really sure what he was before.

While we’re talking about this budget, just a parenthetical word about these specific references to money which we’ll continue to see: depending on your translation, they may be a bit difficult to understand at times. You will see both francs and livres (or, pounds). In the early 19th century, these words were being used interchangeably in France to mean the same thing. The official currency was the franc, but that was a change that took place during the revolution, and many people still talked about livres. It’s the same sum of money. The context will generally give you a sense of whether a particular sum is large or small, in the circumstances. 

But it will be difficult to be much more precise than that. Across time, as economies and lifestyles change, precise currency conversions are tricky business. For example, I found one historical currency converter online, which I will link to on the website, and tried converting 1,000 1815 francs to 2015 US dollars. In purchasing power, it said it was worth $6,177, in labor power--or, wages--it was worth $174,252, its equivalent in gold was $11,351, and in silver, $2,341--that is, the converter told me very little. Unless that particular rabbit hole is appealing to you for its own sake, which it never has been for me, I don’t think an effort to express sums in Les Misérables in modern currency will do much to enhance your appreciation for the book. For now, in the chapter discussing the Bishop’s budget, we can assume that a Bishop’s annual allowance of 15,000 francs would let him live in style, but when Myriel gives away over 90% of his, even when we add in his sister’s small fund, what’s left is meager. We will often see references to 5 franc pieces (or, 100 sous - 20 sous to a franc; this coin is also sometimes called an écu); this is not a lot of money, but is a nice little temporary windfall for our poorest characters. The Bishop’s budget, after his donations, has him and his household living on just slightly less than this per day, which requires significant belt-tightening, but is a living.

So, coming back to these sources, we have the rumors and the budget; the third major supposed source that Hugo includes, is the letter from Mlle Baptistine, which occupies most of chapter 9, supposedly reproduced in its entirety. This source plays an interesting role as well, and to understand that, let’s first talk a bit about these women who live with the bishop: his sister, and the servant woman who keeps house and sees to their personal needs.

Madame Magloire is their housekeeper. We presume she is poor, because she is a servant, and that she is a widow, because she is called “Madame,” but no husband is mentioned, and she lives in the bishop’s home. She grumbles a bit when she disagrees with the Bishop’s choices, but ultimately with occasional nudges from Baptistine, submits to his wishes.

Mlle Baptistine is more complex. She is the Bishop’s sister, from the same noble family background as he is. She is described as being so good, so pure, that it’s as if she had no body. She is beautiful only because she is good, but the narrator uses words to describe her like pale, thin, even transparent and diaphanous, the latter two making it possible to see the angel within. Most remarkably, he says she has “à peine assez de corps pour qu’il y eût là un sexe” (p. 5) -- “barely enough body to have a sex.” He also says, “C’était une âme plus encore que ce n’était une vierge” (p. 5) -- “she was more a soul than a virgin.” It seems that he’s suggesting that she lived such a spiritual life--including before the Revolution, when her brother was living the high life--that it sort of never occurred to her to be a woman, and her physical presence came to reflect that. Thin, pale, a virgin--her physical needs like food and sex were never important to her; she is as close as a living person can be to denying the physical altogether. And, she is utterly submitted to the Bishop--even though he is her brother, she sees him as her spiritual guide first, and accepts without question his ascetic, self-sacrificing model of Christianity. She is the female image of denial of self.

Both women’s total submission is presented to us as a virtue, as selflessness in the sense not only of putting others first, but also of near total erasure of self. This is why it’s so intriguing that Hugo gives us Mlle Baptistine’s voice in chapter 9 to round out our understanding--he tells us that she is approaching this kind of non-existence, but he lets her speak for herself, articulate her own desires and misgivings about the bishop’s habits, and explain her posture toward them. This letter largely repeats information that we already have, but Hugo includes it, both to add believability to his story as the other documents do, and to provide her point of view. 

Still, it is difficult to tell what her feelings really are in passages like this one: “Je suis toujours bien heureuse. Mon frère est si bon. Il donne tout ce qu’il a aux indigents et aux malades. Nous sommes très gênés. Le pays est dur l’hiver, et il faut bien faire quelque chose pour ceux qui manquent. Nous sommes à peu près chauffés et éclairés. Vous voyez que ce sont de grandes douceurs.” (p. 35) -- “I am still quite happy. My brother is so kind. He gives all that he has to the poor and the sick. Money is very tight. Winters are hard here, and we have to do something for the needy. We can more or less afford light and heat. You can see that these are great comforts.”  As she oscillates between the material discomfort of her life and the emotional and spiritual benefits, it is easy to read this as a sincere belief in their lifestyle, but just as easy to hear it as Mlle Baptistine trying to convince herself of her own happiness in a situation that she feels she can’t change. 

Providing us with her own words allows Hugo to convey this ambiguity without stating it himself; the narrator can praise her as utterly submissive, while leaving the astute and thoughtful reader room to question, and maybe even be a bit troubled by this kind of erasure of self. What compels the women to it? Do they comply with the Bishop’s lifestyle because they see it’s for a charitable cause, or because of his authority? Would they submit in this way to a less virtuous version of the bishop, one who made different demands? Does their total obedience make them willing troops in his charitable war, or his prisoners? That is never made entirely clear. In his writings, Hugo says explicitly that he writes for the lecteur pensif (draft preface for L’Homme qui rit), or thoughtful reader, who will read between the lines and be able and willing to think what he might not quite say. In a novel of this scope, the opportunities for this sort of reflection will seem endless; we will seize upon some of them, but there are many more. You can, and should, follow your own intuitions and ideas as you read, and continue to test them against what Hugo says. This is the essence of literary interpretation, and Hugo wrote with that sort of reading in mind. Here, at a minimum, we can say that deeper reflection and careful reading of Baptistine’s letter make the women’s submissiveness seem more complicated than it does at first. We are asked to weigh the the religious values of submission and selflessness, and to consider what makes those values admirable--are they good in themselves, or only as good as what they serve?

After a short break, we’ll turn to the Bishop himself, and consider why religion gets such an important, and sometimes complicated place in the story.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file to share, and extras, like pictures and related texts that don’t fit in each episode, plus a discussion board for your ideas. It’s always exciting when a text that is so familiar to me takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so other listeners and I will look forward to reading your comments and responding, and there’s a chance you might get mentioned in a future episode!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Today, we’re looking at the first nine chapters of the novel, where Hugo introduces the Bishop of Digne, and thinking about the way that religion is portrayed. We’ve already looked at the way Hugo uses sources (fabricated, of course) to anchor his story in a feeling of reality, and to leave room for contradiction and reader interpretation about this character and the religious tradition he represents.

So, now we come to the bishop himself….

We talked about the idea of a separation between past and present in the bishop’s life, as his past was known only through rumor, but his present was understood through documents. But in more than just its documentation, Myriel’s life is presented as cloven in two by the Revolution. We’re told that he was 75 years old in 1815, making him around 49 or so when the Revolution broke out in 1789. He was said to be an émigré, that is, a member of a noble family who found France to be an undesirable place during the Revolutionary years. When the narrator mentions “the tragic spectacles of 93,” he’s referring to the tens of thousands of deaths during the Terror. Many of them, including the King and Queen, were political executions, using the newly-invented guillotine, of those believed, rightly or not, to be anti-Revolutionary agents or combatants--we’ll talk more about that in the next episode. So, these nobles fled, usually to nearby monarchies like England, Austria, and the various German states, or, in Myriel’s case, Italy, returning to France once things had settled down. This emigration serves to further obscure Myriel’s biography; the rumors go something like: well, he was this young nobleman, enjoying wealth and the high life, he emigrated, and, I don’t know what happened, but he came back a priest. His old life and his new life are utterly separate, and there’s no retracing the path between them. 

But it is clear he changed, and changed with the times. The image that Hugo creates of pre-Revolution Myriel is a recognizable type, a libertine of the late Old Regime in the decades just before the Revolution, “elegant, graceful, witty”--he has all the social graces necessary to succeed in dedicating one’s life “au monde et aux galanteries” (p. 3) -- “to the world and to gallantry”--gallantry, here, likely being a euphemism for amorous liaisons. Incidentally, the Senator who gives the long monologue in chapter 8 expresses this type to some extent as well. His materialist philosophy certainly accommodates dedication to the world, and the tone of his half-drunk philosophical musing is also light-hearted and witty in the same vein. It’s not difficult to see that his way of thinking is at odds with the post-Revolutionary Bishop’s central guiding principle of charity. 

So, even though the wit of a libertine remains, to endear him to his housemates and to chastise those who need it, the bishop emerged from the Revolutionary years more serious, more introspective, and more spiritual. This change reflects a cultural shift in France more broadly, especially among the elites who were the drivers of such cultural trends. For the first time in centuries, these privileged classes in France experienced deprivation -- misère -- they lost loved ones, property, fortune, and lived in exile for years, never to return to the world and life they had known. Now, you may be, like me, disinclined to feel pity for them, and to see what they suffered as inconsequential compared to most other people in the world at that time, including suffering of the types represented in this book. I’m not asking for sympathy on their behalf, simply offering the profoundly felt change in their life as part of an explanation for a cultural shift that we see in the arts and in literature--and here, in Myriel. 

That cultural shift found its fullest expression in the advent of Romanticism in France. If you know English or German literature, you know Romanticism as a late 18th-century phenomenon, but in France, it doesn’t get a full head of steam until the early 19th Century, when the émigrés come back, having seen it underway in the English and German traditions. In any tradition, Romanticism is a challenge to define, in part because it is mostly a feeling, the sort of thing you know when you see it, and in part because it is, in many ways, still with us--as they say, don’t ask a fish about the water. We’ll have many opportunities to get our head around what it is as we make our way through this novel. But at its beginning, early French Romanticism set itself in opposition to the artistic, cultural, and philosophical world of late 18th-century France, the one that those libertines would have lived and participated in. Early French Romanticism was a melancholy, religious, spiritual, introspective, royalist movement that reacted in part against the rationalism and atheism of the Enlightenment and Revolution. It saw the primacy of reason that someone like Voltaire championed as leading to the trauma of the Terror, and it could no longer justify optimism about the potential of human reason, or even the fun of that biting, sardonic wit. Art and literature became more serious, less focused on social life and pleasure and more interested in melancholy and suffering, the inner life and contemplation of the sublime. Hugo was a leader, arguably the leader, in the second wave of French Romanticism, a decade or two later. Although the later movement was different in many ways from the earlier movement, Hugo identified very strongly with all things Romantic, and that was something he never fully shook. The Romantic movement was old news by 1862, but in dividing Myriel’s life and describing the two parts as he does, Hugo seems to be claiming the reformed Myriel, and the process of transformation that he’s undergone, for Romanticism. 

This transformation is another way in which Hugo allies the religious with his vision of progress. In the 1820s, Hugo had become the leader of the Romantic movement by arguing, in a text called the Preface de Cromwell, which I won’t summarize extensively, but will link to on the website, that Romanticism was a step forward in artistic sensibility, indeed, the only set of esthetic principles appropriate for modern, Christian societies. It was, of course, new then, when it wasn’t 35 years later in 1862, but he had argued that it was not just new but fundamentally modern AND fundamentally spiritual. Romantic art embraced deep feeling, and recognized life’s ugliness as well as its beauty, its body as well as its soul. This allowed it to see both the need for redemption and the possibility of redemption, and that both of these existed in every human being all the time. For Hugo and his Romanticism, then, constant transformation for the better, or, put more simply, progress, was one and the same with religious ideas of rebirth and renewal. As we’ll see further on in the book, even horror, devastation, and decline create an opportunity to rise. And even a character like the Bishop still has progress to make.

In just a moment, we’ll finish up with a deeper look at the Bishop’s character. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content--equipment, music, web hosting, and the like--and anything you can contribute will help offset them. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Today, we’re looking at the first nine chapters of the novel, and considering the character of the Bishop, and what it means for the relationship between religion and the novel’s other themes.

So it’s easy to see that post-Revolution Myriel is characterized by charity. The first stories we have of him are of his budget, and of the hospital. He keeps only 1/10 of the money available to him for his personal needs, a sort of reverse tithe, and donates the rest to various charities. We also see him trading residences with the hospital, such that the sick of Digne are now housed in the large and luxurious episcopal palace, and he lives in a simple home. Anytime he comes into more money, he gives it to the poor, sometimes even in defiance of the intentions of the donor, such as in chapter 6, when some of the wealthier faithful give him money for an altar in his private oratory. Giving to the poor is always his priority, and the main categories of his concern are education, providing for the sick, providing for widows and orphans, improving prisons, rehabilitation of prisoners, and all the assorted ways that charities try to make up for disadvantages and plain bad luck. This is even the case when Cravatte returns the valuable ceremonial objects he and his gang had stolen from the cathedral. Myriel considers, at least, not returning them for use in the cathedral, but instead redirecting their value to the poor. It’s interesting to note that the narrator’s omniscience lapses conveniently here, as he claims not to know what happened to the cathedral treasure. Instead, he cites another source: a piece of paper found in the Bishop’s things that suggests he was deliberating on the matter. This is followed by a comment in free indirect discourse, which a style that mixes the narrator’s voice and the character’s in a way that creates uncertainty as to whose thoughts are being expressed. He says, “C’étaient là de bien belles choses, et bien tentantes, et bien bonnes à voler au profit des malheureux. Volées, elles l’étaient déjà d’ailleurs. La moitié de l’aventure était accomplie; il ne restait plus qu’à changer la direction du vol, et qu’à lui faire faire un petit bout de chemin du côté des pauvres.” (p. 30) “They were very beautiful things, and very tempting, and very good for stealing for the less fortunate. Besides, they were already stolen, half the job was done, all that was left was to redirect the theft, and make it take a little detour over toward the poor.” It reads like a temptation--and even uses the word “tempting,” but what the Bishop is tempted most by is charity, the possibility of giving more to the poor. There is also a subversiveness to it: although he hasn’t said so in words, his actions suggest quite clearly that the sort of extreme wealth that had always been associated with the church was not appropriate when there were others who needed it more--we saw what he did with the episcopal palace. The idea of a bishop, effectively collaborating with bandits, redirecting stolen church goods (or money made by selling them), even if it is to the poor, is scandalous--so, the narrator elides it, feigns ignorance, creates doubt as to whose thoughts are whose, and lets us draw the conclusions that he has carefully primed us to draw. The traditional wealth of the church is, I think, no less harshly judged for this tactic. 

The Bishop is known to the local people as Monseigneur Bienvenu, which may or may not be translated in your edition, but which means “welcome.” This is part of his birth name, but it is the part that the locals seem to find fitting, thanks to another form of his generosity--his hospitality. 

He sees part of his duty as leaving his door unlocked at all times, which means anyone who needs him can simply enter, and he expresses faith in God to keep him safe. He also refuses to ask the name of anyone who needs the shelter he provides. This is in the spirit of an ancient tradition of hospitality, and shows that distrust of strangers or of the needy, is contrary to his belief system. In the chapter about Cravatte, we see that this is not simply religious bravado, not about proving the mettle of his belief in God--that would, after all, be about his ego. Instead, it is a result of comparing the cost of fear and prejudice against the potential benefit that can come from choosing the riskier path. When he ventures into the mountains to minister to a remote village despite the danger of the murderous criminals hiding there, it is not to show off how brave he is, but rather, because getting to that village, ministering to his people, is the reason he draws breath in the first place--choosing safety would defeat the purpose of the life he would be trying to save. Even more than this, fear of others suggests an underlying assumption of the worst in them, and the bishop rejects this as well, for the sake of one’s own soul. He says, “Craignons-nous nous-mêmes. Les préjugés, voilà les voleurs” (p.30) -- “We should fear ourselves. Prejudices, those are the thieves.”  

This brings us to the final big topic we’ll address today, the Bishop’s encounters with human laws and justice.

We talked about the ambiguity of the word “misérable” from the title in the last episode, and we should always pay attention when we see it. The word appears three times in these chapters to describe people whose paths cross the bishop’s: the counterfeiter; Cravatte, the mountain bandit; and the murderer that the Bishop accompanies to the guillotine. His posture toward all of them is understanding and compassion, because the bishop makes an argument that the double-meaning of the title begins, and that the book will continue to make--that it is crucial to look to the ultimate cause of sins and crimes, particularly those of the poor and vulnerable. This argument is old for Hugo; he made it as early as 1834 in a novella called Claude Gueux, where we see a character whose story bears resemblances to Jean Valjean’s, but who ends up condemned to death. I’ll link to that story on the website as well. The last line of that novella refers, metaphorically, to education, saying, “Cette tête de l’homme du peuple, cultivez-la, défrichez-la, arrosez-la, fécondez-la, éclairez-la, moralisez-la, utilisez-la ; vous n’aurez pas besoin de la couper.” -- “This head of the common man, cultivate it, weed it, water it, fertilize it, illuminate it, moralize it, use it, and you won’t need to cut it off.” In chapter 4, like in the Preface, Hugo again references society’s failure to provide free education, this time putting the words in the mouth of the bishop, who says “Cette âme est pleine d’ombre, le péché s’y commet. Le coupable n’est pas celui qui fait le péché, mais celui qui fait l’ombre.” (p. 16) – “A soul is full of darkness, and sin is committed there. The guilty party is not the one who sins, but the one who creates the darkness.”

So, the bishop believes that comforting a murderer up until the moment of his death is to “officiate pontifically.” This is his highest duty, but it also shakes him to his core, and brings about a step in his ongoing transformation. To explain why, Hugo offers the first prose-poetic digression of the novel, on the effect of seeing a guillotine. Executions by guillotine were public in France until the early 20th century, and continued to happen behind closed doors until the 1970s; the death penalty was abolished in France in 1981. The experience of seeing a criminal executed in this way was not uncommon in Hugo’s time, and this is the experience he’s describing. I encourage you to re-read this section slowly, and sit with the images, and, if you’re reading in French, with the poetry of the sounds. Hugo was a poet first, and passages like this, even though they are in prose, draw on the skills of a poet. He makes the guillotine a living being, like a sort of vampire who lives by drinking its victims’ blood, and incarnates law, human vindictiveness, and all of the social problems that lead people to it. Seeing it in person, through an effect that he portrays as almost mystical, leads to conclusions that second-hand knowledge of it does not. 

This digression is, however, the narrator’s intervention. The only explanation of his emotional turmoil we have from the Bishop himself is, again, documented hearsay, via his sister, who seems to have overheard him thinking aloud about what he’s seen. What she hears him saying has two parts.

First he says, “Je ne croyais pas que cela fût si monstrueux. C’est un tort de s’absorber dans la loi divine au point de ne plus s’apercevoir de la loi humaine.” (p.19) -- “I didn’t think it was so monstrous. It is wrong to be absorbed in divine law to the point of not noticing human laws.” He chastises himself for not realizing sooner the horror that seeing the guillotine face-to-face made clear, and he concludes that more engagement with human laws is necessary.

Then, he continues, “La mort n’appartient qu’à Dieu. De quel droit les hommes touchent-ils à cette chose inconnue?” (p. 19) -- “Death belongs only to God. By what right do men touch this unknown thing?” Like in the Preface, he sees overreach in the presumptuousness of human laws that issue condemnations that should belong only to God--here, death, in the Preface, “social damnation.” 

Hugo had been an opponent of the death penalty since at least the early 1830s, when he published Claude Gueux and re-released his 1829 novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man with a more explicitly political preface. Throughout his life, he would speak out on high-profile death penalty cases worldwide. The best-known American example was the Abolitionist John Brown; I’ll link to the English-language text of that open letter on the website. This passage connects that earlier crusade to Hugo’s reflections in Les Misérables on law, crime, and punishment more generally, and connects both to the deeply Christian and deeply kind example of the Bishop.

So why did we start this book with religion?

This book has been criticized from the beginning as being too Catholic for progressives who appreciate its social themes, and not orthodox enough for those who enjoy its Catholicism. But this fact also speaks, in a sense, to one of its strengths. Hugo’s political views shifted over the course of his life, from conservative, traditionally Catholic, and Royalist in his youth, to progressive, pro-Republic, and socialist in his old age. Unlike most who shared these later views, though, he continued believing in God, although, perhaps not in the way his parish priest would have preferred. When we get to chapter 4, we begin to see why he might start a book like this with religion. The religion of the Bishop is unconventional, and even shocking to some traditionally religious (and powerful) people he encounters. The narrator tells us, sarcastically, that Myriel “avait une manière étrange et à lui juger les choses. Je soupçonne qu’il avait pris cela dans l’évangile.” (p. 16) -- he “had a strange and idiosyncratic way of thinking about things. I suspect he had gotten it from the Gospels.” The Bishop, in other words, provides an example of how to start with Christianity and end up at social justice, a path that leads directly through the Gospels. He embodies a vision in which Christianity can and should be a force for justice. By placing a religious argument for the book’s concerns front and center, Hugo appeals to those who might not be convinced by politically progressive social arguments, who might be put off by their association with bad memories of the Revolution. Between this section and the Preface, he calls upon the values of both the left and the right (then and, perhaps coincidentally, now) to bring attention to the issues at the book’s heart. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll look more deeply into Myriel’s relationship to his political context, and what that contextualization means for the book’s place in the politics of its time. In the meantime, happy reading.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, The Bishop, Builder of Bridges.

[/Music]

In our last episode we looked at the first part of Hugo’s portrait of the Bishop of Digne, and saw him as a Christian, and even conservative, counterpoint to the Preface, a point of entry into Hugo’s social concerns from the ideological right, where the Preface had appealed to ideals of the left. Even as the Bishop remained a figure that traditionalists could admire, he did not fail, on occasion, to put his beliefs into action in ways that shocked traditional sensibilities--he challenged Church wealth, practiced radical charity and hospitality, and performed functions well below the station of a Bishop, including ministering spiritual counsel to a man on his way to the guillotine.

In reflecting on this last instance, we saw him say “Je viens d’officier pontificalement.” (p. 18) -- “I have just officiated pontifically.” We understood this word, “pontifically,” in its most common sense, that is, the one pertaining to a high-ranking church official, even perhaps the Pope. Rather than seeing the condemned man as beneath him as a Bishop, he saw ministering to him as the work of a Pontiff.

This word, pontiff, though, comes from the Latin pontifex -- literally, a bridgemaker. With the man condemned to die, when he said he officiated pontifically, he may have felt he was acting not as a Pontiff in the church sense, but as a builder of bridges--a bridge between society’s most excluded and reviled man and redemption, or God. Or, perhaps the most powerful interpretation of his statement is that, in the Bishop’s view, building these sorts of bridges *is* the work of a pontiff. 

So in today’s episode, we will look at the second half of the portrait of the Bishop, where we will find he builds more bridges--between France’s political conservatives and Revolutionaries, Catholics and atheists, social insiders and outsiders, cultural traditionalists and Romantics -- and he builds them on common ground that will make the final preparations for the plot to be set in motion.

In these five chapters, Hugo’s principal accomplishment is to situate the Bishop in and across the great divides of his time, in politics and in culture. In Chapters 10 and 11, the Bishop engages with the political questions of his day -- that is, the early 18 teens, although these are questions which to some extent still loom over French politics in 1862. In Chapter 12, we see his habit of disengagement with the politics of the Church hierarchy. And in Chapters 13 and 14, his religious beliefs and practices are the focus. 

We’ll start with chapter 10, “L’Évêque en présence d’une lumière inconnue” -- “The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light.” In this chapter, the Bishop goes to minister to the dying man who is named only “G”--lending an air of historical truth, as we have seen Hugo do before, by appearing to redact the name of a real person. He is referred to as a Conventionnel, or Conventionist. This chapter may present some challenges in comprehension for those who haven’t studied French Revolutionary history. I am not a historian, and anyway we definitely don’t have time in this podcast for a full treatment of this extraordinary, and extraordinarily complicated period. But if you are interested in learning more about the History of the French Revolution, I will recommend a few resources on the website. My first goal today will be to answer the question to which you absolutely need an answer in this episode: what is a Conventionist, and why is his meeting with the Bishop so strange and tense? 

Calling him a Conventionnel or Conventionist means he was a member of the Convention nationale, the legislative body and the Revolutionary government in France from September 1792 until October 1795 -- so, including that year we keep hearing about, 1793. This was the most radical phase of the Revolution. Between the storming of the Bastille at the start of the Revolution in 1789 and this time, attempts had been made at a constitutional monarchy, rather like the one England had then, and still has today. But, after Louis XVI was removed from power in August of 1792, the Convention was elected to create the Constitution for the first Republic. Then, thanks to the urgent crisis of both domestic and foreign armed resistance to the Revolution, the Convention assumed governmental responsibilities for somewhat longer than planned. There was a fair bit of turnover in this particular assembly, but we are given to understand that the Conventionist G is one of the just under 900 people elected at one time or another to the Convention. 

Incidentally, while we’re talking about this period generally, I’ll mention that this was also when the Revolutionary calendar was instituted. In the name of rebuilding the world on new foundations the Revolutionaries created their own calendar, so you will occasionally see what look like dates, but with unusual months and years--such as the 9th of Thermidor year (Roman numeral) II, when the Terror is considered to have ended, or the 18th of Brumaire year (Roman numeral) VIII, the date of Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état. If the text itself doesn’t fill you in, a quick Google search of the Revolutionary date will usually reveal its importance and its equivalent date on the traditional calendar. Or, for quick and dirty calculations, you can remember that the Revolutionary calendar begins counting in September of 1792.

So, the Convention is probably best known, as you no doubt surmised from the chapter, as the governmental body that voted for the execution of Louis XVI in January of 1793. There were just over 700 votes on that matter, and the majority that voted to execute him was slim. So, the Conventionist G’s claim that he voted against the death of Louis XVI, even though he was part of the Convention, is perfectly plausible. There were parties and factions within the Convention, and some were more radical than others, but the group of Montagnards, which included names you may have heard, like Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, was the most radical, and the one in charge in during this period of 1793 and 1794, during the Terror. Still, the Convention as a whole is held responsible for the various heavy-handed measures of the Terror, most notably the violent ones, like the King’s death, that of the Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the deaths of tens of thousands of others. During this time, anyone suspected of opposition to the Revolutionary cause was subject to prosecution. This included nobility, clergy, and émigrés--like the Bishop himself. Anyone who had left France after July 1789 was considered an émigré, and émigrés were considered guilty of treason. Many did in fact take up arms against the Revolutionary government, and left France for that purpose, but others did not. Either way, they were summarily banished and subject to the death penalty if they returned to France. Also counted among the dead of this period was the child heir to the throne, Louis XVII, to whom the Bishop refers in this chapter, who died in prison at 10 years old in 1795. 

Napoleon came to power in 1799, and in the 15 years he was in power, he progressively rolled back the radical and punishing measures that the Revolution had instituted against the nobility, clergy, and émigrés--as we’re told here, the émigré Myriel is back in France as a priest by 1804. Then in 1814, Napoleon was defeated and sent into exile, and the Restoration began--the next heir to the Bourbon dynasty, the younger brother of Louis XVI, was made Louis XVIII, King of France, this time with powers limited by a Constitution. Napoleon took power back briefly in the spring of 1815, for what’s called the Hundred Days, and then in June of that year, after Napoleon’s final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, Louis XVIII returned to the throne. 

The text of Les Miserables isn’t specific about the date of the Bishop’s visit to the Conventionist, but during their conversation, the Conventionist mentions “ce fatal retour du passé qu’on nomme 1814” (p. 42) -- “that fatal return of the past called 1814,” so it is certainly after the first Restoration, if not after the Hundred days. This means that the Conventionist has seen the undoing of virtually all that he worked for. The Restoration also brought a change in public opinion, as France reckoned with the violence of the preceding quarter century, and figures like the Conventionist were held responsible--or, one might say, scapegoated--for that violence. This is how he ends up condemned to the isolation in which we find him. His case may be the best example we’ve seen yet of the “social damnation” we saw in the Preface. 

So, you can see that the animosity between the Bishop and the Conventionist is personal, not simply a matter of opposing political opinions. The Bishop lost his family fortune, was declared a traitor and lived in exile for years as a result, he believes, of the work of the Conventionist. And the Conventionist’s disgrace and isolation can easily be tied to the institution to which the Bishop has dedicated his life, thanks to the Church’s close relationship to the restored monarchy. Each can blame the other for personal suffering, and each does blame the other for broader harm that he considers inexcusable. This is what makes their reconciliation so remarkable. 

After a short break, we’ll dig into that reconciliation.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file to share, and extras, like pictures and related texts that don’t fit in each episode, plus a discussion board for your ideas. It’s always exciting when a text that is so familiar to me takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so other listeners and I will look forward to reading your comments and responding, and there’s a chance you might get mentioned in a future episode! 

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So far today, we have been discussing the historical context of the Bishop of Digne’s visit to the Conventionist in Chapter 10. Now we can turn to the chapter itself, and think about how we might interpret their reconciliation.

In the chapter title, the Conventionist is described as an “unknown light.” This is one of the places where translation does the text a bit of a disservice: the word “light” in the French title, “lumière,” metaphorically evokes not only what it does in English--a source of understanding and goodness that is different from the religious one that the Bishop knows--but it also evokes the specific period in intellectual history that we in English call the “Enlightenment”--in French “L’Age des Lumières,” the age of lights. As we’ve discussed, this period was deeply suspect for someone like the Bishop in 1815 -- he had seen it lead to a rejection of religion, and then the violence of the Revolution. But what the Bishop will discover here is that this particular light held over from the Enlightenment is not so dissimilar from his own. It’s an unknown light to the Bishop, but it is presented unequivocally as light. The narrator already knows what the Bishop is about to learn, and he lets us in on the secret from the beginning. This primes us to hope for a specific outcome. Because the Bishop is so sympathetic so far, we want him not to disappoint us--we want him to “see the light,” as it were. It is interesting to note that we aren’t set up to hope for a similar sort of conversion from the Conventionist, even though traditionally, a final visit from a member of the clergy might be expected to involve just this sort of religious reconciliation. The Bishop sees it as his duty to pay a visit to this dying man, just as he had to the murderer on the way to the guillotine, but there is a surprising lack of discussion of saving his soul or returning him to righteousness. If anything, we are given to expect that the Conventionist is beyond hope where religious conversion is concerned. 

Regardless of our expectations, though, both men enter into the conversation with significant prejudices against the other. We learn that the Bishop knew about the Conventionist living in his solitude, as did everyone in Digne, long before his dying moments made a visit urgent. Despite the Bishop’s nagging sense that he should minister even to this member of his flock, for a long time, he can’t quite make himself do it. This time, the town gossips express the Bishop’s prejudice as well as their own--the Conventionist is, after all, as they say, “half-regicide,” belongs that dreadful time when everyone called each other “citizen,” and why hadn’t they just made an example of him and exiled him? When the Bishop finally visits the dying man, they set his visit in parallel to that trip into the mountain bandits’ territory that we saw last time, considering it maybe even more dangerous. 

But this parallel brings the central flaw in the Bishop’s thinking to the forefront--when it came to venturing into that other danger, we remember, he had warned against prejudices, saying they were the real thieves. But when it comes to the Revolution, this deepest of national wounds, he can’t quite conquer his own prejudice. Even once he arrives in the Conventionist’s home, the Bishop expects more formality and respect from him than is his habit, and gets offended by him more easily. He holds the Conventionist’s former power against him, even though the whole reason for his visit is that right now, the former Revolutionary is lonely, rejected, and dying. Still, the narrator tells us, “un conventionnel lui faisait un peu l’effet d’être hors la loi, même hors la loi de charité.” (p.41) -- “A Conventionist sort of gave him the impression of being outside of the law, even the law of charity.” The narrator can see this hypocrisy before the bishop does, and calls the distance that he wants to keep from the Conventionist “la frontière de la haine” (p. 39) -- “the border of hate.” 

Now, the Conventionist has his prejudices too. Remember, when the Bishop sarcastically congratulates him for not having voted for the King’s death, the Conventionist tells him just as sarcastically to hold his congratulations, because he voted for the end of the “tyrant” (p. 42)--and he defines the tyrant in a way that will sound familiar: prostitution for women, slavery for men, darkness for children. We recognize these as echoing the century’s three problems from the Preface, Hugo’s impetus for writing this book. The suggestion that the Bishop might not wish to congratulate him on, as he puts it, voting for the end of these problems, speaks to the deep political divisions that led to prejudices between people who otherwise might have had common cause. The Conventionist only knows that a Bishop and his Church are opponents of the Revolution--the cause he served in order to bring about a new, better world. As far as the Conventionist is concerned, opposing the Revolution is opposing that new, better world--but we know enough about the Bishop to know that he would vote for the end of those tyrants as well.

The Bishop’s main complaint about the Revolution is actually its methods. He understandably objects, as many at the time did, to the violence of 1793, especially when it was perpetrated against innocents like the child Louis XVII. But the Conventionist argues convincingly that the poor, including their children, suffered and died far more and for far longer in the centuries preceding the Revolution than anyone did on the Convention’s watch. He is also careful to note the complicity of the Church, in its quest for power and its close alliance with the Old Regime. All the Revolution did, he claims, was work to end those centuries of suffering. We know the Bishop has deep compassion for the suffering, and we know of his resistance to the trappings of Church power, so we anticipate that this argument will touch him. We, as readers, now see the place where the Revolutionary project meets the Bishop’s religiously-based compassion, and where former enemies can become allies.

Still, the moment when the Bishop kneels before the Conventionist to ask for his blessing is clearly intended to be dramatic; it’s both touching and challenging. It was also troublesome to the more conservative, Catholic readers of Hugo’s day, who saw a sacrilege in this role reversal. They were offended to see a clergyman and a conventionist, metonymic representations of the Church and the Revolution, in this posture, with the Church asking for the Revolutionary atheist’s blessing. Hugo seems to be saying that if the Church were as it should be, after Myriel’s model, it would seek the blessing of the Revolutionary spirit that the Conventionist represents. Interestingly, as we have seen Hugo do before, he elides the key moment of this scene, again by letting his omniscience fail and slipping into a character’s point of view, namely, the Bishop’s. While Myriel’s head is bowed, the Conventionist breathes his last, but we don’t know whether or not he gives the benediction with his last breath. That moment is simply left out. We are allowed to assume what we like, and give it whatever implications we wish. If the Conventionist dies before giving his benediction, or refuses it, how is that different than if the Bishop received his blessing? Leaving it up to us provides another opportunity to grapple with multiple possible stories, and all the meanings they might have. 

The narrator also does something similar when he tells us that the Conventionist is part of the Bishop’s “approach to perfection,” that this experience caused “une sorte d’étonnement qui le rendit plus doux encore. Voilà tout” (p. 50)-- “a sort of astonishment that made him kinder still. That’s all.” Astonishment at what, though? The precise substance of the change that the Bishop undergoes is another question that Hugo leaves to our imagination. Was it the ability to see common ground with those he opposes so fiercely? the recognition of multiple paths to morality?  The understanding, maybe, that the work he had been doing since he became a priest was part of the Revolutionary project? Was it simply forgiveness, the healing of national wounds in a single person’s life? Or maybe the sudden unification in his mind of the various ways one might work for justice? Perhaps it is all these revelations at once that leave the Bishop astonished.

The Conventionist, as we predicted, does not experience a conversion during this meeting. His only dying regret is that the Revolution failed to go far enough--it changed social structures, but did not exterminate the ideas that lead to injustices, and so it gave them room to reappear in new forms. Because of this, it seems for the moment that it was all in vain--but he looks to the future to vindicate him. The Conventionist’s solitude and his life as an outcast both bring to mind Hugo’s own exile--we’ve mentioned that Hugo published Les Misérables when he was on the Channel Island of Guernsey in exile from the repressive, and in many senses regressive, Second Empire in France. He was 60 years old, and had suffered a severe illness a few years earlier when he contracted anthrax, so his sense of his own mortality was acute. Like the Conventionist, he sees that he could die in solitary exile. So, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that this chapter involves an element of wish fulfillment for Hugo as well. Here, the exile is heard and his wisdom has an impact. It changes the heart of no less than a Bishop, someone who has a place and a voice in the Restoration, where the Conventionist does not. As proof, we will very soon see the Bishop set the rest of the plot in motion, so the Conventionist’s influence outlives them both. Thanks to the Bishop’s change of heart, the Conventionist can hope that what he has done, to quote the preface, “may not be without use.”

Where the Bishop has been offered as one sort of model up to this point, now the Conventionist becomes another. At least at the beginning of their meeting, he is an opposing one. The Bishop calls 1793 “inexorable”--the death it dealt was final, and left no room for pity, clemency, or forgiveness. This word, inexorable, is important though--in an earlier draft of the Preface that we read in our first episode, Hugo called Les Misérables “a protest against the inexorable,” which linked it closely with his life-long work against that most inexorable of state actions, the death penalty. The Bishop’s objection to the Revolution, which of course made extensive use of the same guillotine as the executioners Hugo protested, is an echo of that earlier version of the Preface. Meanwhile, we just saw the Conventionist echo the definitive version of that Preface in describing what he called his vote for the end of the tyrant. I suspect that if we could ask Hugo, “Should we imitate the Bishop or the Conventionist?” his answer might well be, “Yes.” In 1815, maybe even at the moment of the publication of Les Misérables in 1862, maybe even now, our mind would boggle at such a close kinship between these two opposing causes. 

This chapter works through that paradox until it resolves. At the end of the chapter, knowing about his visit to the Conventionist, an old woman jokes with the Bishop, “on demande quand Votre Grandeur aura le bonnet rouge.” (p. 49) -- “We were wondering when Your Grace will start wearing the red bonnet!” The red bonnet she’s referring to is the Phrygian bonnet that French Revolutionaries wore; I’ll put some pictures on the website for you if you haven’t seen one. Myriel, still with his old wit, responds, “voilà une grosse couleur [. . .] Heureusement que ceux qui la méprisent dans un bonnet la vénèrent dans un chapeau.” (p. 49) -- “that’s an important color [. . .] fortunately those who hate it in a bonnet revere it in a hat.” In one sense, this is a reminder that she should perhaps have a bit more respect for the Bishop’s own reddish biretta--the hat that is part of his vestment. At the same time, their similar headwear serves as a visible reminder of the common ground that he and the Conventionist found--mercy for the suffering and rejection of the sins of the privileged, but also a gruesome history of violence. The Bishop realized, in a sense, that he was already wearing a red bonnet. Their conversation shows that both religion and revolution can do great harm when they lose sight of those higher priorities, and both can work for good when they prioritize their higher call above all other considerations, even their own political motivations and prejudices.

After a short break, we’ll look at the four short chapters that conclude the portrait of the Bishop, builder of bridges.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content--equipment, music, web hosting, and the like--and anything you can contribute will help offset them. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well. 

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.”

To finish up today, I want to clarify the final point about the Bishop’s politics that Hugo makes in Chapter 11, then move on to try to get a better understanding of the Bishop’s philosophy and theology.

Up to this point, we’ve been discussing chapter 10, in which we see the Bishop of Digne take a step in what the narrator calls his “approach to perfection” when he ministers to the dying Conventionist G. It’s presented as a kind of reconciliation of two mortally opposed ideologies of the period around a common cause, namely, compassion for the oppressed and the repairing of social ills. 

In the next chapter, though, he makes it clear what it is not: it is not a politicization of the Bishop, who remains mostly apolitical. Chapter 11 -- titled in French “Une Restriction,” possibly the same word in English, “A Restriction” or something like “A Qualification” or “A Reservation”-- may be a bit difficult to understand without some sense of the history of Napoleon’s rise and fall. This qualification--the only serious critique of the Bishop that the narrator leaves unresolved--is that the Bishop’s most political actions were to oppose Napoleon when his power was already on the decline. He never really supported Napoleon or the supremacy he sought over the Church in France, but opposition to Napoleon is not itself the main subject of Hugo’s objection. By 1862, Hugo’s feelings about the Napoleonic era were complicated--we’ll learn more about them when we arrive at the long digression on Waterloo. Instead, he objects to the fact that the Bishop’s opposition only manifests when Napoleon is already past the crest of his power. He would have preferred that the Bishop take a stand for justice and liberty against Napoleon’s rise, and would have considered this to give him the right to criticize him during his fall. But to begin opposing him in the 18-teens, as some people did, when it starts to become easy, lacks courage to the narrator’s mind. 

Still, this criticism is minor because it’s a minor part of his personality. The overarching characteristics of the Bishop continue to be his concern for the poor, his witty critique of church wealth, and the solitude that, we learn, is owing to his rejection of ambition and intrigue. This final characteristic allows the Bishop to build more bridges across the religious and cultural landscape of his time.

Because he rejects ambition, the Bishop leads a relatively solitary life, away from the city, in close contact with common people and with nature. This calls to mind the character type of the Romantic hero. In each of the last two episodes, we’ve had occasion to talk about the legacy of Romanticism in Hugo’s writing even here in 1862, well after the height of the Romantic era had passed. The Bishop would be an unusual Romantic hero, certainly; the typical one was young and melancholic, suffering from an ennui whose source he couldn’t quite name. The Bishop doesn’t share these characteristics of the type, but he does share his solitude and his intent to follow his heart, his intuition, and his conscience above all. As we start to think about the last two chapters of this first book, we can say, at least, that the Bishop’s faith bears the imprint of Romanticism.

The influence that Romanticism had over religion will be recognizable to us today. On the one hand, early French Romanticism looked to the past. It wanted to undo the horrors of Revolution and atheism and return to a more traditional belief system. In 1802, the year of Victor Hugo’s birth, François-René de Chateaubriand, an émigré, published one of the first works of French Romanticism, Le Génie du Christianisme, “The Genius of Christianity,” where he hoped to defend Christianity to his recently atheist country. This work was typical of the first wave of French Romanticism, in which a personal, emotional, introspective, but still orthodox Christianity tended to prevail. The adolescent Hugo was a fan of this--in the 18 teens, as a schoolchild, he is said to have doodled “Je veux être Chateaubriand ou rien” -- “I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing” in one of his school books. But the second French Romanticism that we discussed last time--that phase in the late 1820s and 1830s where Hugo was arguably the leader of an early sort of counterculture--they reinterpreted religion as well. Theirs was a type of religion that emphasized personal contemplation and introspection, too, but included some less orthodox elements--there was interest in other world religions, especially those of what they called the Orient, and in various mysticisms. Hugo and his contemporaries experimented with practices like table-turning, read texts from a wide variety of mystical traditions and incorporated them in their belief systems. The arts and literature developed an aesthetic interest in the Gothic, the occult, and horror that had evolved from early Romanticism’s interest in spiritual Christianity. 

This is important context for understanding Ch. 13, entitled “What He Believed,” describing the Bishop’s religious faith and practice. Given the flavor of Romanticism that some readers, maybe particularly the more conservative ones, might see in the Bishop, we can understand why the chapter begins with such a pronounced unwillingness to question his doctrinal correctness--don’t worry, everyone, the narrator seems to be saying, this Bishop isn’t some hippy-dippy Romantic! Still, the subsequent description is of a deeply non-traditional faith. The following chapter “What He Thought,” elaborates on the same pattern, insisting that, however it may seem, he isn’t the sort of amateur philosopher who has developed his own spiritual system--the subtext being, again, he isn’t that Romantic. He loves nature, sure, but he isn’t Brahmanist or Pantheist--words that would have been associated by some with the Romantics’ strange religious ideas. In fact, his faith is far simpler than all that, and he prefers to avoid getting lost in Big Theological Questions. Instead, his spiritual life consists of love for all--including animals, plants, and all of nature--and of contemplative prayer. Beyond that, he simplifies the Big Questions by relying on the Church’s teachings to provide answers when he needs them, but focusing mostly on loving others and alleviating their suffering. 

The resulting picture is of an almost primitive religion, uncomplicated by doctrines and creeds. This system of beliefs has more to do with his attitudes toward power than it might first appear. His faith is sort of de-institutionalized. He accepts the Church’s teachings, but that is where his connection to the institution’s culture ends. The Bishop’s involvement in the political life of the institution is minimal, and and we see only a passing mention of his performance of Catholic rituals. Although it is clear that he performs them, they are not the substance, or even an important focus, of his beliefs. This religious posture runs parallel to his refusal of the Church’s political power, and in that sense, it is political – or, perhaps, antipolitical. It makes the distinction between institutionalized religion’s preoccupation with power and spiritual religion’s transcendence of it. 

Through the Bishop, Hugo encourages his religious or traditional readers to accept the cause of social progress, and he also asks his progressive readers to remain open to this sort of spiritual religion. When the Bishop challenges the Conventionist theologically, the answer that the Conventionist gives might have been Hugo’s own: that notion of the infinite necessarily having a Self, and that Self being called God, that was a basic element in Hugo’s theology. Even as other elements around it shifted over the course of his life, he remained convinced of a spiritual intelligence in the universe. Where Hugo’s progressive contemporaries rejected faith altogether out of disgust for the Church’s ambition, corruption, and abuses, Hugo shows a way in which the best elements of religious faith might be retained even as its abuses are rejected. 

So, in this second half of his portrait of the Bishop, Hugo situates him politically, doctrinally, and culturally as a builder of bridges. He is a Royalist, but finds common ground on the matters of priority in the book with the Conventionist, doing a great deal to depoliticize them. His beliefs are traditional, so that Catholic readers can find an entryway into the book through him, but they have a flavor that Romantic, spiritualist or atheist readers could still sympathize with, and perhaps also find common ground. In other words, the Bishop is carefully positioned in the culture of his time to build bridges between forces that could be seen as cultural nemeses, in the name of what matters more. Anyone who can share this common ground with them can, and should, claim affinity with what the Bishop will soon do to set the book in motion. The Bishop’s work isn’t solely the work of the Clergy, of the Restoration, of a Romantic, or of the Revolution, but instead, it is the work of anyone willing to vote for the end of the tyranny of poverty and oppression.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we will, finally, meet our hero Jean Valjean. In the meantime, happy reading.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 1, Book 2, Chapters 1-5: How to Feed the Body and Soul.

[/Music]

Here, at last, we meet Jean Valjean. We’ll talk about his arrival in Digne, and look at all the ways Hugo adds meaning to this most important character introduction. Then, finally, we’ll discuss the beginning of his encounter with the Bishop.

Over the course of the first chapter, as Jean Valjean arrives in Digne in search of food and shelter for the night, we see two progressions play out. The first is a gradual approach to the character, from a purely external point of view to one that is much closer to being through Jean Valjean’s own eyes, but never quite is. As we are given more and more detail about his feelings and experiences, we come to a much more intimate sense of the character than we have at the outset. But, we’ll see that the narrator seems to struggle to bring us truly inside this character’s point of view. The second progression is the character’s own downward trajectory, one possible meaning of the title of the Book 2, “La Chute” or “The Fall.” I’d like to start with the second one of these, the downward trajectory that Jean Valjean follows through Digne.

You may have noticed that Book 1 and Book 2 both begin by situating themselves in 1815. In a sense, this isn’t surprising--Book 1 mentions that Myriel was Bishop of Digne in 1815 because the long description of his character that we discussed in the last two episodes is given largely as a backdrop to the events of Book 2. This becomes easier to see if we imagine the description of the Bishop being much shorter, and skipping directly to the first line of Book 2. So it would go something like, “In 1815 Monseigneur Myriel was Bishop of Digne. He was a gentle and kind man. One day, in October of 1815, a ex-con arrived in town….” I think Hugo’s version is much better, but this way, it’s easier to see the surface structure that leads to repeating this date. 

But--this repetition also places emphasis on the date itself, and the date is a significant one. Jean Valjean’s arrival in Digne is narrated in the shadow of Napoleon’s arrival 7 months earlier, at the beginning of the Hundred Days. We mentioned this event last time. After the coalition of forces opposing him entered Paris in March of 1814 and Napoleon abdicated, he was exiled to the island of Elba, just south of France in the Mediterranean. He stayed there for nearly a year before he saw an opportunity to return. This opportunity was created by broad dissatisfaction with the first Bourbon Restoration, in particular among those who had fought with Napoleon, who were being treated badly. Plus, the various European powers that had defeated him, who were now participating in the Congress of Vienna, were engrossed in their own differences and unprepared to defend against his attempt to return. So he left Elba and landed on the Mediterranean coast of France on the first of March 1815 with about a thousand men, amassing an army as he proceeded north on what came to be called the Route Napoléon. As we read here, this route took him through Digne. He proclaimed himself Emperor, created a new constitution and held a successful referendum on it, and at first met little resistance. This early juggernaut of Napoleon’s return is the context of the arrival in Digne that chapter 1 of book 2 references. The Golfe-Juan Proclamations, which were mentioned here, declared Napoleon’s return. They appealed to national pride and loyalty, claiming that Napoleon was the true guardian of the French nation, while those loyal to the Bourbon kings--notably the émigrés--had fought for 25 years with France’s enemies, the other nations of Europe. Separate proclamations were addressed to the people and to the soldiers. All, but especially the soldiers, were summoned to join him. 

When Jean Valjean arrives in Digne, he is tracing the path of this triumphal re-entry. His return from prison echoes Napoleon’s return from exile, but this fact only emphasizes the way in which their paths then diverge, as Jean Valjean’s takes a downward turn. At the city hall, in the spot where the Golfe-Juan Proclamations were read, Hugo places a suspicious gendarme at the moment of Jean Valjean’s arrival. The gendarmes were and are a policing arm of the military, and it feels heavy with significance to place a character who is both a law enforcer and a soldier in the spot where the soldiers of Digne were called to loyal defense of the nation. In October of 1815, with Napoleon now in permanent exile on the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic and both the Bourbon King and domestic and foreign peace securely installed, who is the enemy that a loyal defender of France must fight? This gendarme, with one foot in the army and one foot in law enforcement, eyes Jean Valjean suspiciously, and seems to have an idea of the answer. When he sees this tired, gruff, haggard stranger, he presumes that he is not part of the nation he is charged with defending, but instead an outsider he must defend against. 

Jean Valjean leaves the city hall and goes to his next stop, which is also associated with the early part of Napoleon’s Hundred Days, only this time, less closely. Rumor has it that the Croix-de-Colbas inn is owned by a relative of an innkeeper by the same name in another town, and that Napoleon had been welcomed at that other inn. It’s no longer the exact site of an historic event of the Hundred Days, but it can still claim proximity. After Jean Valjean is rejected there, though, that is the end of the parallels with Napoleon; he has fallen below the level of such comparisons.

So like a character in a fairy tale, Jean Valjean makes three stops in human habitations looking for food and a bed for the night, and the three stops are narrated in parallel structures. Each one is slightly humbler than the last in the description of its food, atmosphere, and clientele--the third, being a private home, has no clientele at all--and each one treats him slightly worse. At the same time, their treatment of him is based on slightly less reliable information about him each time, and as he leaves each place, the hostility he finds in the street increases. These latter elements of his descent in particular show us something important about his situation, which is, I think, recognizable as the “social damnation” that we saw mentioned in the Preface. It has its root in something that happened at the city hall, although we don’t yet know what, but it has pursued him down through society’s ranks thanks to rumor, and a kind of single-minded consensus about him that goes unquestioned--at least, so far. We remember that the Preface said that social damnation exists thanks to both law and custom--and both are visibly at work in this descent. Then, oddly, as if human law and custom reach beyond humanity by some mysterious force, he is finally chased out of a dog house, by the dog, and lastly, out of an empty field by an indefinable feeling of hostility in nature itself. Also somewhat surprisingly, the woman who is finally kind to him and shows him the Bishop’s house is a marquise, of the highest social status of anyone he’s met yet. 

The narrator tells us she is worthy of being called “good woman,” supplying us with a value judgment for the situation, as he did with the Bishop. We probably don’t need this prompt to see her kindness as well-placed, though, because as Jean Valjean has followed this downward slope of rejection from society, the narrator has simultaneously brought us into closer proximity with him. The more his situation becomes dire, the closer we feel to him, and the more we wish for some reprieve for him. 

As he enters town, the description of him is superficial and physical, with a strong emphasis on the suspicion he provokes. A relatively dry and objective description of his physical appearance opens the chapter by letting us know he is poor, strong, and road-worn. As the narration follows him out of the inn, we are just a bit closer to his point of view, and the narrator now guesses at Jean Valjean’s own emotions based on his appearance--specifically, saying he looks humiliated and sad. 

In the tavern, we have a second description of him, still more intimate and emotional, but still based on his appearance as seen by others. He has “[U]ne vague apparence de bien-être mêlée à cet autre aspect si poignant que donne l’habitude de la souffrance.” (p. 68) -- “A vague appearance of well-being mixed with that other poignant look that comes from being used to suffering.” And later, “L’oeil luisait sous les sourcils comme un feu sous une broussaille.” (p. 68) -- “His eyes glowed beneath his brow like fire beneath brush.” All provides a vague suggestion of depth, of a past, of something dark, and of suffering, but it is also presented as supposition; the narrator’s omniscience doesn’t yet extend into Jean Valjean’s thoughts.

The narrator admits this insufficiency when he arrives at the private home, but he continues to make still more specific guesses at his character’s thoughts. “Que se passait-il en lui? Lui seul eût pu le dire. Il est probable qu’il pensa que cette maison joyeuse serait hospitalière, et que là où on voyait tant de bonheur il trouverait un peu de pitié.” (p. 70) -- “What was happening within him? Only he could tell. It is probable that he thought that his joyous house would be hospitable, and that where there was so much happiness, he might find pity.” Even though he admits his lack of omniscience, this is a really specific guess that Jean Valjean has a palpable sense of desperation and hope, and the narrator is willing to venture that it’s “probable.” We can hardly be faulted for taking this as a reliable account of Jean Valjean’s thoughts and feelings.

When he’s alone in the field, it is difficult to distinguish the narrator’s description from Jean Valjean’s emotionally charged impressions: “Cet homme était évidemment très loin d’avoir de ces délicates habitudes d’intelligence et d’esprit qui font qu’on est sensible aux aspects mystérieux des choses; cependant il y avait dans le ciel, dans cette colline, dans cette plaine, et dans cet arbre, quelque chose de si profondément désolé qu’après un moment d’immobilité et de rêverie, il rebroussa chemin brusquement. Il y a des instants où la nature semble hostile.” (p. 73) -- “This man was obviously far from having the delicate habits of mind and intelligence that make one sensitive to the mysterious appearances of things; however there was in the sky, in this hill, in this plain, in this tree, something so profoundly sad that, after a moment of stillness and reflection, he briskly retraced his steps. There are times when nature seems hostile.” This passage is an example of the apparent contradiction in the way that the narrator approaches Jean Valjean’s thoughts and feelings: he simultaneously shies away from saying with certainty what Jean Valjean is thinking and suggests that the character might not know himself, even as he tries to give us a sense of his thoughts anyway. All of this creates a sort of veil covering the thoughts of the misérable, creating a sense of mystery, or dysfunction, or insufficiency, or otherness. But meanwhile, bringing us as close as he can to Jean Valjean's thoughts makes him more sympathetic to us, leaves us rooting for him, even as something about him remains out of reach. We’ll continue to explore this push-pull between mystery and sympathy in the next two episodes and beyond. 

In a few moments, we’ll explore the rest of what we learn from this all-important introduction of Jean Valjean by digging into the references in this section, and later, we’ll see what happens when this suffering soul and the Bishop finally meet.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file to share, and extras, like pictures and related texts that don’t fit in each episode, plus a discussion board for your ideas. It’s always exciting when a text that is so familiar to me takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so other listeners and I will look forward to reading your comments and responding, and there’s a chance you might get mentioned in a future episode!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So far in this episode, we’ve seen that the narration of Jean Valjean’s arrival in Digne, and in the novel, follows a downward and inward trajectory--as a weighty secret, which is not yet revealed to us, follows him and has him chased out of humbler and humbler places, we grow closer to him, collecting clues about him and seeing more of his thoughts and emotions. This chapter also offers information about Jean Valjean in the references and metaphors that it layers under the story, so let’s take a look at those next.

The first of these references is to the title of the novel itself. The narrator says right away of Jean Valjean, “Il était difficile de rencontrer un passant d’un aspect plus misérable.” (p. 63) -- “It was difficult to find a passerby who seemed more misérable.” We recall, of course, the ambiguity of this word. Is he the poorest-looking man imaginable or the most dangerous? At this point, we’re explicitly in the point of view of the other people in the street, the inhabitants of Digne, and they’re said to look at him with “une sorte d’inquiétude” -- worry, or disquiet. Is this worry for him, because of his poverty, or for themselves because he looks suspicious? His being sweaty and dirty and traveling on foot in the heat seems “sordid” (p. 63), and it is based on his poor appearance and his hunger that the innkeeper at the Croix-de-Colbas becomes suspicious and sends to city hall for more information about him. All this suggests that the people of Digne confuse or conflate poverty and untrustworthiness--precisely what the bishop’s radical hospitality refused to do. The Bishop chooses, in spite of any danger that others might see, to offer his trust to those in need, and from the moment that Jean Valjean is called a misérable, he seems set on a course toward needing the Bishop’s hospitality.

The second significant reference in this section is biblical. When Jean Valjean is at the door of the family’s home and the father connects him to the rumors he’s heard, he says “Est-ce que vous seriez l’homme?....” “Could you be the man….?” (p. 71). This weighty use of the word “man,” echoes the phrase “Ecce homo” -- “Behold the man,” from the Gospel of John, a frequent reference for Hugo. In the Gospel, it occurs when Christ, having been scourged and crowned with thorns, is presented to the crowd by Pilate. This is the first hint of what will be an extended association between Jean Valjean and the sacrificed Christ, and we will continue to follow it as it calls upon the complex networks of meaning of that story. The most pertinent node of meaning it adds here is its connection to the idea of the scapegoat. The idea of a “scapegoat” has become a common expression now thanks in part to its adoption by modern social psychology--I used it without explanation in the last episode. But its root is also Biblical--in the book of Leviticus, it says that the sins of the people are to be laid upon a goat by the priest as part of the ceremonies of Atonement, and that goat is to be sent into the desert to purge the community of its sins. Christians often see this process echoed in the crucifixion, where the sins of the world are placed upon Christ, rather than a goat. When the householder asks Jean Valjean, “Could you be the man?”, we don’t know yet why he has been rejected everywhere he has gone, but he does, indeed, seem to have a sort of irrevocable outsider status. At all levels of society, he is seen as something outside of it. He is, so far, a wandering version of the outcast, like the Conventionist, or of the exile, like Hugo himself. He is metaphorically sent into the desert as the goat was, with this phrase asking whether he might be echoing Christ’s sacrifice. A reference like this asks us to look for other possible parallels between the two stories, and the most significant element missing from the story of Jean Valjean is that of bearing the sins of others. So we ask, without having a clear answer just yet: does Jean Valjean somehow bear the sins of others? 

A third moment that opens up on a much larger field of significance is when the dog chases him out of the doghouse. This dog, described as “un dogue énorme” (p. 72) -- “an enormous mastiff”  -- is likely to be a guard dog. That is an interesting position to consider: a guard dog belongs to the house, but to perform his duties, he must stay outside of it. He is the line of defense between insider and outsider, between his master and those who might attack him. He is just barely an insider, and is so only because he stands his post at the boundary. We will see much more about this kind of role as the novel progresses. In chapter 3, Jean Valjean will say of this dog “on aurait dit qu’il savait qui j’étais” (p. 79) -- “you would have thought that he knew who I was.” Even he doesn’t believe in this anthropomorphism literally--the dog is only following his instinct to protect territory. But by saying this, he makes an equivalence between the dog’s behavior and the humans’, who did know who he was. We might take this to suggest that the humans are behaving like animals, not vice versa. When the Bishop is kind to him, Jean Valjean responds by saying, “Vous êtes humain [. . .] vous n’avez pas de mépris” (p. 80). Interestingly, the word “humain” in French can mean either “human” or “humane.” So his expression of gratitude toward the Bishop has two possible translations: “You are humane, you have no contempt” or “You are human, you have no contempt.” To have contempt for the stranger, and to be unkind to him, is given here as a response unworthy of humanity.

The final reference I wanted to point out, before we move on to the Bishop and Jean Valjean’s meeting, is a bit subtler. Having returned to town, Jean Valjean arrives in the square where the cathedral is located. The rejected Jean Valjean shakes his fist at the Church, perhaps at its power, or at God himself, and then settles down to spend the night on a stone bench. A few details of this square are important. We know from the context here and earlier that both the hospital, located in the former episcopal palace, and the Bishop’s current home, are here. We also learn another detail at the end of this chapter: that there is a printer’s shop on the square as well. This seemingly unnecessary detail adds several layers of meaning. First, it provides a final reference to Napoleon’s stay in Digne a few months earlier--these references disappeared, you remember, after Jean Valjean was sent away from the Croix-de-Colbas inn, and this one serves to remind us one last time how different his painful arrival in Digne has been from Napoleon’s triumphal one. 

But second, and perhaps more interesting, is the reference that is created by the juxtaposition between the printer’s shop and the cathedral. In 1831, three decades before Les Misérables, Hugo published what is perhaps his second-best-known novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, usually titled in English The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The story of Quasimodo, Esmeralda, and medieval Paris is set in 1482, on the eve of the French Renaissance. In one of the lesser-known passages of that novel, the sinister archdeacon Claude Frollo holds one of the earliest books printed on a printing press in his hand as he contemplates the Notre-Dame cathedral, and he says, “Ceci tuera cela.” (Book 5, Chapter 1) -- “This will kill that.” The subsequent chapter takes this phrase as its title, and is a reflection on the dissemination of information as societies and technologies progress. In this second chapter, Frollo’s statement it taken to mean that “le livre de pierre, si solide et si durable, allait faire place au livre de papier, plus solide et plus durable encore” (Book 5, Chapter 2)-- “the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper, still more solid and more durable.” This seems paradoxical at first, but he goes on to explain that where a cathedral, with its carvings and statues full of stories and beliefs, preserves ideas forever in stone, the printing press frees them for infinite reproduction and distribution, making them all but indestructible, as they can be remade if they are destroyed, and can inhabit the minds of an ever-expanding readership. This chapter, I’ll say parenthetically, makes for fascinating reading in an age where we again see, and sometimes lament, new communication technologies supplanting older ones. These two chapters make up Book Five of that novel; I will link to it on the website if you would like to read it in detail. 

So, what we have here in Les Misérables is a juxtaposition of this line of thought with the image of Jean Valjean, rejected from all quarters, about to spend the night on a cold stone bench. The younger Hugo’s optimism about the promise of access to information is rebutted by the older Hugo, who seems to ask, to what end? The printing press may have killed the cathedral (although, here it is, still standing), and the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas may have challenged the church, but has that really meant progress? In October of 1815, with the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras definitively ended and the Restoration firmly installed, or in 1862, with an oppressive and unworthy dictator ruling France, and with social damnation still leaving the poor outcast literally out in the cold, what has access to information gotten us? We need something more.

After a break, we will begin to see what that is.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s read-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content--equipment, music, web hosting, and the like--and anything you can contribute will help offset them. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Up to this point in today’s episode, we’ve taken a close look at Jean Valjean’s arrival in Digne, and all the layers of meaning that his difficulty finding food and shelter might have. Chapter 2 returns us to a familiar environment: the Bishop’s home. All is normal there on this particular evening, as the women fret about having the door unlocked when a shady-looking stranger is said to be in town, and the Bishop, undaunted, is focused on his work. We’ll talk more specifically about that work in a couple of weeks. 

As a result of this change of perspective in chapter 2, we see Jean Valjean’s entrance into the Bishop’s house in chapter 3 from the women’s point of view first. It is sometimes said that Hugo’s writing is sort of proto-cinematic, and this is a great example of that. Cinema would of course not exist until well after Hugo’s death in 1885, but he has a strong sense of visual imagery, and he guides the reader’s eye through scenes similarly to how a film director might. In this scene, he writes, “Il entra, fit un pas et s’arrêta, laissant la porte ouverte derrière lui. Il avait son sac sur l’épaule, son bâton à la main, une expression rude, hardie, fatiguée et violente dans les yeux. Le feu de la cheminée l’éclairait. Il était hideux. C’était une sinistre apparition.” (p. 78) -- “He entered, took a step, and stopped, leaving the door open behind him. He had his bag on his shoulder, his stick in his hand, a rough, daring, tired, and violent expression in his eyes. He was lit by the fire from the fireplace. He was hideous. It was a sinister apparition.” The concern for the lighting and for the visible emotional complexity, the progression from less to greater detail, and then back to the overall impression, allows us to imagine the moment on film, where a director might give the audience a beat, maybe something like a quick dramatic push-in combined with a point-of-view shot, to help the audience see the character as the women do. 

After this first moment, the point of view progresses quickly too, from the most frightened character, Mme Magloire, to the least, the Bishop, by way of Mlle Baptistine, who is initially shocked, but quickly follows her brother’s emotional lead. By now, we have developed enough of a sense of this household that we are encouraged to do the same. 

This brings us to a word about the chapter title, “Héroisme de l’obéissance passive,”-- “Heroism of passive obedience.” For anyone who knew Hugo’s work during the Second Empire, this title would recall the title of a poem Hugo published in Les Châtiments, the 1853 book of poetry in which he unleashed all his criticisms and emotions against the newly founded Second Empire--remember that this was the regime that had staged a violent coup in late 1851, and was the reason Hugo was in exile. I will link to that poem from the website, for those who can read the French. It calls into question the heroism of soldiers who obey immoral orders, referring directly to those who supported the coup d’etat that began the Second Empire. The soon-to-be Emperor had demanded obedience phrased this same way, “l’obéissance passive,” of his soldiers, but Hugo chastises them for it, as obeying their immoral leaders meant killing civilians, including women and children. But here, the women’s passive obedience when the Bishop welcomes Jean Valjean, is seen as heroic. Last time, you’ll remember, ambiguities in Mlle Baptistine’s letter brought up questions about the total submission of these women to the Bishop, even in the face of their own misgivings, and whether it should be admired. Using the title to connect it to this other use of the phrase postulates an answer to that question: obedience to authority is not an absolute good; it is only heroic if it serves a heroic cause. But because the Bishop’s work is presented as so heroic, so too is the women’s obedience to his authority. Unquestioning loyalty and submission must, Hugo seems to be saying, choose its leaders wisely.  

As if he expects the worst from this encounter, Jean Valjean tells his story right away, and the mystery surrounding him is finally solved. He tells the bishop only the bare minimum of his backstory--his name and his crime. In this first instance, as he is reading his yellow passport, he does not add any explanatory comment to the official story and he even skips details of his identity that are printed on the page, reading, “Jean Valjean, forçat libéré, natif de… --cela vous est égal…. --est resté dix-neuf ans au bagne. Cinq ans pour vol avec effraction. Quatorze ans pour avoir tenté de s’évader quatre fois. Cet homme est très dangereux.” (p. 79) -- “Jean Valjean, released convict, native of…  -- you don’t care about that… -- spent 19 years in penal servitude. Five years for theft and breaking and entering. Fourteen years for having made four attempts to escape. This man is very dangerous.” Not only is there more to this story than what is on the page, as we will learn, but he skips the portion of the text that is right there on the page that pertains to his past. As we saw with the Bishop, the life he lived before the cataclysmic events of the last quarter century is obscured by his present.

Of course, even his name and his crime are beside the point for the Bishop. He is only interested in what his guest has suffered, and in easing that suffering. We have seen a hint at his compassion for prisoners in his budget, and we know that he has an interest in their education and rehabilitation. But for what remains of this episode, I would like to focus on the steps that the Bishop takes to ease Jean Valjean’s immediate suffering. 

The most immediate, of course, is providing him food, shelter, and a comfortable bed. This already seems generous to Jean Valjean, but it is not, I don’t think, the most important thing that the Bishop does. He also sees to his emotional and spiritual needs in a much more comprehensive and surprising way. Jean Valjean comments before the literal dinner begins that “j’avais bien faim en entrant ici; mais vous êtes si bon qu’à présent je ne sais plus ce que j’ai, cela m’a passé” (p. 82) -- “I was very hungry when I came in here, but you’re so kind that, I don’t know what it is, but it seems to have passed.” His intangible needs are as important as his physical ones, and satisfying them even temporarily sates his hunger.

So, what is the emotional food that the Bishop provides?

First on the list, and the only item that the text identifies explicitly, is respect. The narrator tells us that each time the Bishop calls him monsieur, “le visage de l’homme s’illuminait. Monsieur à un forçat, c’est un verre d’eau à un naufragé de la Méduse. L’ignominie a soif de considération.” (p. 81) -- “the man’s face lit up. Monsieur to a convict is like a glass of water to a victim of the Méduse shipwreck. Disgrace thirsts for respect.” The shipwreck he references is well-known to students of art history thanks to an 1819 painting by the Romantic painter Théodore Géricault. It depicted the aftermath of a real event, when a ship called the Méduse wrecked off the coast of Mauritania in 1816, and the survivors were adrift for 13 days, suffering starvation and dehydration, and resorting to cannibalism. I will post a picture of that painting on the website, so you can experience the image of desperation that Hugo is associating with Jean Valjean’s need for respect. In addition to calling him monsieur, he uses the formal “vous” form of address with him--only one person so far in Digne has done this after learning that he is a convict, and that was the innkeeper at the Croix-de-Colbas, who insisted that he was only being polite because he was in the habit of being polite with everyone--his vous was a matter of his own respectability, not respect for Jean Valjean. 

The second sort of spiritual food that the Bishop offers is trust. He allows Jean Valjean into his home, as a vulnerable old man living with two old women, and he brings out his only valuable possessions--the silverware and the candlesticks. We will see Jean Valjean question this choice near the end of the evening, and will soon see whether or not the Bishop’s trust is misplaced. 

Thirdly, the Bishop provides Jean Valjean with a sense of equal status--he calls himself only a priest, and allows Jean Valjean to believe that he is a simple country vicar, not a distant and inaccessible Bishop. Note that this is, effectively, a lie of omission, and thus, arguably a sin. But the Bishop seems to feel it is more important to set his guest at ease than to elaborate the full truth. He also tells him “vous vous appelez mon frère” (p. 82) -- “your name is my brother.” He does not want to know about his past or emphasize his status as a criminal.

Instead, in response to the knowledge that Jean Valjean has been in prison, he provides the fourth course in Jean Valjean’s emotional banquet: a listening ear. He inquires about the conditions in prison, and Jean Valjean’s suffering, and he responds with sympathy for the experience itself. While the bishop seems to express shock when he learns that it has taken Jean Valjean 19 years to earn 109 francs, he does not enter into the question of justice in discussing Jean Valjean’s experience, he expresses only sympathy for, and attention to, the experience itself.

This may seem a bit counterintuitive to us, given the stated goals of the novel, having to do with justice. But in doing this, he provides for a fifth need: an emotional way forward. The Bishop seems to recognize that Jean Valjean, as an individual, will not benefit from rage against a system that the political reality doesn’t allow him to change, that all he will gain from that path is frustration and bitterness. Instead, the Bishop encourages Jean Valjean to rise above his suffering. He does not participate in nursing Jean Valjean’s anger against society, however justified he might feel it is, instead encouraging Jean Valjean to respond with “des pensées de bienveillance, de douceur et de paix” (p. 82) -- “thoughts of goodness, gentleness, and peace.” At the same time, though, he recognizes that being able to find peace after such suffering might be an impossible emotional feat, saying that if he manages it, “vous valez mieux qu’aucun de nous” (p. 82) -- “you are more worthy than any of us.” The Bishop does Jean Valjean the honor of issuing him a higher call, believing that he can grow, that his soul is not beyond rehabilitation. But at the same time he recognizes that his suffering is real, and that his anger is a part of it, one that he may struggle against for the rest of his life.

Just before bed, Jean Valjean gives a first indication that this good meal for body and soul has not been instantly transformative, as he tacitly threatens the Bishop by questioning his judgment in trusting a convict: “qu’est-ce qui vous dit que je n’ai pas assassiné?”(p. 87)  -- “How do you know I’m not a murderer?” The narrator leaves the reason for this mysterious, just as he has so much about Jean Valjean, suggesting it is inscrutable, instinctive, belonging to an alien psychological profile. And yet it rings true. Perhaps he wants to exert some power in the form of fear, the only sort he has, after the bishop’s kindness provoked tender vulnerability in him. Perhaps he doesn’t trust his own darkest impulses, forged in the hell of prison, and this is like Dr. Jekyll warning of the possible emergence of Mr. Hyde. Perhaps he is made uneasy by the radical difference between the Bishop’s posture toward him and everyone else’s, from the respectable innkeeper to the lowly guard dog, and he would feel more comfortable if he could get the Bishop to distrust and insult him like he’s used to. Regardless, I find myself reassured to see that Hugo does not present an evening of the Bishop’s kindness as a miracle cure for 19 years of bitter suffering. We will spend the rest of the book exploring just how curative this and other experiences will be.

[Music]

But, that’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll learn more about Jean Valjean’s backstory, and think about the forces that brought him to where he is. In the meantime, happy reading.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 1, Book 2, chapters 6-9 “Understanding Despair.”

[/Music]

In these chapters, Hugo passes twice over the story of Jean Valjean’s life before he was released from prison. In chapter 6, he tells the surface story, and all we know about his mind from chapter 6 is that he was frightened and vulnerable when he entered the bagne, but that his time there hardened him.

In chapter 7, he makes a first attempt to dive into what he calls his “soul”--but what we would probably call his psychology. We’ve been building toward this, as we remember from last time, but it hasn’t been easy. As he made his way through his troubled arrival in Digne, we got closer and closer to him, but the narrator was never able to assure us that he was presenting the character’s thoughts and feelings with any certainty. This is part of something that we will continue to see throughout the book, which is a strong tendency to make the character inscrutable. For all the times I’ve read this book, I have never felt like he is really familiar, as much as I have become attached to him and developed affection for him. He continues to feel like a person who doesn’t speak much or make eye contact, perhaps someone who has a lot of secrets. Interestingly, his secrets aren’t kept from the reader, but it feels as though something is still behind a veil. Some people see this as a weakness in Hugo’s character development, but in this book, at least, it goes a long way toward expressing a central element of how he understands the condition of the misérable.

So today, I want to start by talking about that condition, as we see it in the life of Jean Valjean before he’s arrested, then see how his time in prison intensifies it. Then, finally, we’ll look at what Hugo begins to say more generally here about criminal justice, and its effects on Jean Valjean.

In his early life, Jean Valjean is typical of vast numbers of peasants in pre-Revolutionary, pre-industrial France. From the first paragraph of chapter 6, this is suggested by the anonymity of his name – it’s a strange phrase to use, but appropriate here. In French, the name Jean is so common as to be nearly anonymous. And his last name, with the etymology that Hugo provides, is less a connection to a family heritage than a reaffirmation that there’s nothing to know about him other than that first name. He claims (again, without certainty) that Jean Valjean is a corruption of “Jean, Voilà Jean.” This is like saying, “John, there, John,” or possibly “John, that’s all, John.” His last name, unlike most, doesn’t make his name any more specific or do anything to anchor him in a place in the world. He is nobody, and every man. And yet we notice--you’ll see it now if you didn’t before--that Hugo almost always uses his full name in the text. Most of the misérables in the book will have names that fail to provide the sort of mooring that names should--attachment to families, geographical places, and history. For Jean Valjean, the bitter irony is that he will carry this sort of anonymity despite the fact that we will consistently see his first and last name together.

As would have been common at this time, he works in agriculture, but doesn’t own land. He works as a tree pruner, for which he is underpaid. He is in Faverolles, northeast of Paris, and that work is seasonal, so he cobbles together odd jobs, also mostly in agriculture, to earn enough for his own survival and that of his widowed sister and her seven children. Bare survival consumes virtually all his energy. The narrator is careful to note that he had never been in love, and the image of him eating his soup mechanically, seeming not to notice as the best part is given to one of the children, already suggests an absence from himself. 

This emphasis on bare survival, on connection to the land, but not ownership of it, and on disconnection from family and history, all suggest a kind of naturalness, a distance from civilization. This can be understood either in positive terms, as simplicity and innocence, or in negative terms, as being something less than human, wild, or animalistic. We’ve seen the double-edgedness of this sort of idea before, when we talked about the implications of the word “civilization” in the Preface. Civilization can be the pinnacle of human progress or the thing that corrupts humanity--but either way, Jean Valjean is presented as excluded from it. 

We can see this duality in talking about Jean Valjean specifically when the narrator mentions one of the details from his trial, that he is known to own a gun, and use it for illegal hunting--almost certainly, although he doesn’t say so, in an effort to survive. Hugo is careful to distinguish between country bandits like poachers and smugglers and the hardened criminals of the city. This distinction echoes an idea that was common among the Romantics: while “uncivilized” environments--in Jean Valjean’s case, the forests--might make men wild and fierce, the city makes them corrupt and brutal, which is much more dangerous (p. 90). Forests, mountains, and seas, Hugo says, allow people, even violent people, to keep their humanity in a way that the city doesn’t. Even armed, he seems to be saying, this primitive Jean Valjean shouldn’t be seen as dangerous, at least, not more dangerous than a wild animal.

And this comparison to a wild animal, or something that is otherwise not human, is reinforced by the rest of the description of him. Because of his physical strength and agility, he is compared to a bird, a fly, and a jack--animals and objects. He doesn’t talk much, but even though he is described as pensive, Hugo keeps suggesting that he is something less than conscious. He is called “quelque chose d’assez endormi et d’assez insignifiant” (p. 88) -- “something rather asleep and rather insignificant.” As he is being sent to prison, we’re told, “Il paraissait ne rien comprendre à sa position, sinon qu’elle était horrible. Il est probable qu’il y démêlait aussi, à travers les vagues idées d’un pauvre homme ignorant de tout, quelque chose d’excessif.” (p. 90) -- “He seemed to understand nothing about his position, except that it was horrible. He could probably also make out, through the vague ideas of a poor man who was ignorant about everything, something excessive.” He is not, so far, presented as capable of sophisticated ideas about justice, but instead understands his situation much as an abused animal would--he knows he’s suffering, and he feels it’s wrong, but that’s where his analysis ends.

This passage also resembles some that we saw last time, in the chapter narrating his arrival in Digne, where we approached his point of view, but the narrator’s omniscience seemed to end at his thoughts. Those passages, like this one, talked about what he “probably” thought, felt, or understood. The narrator suggests in chapter 7 that Jean Valjean himself is not fully aware of his thoughts, and this is a characteristic that we will see in other misérables as well--there is a sort of fog, an obscurity around their inner lives that narrative insight will only occasionally, temporarily pierce. This is not only a literary technique aimed at creating an intriguing and mysterious character, but it has a basis in historical fact. In 19th-century France, there was an emphasis in education on developing selfhood, a sense of autonomy, and an awareness of one’s own mind. The theory that supported this, though, also claimed that not everyone had the capacity for developing this sort of selfhood--specifically, and perhaps unsurprisingly, white men of means were considered to be best cut out for this. So, as this novel will reflect, this sort of formal education was reserved for those individuals; women from wealthier families were educated differently, and the poor were usually not educated at all. 

So, in a sense, we should not be surprised when characters like Jean Valjean, and the other misérables, have thoughts and motivations that seem inaccessible to us or even to themselves, when we see them act on instinct, or for reasons we and they don’t quite understand. This is, for Hugo, an element of what it means to be a misérable--it is to be deprived not only of physical needs and comforts, but also of autonomous selfhood, of individuality and identity. 

And yet, in chapter 7, we finally find our way inside the mind of Jean Valjean, just in time to learn how prison reinforced his misère, and made him what the justice system believed he was--a very dangerous man. We’ll dig into that process after a short break.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file to share, and extras, like pictures and related texts that don’t fit in each episode, plus a discussion board for your ideas. It’s always exciting when a text that is so familiar to me takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so other listeners and I will look forward to reading your comments and responding, and there’s a chance you might get mentioned in a future episode!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Before the break, we looked at what it means to be a misérable through the lens of Jean Valjean’s life before his crime and arrest. He was virtually anonymous, so focused on bare survival as to be animalistic, and deprived even of basic selfhood and identity. 

When he steals a loaf of bread and is sent to the bagne in Toulon, the first thing we find is that all these characteristics are intensified. But he becomes something else as well, as he serves his sentence as his situation makes him the criminal it is designed to house. We mentioned last time that his life was cloven in two, and we see here how that happened. 

First, he is deprived even of the mostly meaningless name that he had. He’s given that number, 24601, that so many of us know from the musical. It’s ok if, when you saw it in the text, you sang it, a little. But it’s in the musical not just because it fits the melody well. What it does there is a simpler version of what it does here--it serves as a signal of struggle between the main character’s possible identities. When he becomes a convict, his identity is understood only through its relationship to the criminal justice system, through that number. And yet, in a sense, that number is more specific, more defined, than the name he had before his arrest. We saw the sort of non-specificity that the name Jean Valjean has, but 24601 is unique, and it is clear who and what he is. Of course, replacing a name with a number is not unique to 19th century France’s criminal justice system--it is a chilling feature of many systems across history that have dehumanized people by depriving them of individuality. So this change of moniker both deprives him of his humanity and provides him with something almost like an identity.

In the same way, his meager connection to social life is severed when, after he is arrested, what’s left of his family gets lost in the indistinguishable mass of people that no one keeps track of. They are described as disappearing into a fog, or into darkness, as if human beings could simply dissolve. About four years into his sentence, when he hears of their whereabouts, only the youngest child remains with his mother; the rest, who would all still be minors, are nowhere to be found. His sister is struggling to work for a living in Paris--as it happens, in a printer’s shop; we discussed the significance of that last time--while her youngest son is struggling to get an education, both in terrible conditions. The ability for groups, especially families, to dissipate in this way will continue to be a characteristic of the most abject misère, and for Jean Valjean, it means that what place he had in the social world has dissolved into the mist along with them, and with his name. 

We also find out why Jean Valjean spent 19 years in prison for the relatively small crime of stealing bread, as his sentence was progressively extended for repeat escape attempts. Continuing to try to escape seems irrational, and in chapter 6, when we’re seeing him mostly from the outside, we aren’t provided with his thought process. It’s not until chapter 7, when we are invited inside his mind, that it’s explained. The narrator tells us that this irrational behavior is a perfect example of how this sort of punishment transforms, “un homme en une bête fauve, quelquefois en une bête féroce” (p. 97) -- “a man into a wild animal, sometimes a ferocious animal.” It is associated with his descent into pure instinct, he is a beast. Before his arrest, when he was just a common peasant, he had animal qualities, but now, “la bête seule agissait” (p. 97) -- “only the beast was acting.”

But even as he becomes more animalistic, more disconnected, and more anonymous, he develops a clearer vision of the system he has fallen under. The clarity he develops is portrayed as a corrupted sort of education that is forced into the void created by his lack of formal education, and the awareness it gives him only makes him more dangerous. This is signaled by the fact that he learns to read in prison, but he does so because he feels that “fortifier son intelligence, c’était fortifier sa haine” (p. 95) -- “fortifying his intelligence was fortifying his hatred.” 

The narrator tells us that the first thing he does when he arrives in prison is to create a sort of tribunal in his mind, and he makes arguments for his own guilt and the guilt of society. The arguments he makes speak for themselves, I think, but what is remarkable, given what we know about Jean Valjean so far, is their sophistication. The simple fact of being made a convict has transformed the man who was only able to feel that his punishment was horrible and vaguely excessive, into someone who can imagine arguments about nuanced degrees of harm in terms of power and justice. In the middle of the chapter, we have a familiar disclaimer about Jean Valjean’s thoughts being less clear than the narrator tries to make them. “Il y avait trop d’ignorance dans Jean Valjean pour que, même après tant de malheur, il n’y restât pas beaucoup de vague.” (p. 97) -- “There was too much ignorance in Jean Valjean, even after so much suffering, for a lot of things not to remain vague.” But in that same intervention, suffering, hatred, and anger seem to be what provide any clarity he has, that they flash from time to time like lightning and illuminate “aux lueurs d’une lumière affreuse, les hideux précipices et les sombres perspectives de sa destinée” (p. 97) -- “in the glow of terrible light, the hideous precipices and the dark perspectives of his destiny.” 

Interestingly, this act of constituting a tribunal in his mind is the same one that Claude Gueux had undertaken. We’ll remember that Claude Gueux was the title character of an anti-death-penalty novella that Hugo published in the 1830s. His story began much as Jean Valjean’s did--he was hungry, and was condemned for five years for stealing bread; I linked to a full text of it in the extras for episode 2. They key differences between this passage in Les Misérables and the one in Claude Gueux are that Claude Gueux had a specific human defendant in his mental trial--a prison guard who had treated him badly--and he condemns him to death, his murder being the reason for Claude Gueux’s own death sentence. Here, Jean Valjean condemns society not to death, but to his hatred, and he condemns God as well. For Claude Gueux, the one particularly cruel individual turned him into a murderer and brought about his death. For Jean Valjean, the harm was inflicted by the system as a whole, and the transformation was subtler, deeper, and arguably more intolerable. 

The strongest impression we have as he thinks through society’s guilt is the disproportion between his crime and his punishment, particularly given the circumstances. We are shown a  vision Jean Valjean has of the immensity of the society above him. He sees “une sorte d’entassement effrayant de choses, de lois, de préjugés, d’hommes et de faits, dont les contours lui échappaient, dont la masse l’épouvantait, et qui n’était autre chose que cette prodigieuse pyramide que nous appelons la civilisation.” (p. 98-99) -- he sees “a sort of terrifying pile of things, laws, prejudices, men, and events, whose contours escaped him, but whose mass horrified him, and that was none other than this prodigious pyramid that we call civilization.” Here is, once again, an extremely ambiguous picture of civilization--from Jean Valjean’s perspective either just outside it or just beneath it, it is not a shining achievement, but a terrifying mass that serves only to crush him. 

This image of the “pyramid” of society from Jean Valjean’s perspective at the bottom draws on a couple of key reference points. The first is a traditional image of French society, which was imagined as a pyramid, with the vast majority of common people at the bottom and the aristocracy, clergy, and King placed by God at the top. Under the Old Regime, this was an image of stability, so long as each part remained in its divinely appointed place. But in Hugo’s famous 1830 play Hernani, he had already rewritten this image to destabilize it. This play was well known, as it had provoked a key moment in the Romantic movement when riots broke out at its opening night over some aesthetic choices that offended theater traditionalists. It is set in 1519, and depicts, in one scene (Act IV, scene 2), the Spanish King Don Carlos as he is made Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. This is taken as an occasion for a long meditation on societal structure and power. Don Carlos describes this same pyramid, only not from the bottom, as Jean Valjean does, but from his position at its highest point. In this articulation of it though, the masses of people at the bottom of it are no longer a stable, immobile foundation, but a moving and dangerous sea. The king poised securely at the top of his pyramid has become a ship. The people at the bottom of the pyramid now can shipwreck their rulers. We can tell this was written after the French Revolution, of course, but also just months before the July Revolution in 1830, when another French king, who happened to be named Charles, was overthrown. 

Now we see this same pyramid from Jean Valjean’s perspective at its base, as part of that sea, and we can see why it’s stormy. We can see in much greater detail the reason for the shouts and the tears, and Jean Valjean even echoes the bitter laughter from these lines. “Il fallait quelque émotion extrême pour lui arracher, une ou deux fois l’an, ce lugubre rire du forçat qui est comme un écho du rire du démon.” (p. 98) -- “Some sort of extreme emotion was necessary to wrest from him, once or twice a year, that dismal convict’s laughter that is like an echo of  a demon’s laughter.” When the narrator confirms at the end of the chapter the declaration from Jean Valjean’s yellow passport, that he was “un homme très dangereux” (p. 100) -- “a very dangerous man,” he doesn’t just refer to his anger, or his strength, or his potential for further crimes, as the yellow passport does, but he also sees him as one of a class of misérables that risk endangering the same society that has created them, through its disregard for the poor and the crushing criminal justice system that awaits those who falter.

But this is only one of the critiques Hugo makes of the criminal justice system in this part of the novel. When we return, we’ll consider the others in more detail, and draw out the connections between this story and Hugo’s other writings on the subject. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Up to now, we’ve been looking at how Jean Valjean’s life and punishment have forged him into a “very dangerous man.” Hugo does not mince words about why he is telling this story, writing at the beginning of chapter 7, “Il faut bien que la société regarde ces choses puisque c’est elle qui les fait” (p. 93) -- “Society should look upon these things, since it is she who does them.” Similarly, but far more graphically, the poet Charles Baudelaire, a contemporary of Hugo, in a review of Les Misérables not long after its publication, wrote, “N’est-il pas utile que de temps à autre le poète, le philosophe prennent un peu le Bonheur égoïste aux cheveux, et lui disent, en lui secouant le mufle dans le sang et l’ordure: ‘Vois ton œuvre et bois ton œuvre’?” (Le Boulevard, April 1862, reproduced here)-- “Is it not useful for the poet or the philosopher to, from time to time, grab selfish Happiness by the hair and say, rubbing its face in the blood and the filth, “Behold your work, drink your work’?”

These chapters are, of course, a psychological profile of Jean Valjean, but it is also a blatant critique of what Hugo saw as an excessively harsh criminal justice system. 

The harshness begins with the motivation for his crime: he broke a window and stole a piece of bread, because his widowed sister and her seven children, whom he supported, had no food. As we saw, he had already used the same motivation for Claude Gueux’s crime, but he defends the repetition on the basis that this desperation is often the root of crime. We have already seen the Bishop’s emphasis on charity, and we will continue to see as the book goes on some of the solutions Hugo offers to the question of hunger. Just wait until you hear what he has to say about the sewers. But what is clear here is that poverty and crime are closely linked. No one knew about Jean Valjean’s suffering until he committed a crime, and then, sending him to prison was no solution.

A word about what I keep calling “prison”--it isn’t really prison, in the sense that we think of it today. It was something called le bagne: you may have this translated as “galley,” with Jean Valjean as a “galley slave,” but that’s not quite right either. The galleys were a type of ship powered by many rowers, usually slaves; you may have seen pictures of them, with dozens of oars sticking out the sides of the hull. If not, I’ll put one on the website. Convicts were used for this purpose between the 15th and 18th centuries in France’s Mediterranean fleet. But the galleys were obsolete by the mid 1700s, so they were decommissioned, and the prisoners who were already there, or those who were subsequently sentenced to hard labor, were sent to bagnes, still on the Mediterranean. That’s where Jean Valjean was sent. His was in Toulon, which was the largest and most notorious bagne. They lived in dreadful conditions on the decommissioned galleys or in buildings nearby--increasingly on land as time went on. They would have done heavy manual labor there, usually related to the operations of the port, always in chains and under heavy supervision. If you’re reading in French, you’ll see them called bagnards, meaning people who had been sentenced to the bagne. You will also see the word galérien, an anachronism that literally means galley slave, but was still sometimes used in place of its official replacement, forçat, which meant someone condemned to hard labor. Translations into English for the persons include convict, or galley slave, and for the place, prison, or chain gang. If the context is Jean Valjean’s time in captivity, which it most often will be in this book, you can be sure it refers to this situation of living and working at the docks on the Mediterranean coast. I may sometimes call it prison, for simplicity’s sake, but do be sure not to picture cells and bars and long hours of idleness like in modern prisons. These were essentially hard labor camps.

And, they were dreaded. In Hugo’s earlier novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man, there is a chapter describing the chaining of men in Bicêtre to be sent south to the hard-labor prisons on the Mediterranean coast. This is precisely the ordeal we see Jean Valjean go through in chapter 6, as he sobs and pantomimes touching each of the heads of the nieces and nephews he had tried to save. In The Last Day of a Condemned Man, the title character, awaiting his own execution, is brought out of his cell to watch the chaining of the convicts. They are stripped, inspected, given the clothes they’ll wear for their weeks-long trip south, and chained. They see him watching and begin shouting their admiration and envy, because “Il est heureux, il sera rogné” (Ch. 13) -- “He is lucky, he’ll be clipped!” The condemned man, even knowing what he himself faces, is horrified by the spectacle, and concludes, “plutôt mille fois la mort ! plutôt l’échafaud que le bagne, plutôt le néant que l’enfer” (Ch. 14) -- “A thousand deaths instead! Sooner the scaffold than the bagne, sooner nothingness than hell.” 

Even though Jean Valjean is not condemned to death, his sentence is brought into close comparison with a death sentence. Even with the external perspective of chapter 6, the vocabulary of death is used to describe the moment of his condemnation. “Quelle minute funèbre que celle où la société s’éloigne et consomme l’irréparable abandon d’un être pensant!” (p. 90)-- “What a mournful moment, when society withdraws and completes the irreparable abandonment of a thinking being!”

This gestures toward what may be the most striking chapter in this section, chapter 8, titled “L’Onde et L’ombre,” perhaps translated as something like “Wave and Shadow.” This chapter, in either language, is one of those that in one sense can only speak for itself, bordering on poetry the way the meditation on seeing the guillotine did a few episodes ago. Reread it, slowly, and allow yourself to feel your way through it. The image of the sea returns, but this time, an anonymous man has fallen overboard. As in the image from Hernani, the ship remains a metaphor for society, but now, we see the situation of a man who has been left behind. As an aside, especially for those of you reading in French, this chapter has particularly remarkable similarities to the first chapter of Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, The Last Day of a Condemned Man, where the condemned man is processing his own condemnation. I’ll link to that chapter from the website if you’re interested in comparing them. 

One of the most striking characteristics of this chapter, which it also shares with that novel, is the existential crisis of someone who will soon die, but who, for the moment, continues to live and think. He is at a strange point between life and death, but in both instances, Hugo brings us inside his perspective, allows us to see that he still has a self, a mind, an internal narrative, even though he has no hope. 

And yet, he struggles. As he does, the narrator describes his situation, and the title of book 2, “La Chute” or “The Fall” reappears: “Autour de lui, l’obscurité, la brume, la solitude, le tumulte orageux et inconscient, le plissement indéfini des eaux farouches. En lui l’horreur et la fatigue. Sous lui, la chute.” (p. 102) -- “Around him, darkness, fog, solitude, the unknowing tumult, the chaotic movement of the savage waves. Within him, horror and fatigue. Beneath him, a fall.” So this fall, that became the title of this group of chapters, is what happens when this hopeless man stops fighting the inevitable, and surrenders to death.

Even though Jean Valjean is not condemned to physical death, Hugo creates this same effect by taking us inside of his mind. He references the sign at the entrance to Dante’s hell, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” (Inferno, Canto III) and makes the entrance to the bagne a similar point of no return. Even after Jean Valjean is released, we have seen the fact that he is a bagnard following him, keeping him in a permanent state of rejection. We’ve begun, I think, to get a clear picture of the meaning of that phrase from the preface, “social damnation.” Even though he is allowed to keep his head and keep breathing, he has as much chance of truly re-entering society as the condemned man, or the man overboard. As the narrator tells us at the end of chapter 9, “Libération n’est pas délivrance. On sort du bagne, mais non de la condamnation” (p. 103) -- “Liberation is not deliverance. You can leave the prison, but not condemnation.” And, at the same time, his soul suffers a kind of moral death, as he becomes what society believes he is: a very dangerous man. 

Chapter 8 ends with the question: “Qui la ressuscitera?” (p. 102) -- “Who will resurrect it?” I suspect we already know the answer.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll see the answer to that all important question from the end of Chapter 8. In the meantime, happy reading.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 1, Book 2, Chapters 10-13, “The Bishop’s Real Work.”

[/Music]

Last time, we took our first real journey into Jean Valjean’s mind, learned the full story of his past and how it was defined by what the Preface called social damnation, at the same time going a long way toward defining that term for us. Today, the psychological exploration continues in chapters 10 and 11, then we see Jean Valjean steal the Bishop’s silver, and we arrive at one of the novel’s most iconic scenes, and one that will set the course for everything that is to come.

First, today, I would like to look at a few features of chapters 10 and 11. Then, we’ll take a careful look at chapter 12, in the hope of seeing this possibly familiar scene with new eyes. Then, finally, we’ll look at how real transformation is represented in chapter 13.

Chapters 10 and 11 continue the psychological exploration of Jean Valjean in a way that is remarkable for the 19th century because much of it is non-linear. At the same time as Hugo attributed the reasoning of a lawyer at trial to Jean Valjean a few pages ago, here, he describes his mind doing what all of our minds do: jumping from one idea to another, beyond our control. As common as this experience is, it was innovative in Hugo’s time to narrate this chaotic mental activity in the way he does. A few years after Les Misérables, we will begin to see writers, mostly in poetry, experiment more and more with turning their attention to the non-rational mind in this same way. One of these poets, Arthur Rimbaud, professed a great deal of admiration for Les Misérables, saying he read it as if it were poetry. These poets would, in turn, be a part of the creative lineage of the surrealists, who would work to apply new Freudian ideas of the unconscious to writing their poetry after the First World War, in the 1920s, 60 years after Les Misérables.

So, it is fair to say that Hugo is ahead of his time when he shows us the “va-et-vient obscur dans le cerveau” (p. 104) -- “obscure comings and goings in the brain” of Jean Valjean. At the same time, though, these semi-conscious machinations are something we’ve seen before, in that they’re associated with the foggy inner-workings of the mind of the misérable and with his baser impulses. We have already seen that, thanks in part to a lack of education, Hugo’s misérables do things without being sure why. Here, the directionless churning of his mind is connected to the  temptation to steal the Bishop’s silver: “Beaucoup de pensées lui venaient, mais il y en avait une qui se représentait continuellement et qui chassait toutes les autres. Cette pensée, nous allons la dire tout de suite: -- il avait remarqué les six couverts d’argent et la grande cuiller que madame Magloire avait posés sur la table” (p. 104) -- “Many thoughts came to him, but there was one that presented itself continuously and chased out all the others. This thought, we’ll say it right away: -- he had noticed the six silver place settings and the big spoon that Madame Magloire had put on the table.” But at the same time as the idea of the silver hounds him and obsesses him, his rational mind returns to the justification that he found long ago for any act of vengeance against society: that he had been cheated by his 19 years in prison, by the excess of his sentence and by having been underpaid for his work there. 

We talked two weeks ago about the various practical and emotional needs the Bishop met for Jean Valjean earlier in the evening, and the hinted-at possibility that the Bishop’s first treatment of Jean Valjean’s wounds hadn’t been a miracle cure. This moment confirms that. Jean Valjean certainly has a kind of respect and veneration for the Bishop, but he still teeters on this precipice between that impulse and the one toward hatred, revenge, and animalistic survival. 

This position is represented physically in the long moment that Jean Valjean takes at the Bishop’s bedside. The narrator says of Jean Valjean watching the sleeping Bishop: “Ce sommeil, dans cet isolement, et avec un voisin tel que lui, avait quelque chose de sublime qu’il sentait vaguement, mais impérieusement.” (p. 109) -- “This sleep, in this isolation, and with a neighbor such as him, had something sublime about it that he felt vaguely, but urgently.” This word, sublime, is worth a moment of comment. The sublime, for the Romantics, was an esthetic quality of being in awe bordering on fear. In the physical world, the Romantics found this in nature--mountains, waterfalls, the sea, and similar awe-inspiring sights that reinforced the grandeur of nature and the individual’s comparative insignificance and weakness. But the word was frequently applied to moments like this one as well. The sublime that Jean Valjean can just barely see in the Bishop’s trust and goodness is metaphysical. At the same time, we as readers can see two instances of the sublime here: the Bishop through Jean Valjean’s eyes, and the enormity of the potential in this moment for Jean Valjean himself, when “Il semblait prêt à briser ce crâne où à baiser cette main” (p. 109) -- when “he seemed about to crush that skull or to kiss that hand.” Two extremes of the “very dangerous” Jean Valjean contemplating the most innocent and trusting sight he can imagine: a vulnerable old man, asleep. We take a long, slow moment to pause and consider this scene. 

During this moment, Hugo’s use of light is remarkable as well. This sort of attention to light is another reason why Hugo’s writing is sometimes called proto-cinematic--he uses the lighting of this scene in a way that filmmakers, decades after after Hugo’s death, will echo. He creates a vivid image that we can easily imagine from our own experience of the light of a full moon coming and going as it is obscured by clouds, and when this light falls on the Bishop’s face at the perfect moment, it stops Jean Valjean in his tracks, and gives him this vague but insistent sense of the sublime. But the light serves not only this esthetic purpose, but also a symbolic one. The natural light from the moon comes and goes unpredictably, much as Jean Valjean’s thoughts are unpredictable and, sometimes, quite dark. Now that we have read to the end of book 2, we can also oppose this light, both real and metaphorical, to the light from the candlesticks he will soon receive. The candle light is constant, within his own control, a more reliable guide in the dark than the moon. It’s also worth noting that the iron bar that we are allowed to fear he might use as a weapon, perhaps called something like a miner’s spike in English, is called in French a “chandelier de mineur” -- a miner’s candlestick. It is the “candlestick” that he brought from his forced hard labor, quarrying rock from the hills near the bagne. But it is a candlestick that produces no light at all.

The narration slows down so much for the scene at the Bishop’s bedside that we are doubly able to feel the frenzied pace of the final paragraph, all one long sentence, where Jean Valjean grabs the silver and runs. 

The next morning, the bishop’s reaction to the theft, his non-attachment to this silverware, is in one sense not surprising. He gives away everything of value that he has, and these have a great deal of value. But astute readers who already knew the story probably noticed that this silverware was mentioned early on in the description of the Bishop, and that they are the last remnant of his old life of luxury. He had inherited the silver candlesticks, and he said that eating with silver flatware was a luxury that would be difficult to give up. We see no sign of that difficulty here. He cheerfully accepts the possibility of eating with tin, iron, or even wooden utensils. 

By doing so, he provides us with one last mundane moral lesson before the Big One that will change the course of Jean Valjean’s life. He tells Madame Magloire that the silver had belonged to the poor all along, and that if a poor man took it, well, that is only right. Not only must we be willing to give to the poor, he seems to be telling the women, but we must relinquish control over that charity, make ourselves vulnerable to those in need, and accept when possessions are returned to their rightful owners in ways we didn’t plan. His easy acceptance of the theft is perhaps his most radical lesson yet--it’s difficult to imagine anyone who would accept it fully. But it is the logical end point of the lesson he has been teaching all along--that everything a just man has should be for those in need, that we shouldn’t cling to material possessions, that anything of value that can be put toward a higher purpose, should be.

With that final lesson learned, in a moment, we will talk about that iconic moment when the Bishop does his real work.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file to share, and extras, like pictures and related texts that don’t fit in each episode, plus a discussion board for your ideas. It’s always exciting when a text that is so familiar to me takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so other listeners and I will look forward to reading your comments and responding, and there’s a chance you might get mentioned in a future episode!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So far today we’ve been considering Jean Valjean’s theft of the Bishop’s silver, which, at last, leads to one of the most famous and iconic moments in the book. Virtually every adaptation includes it; it is the fundamental element of the main character’s origin story, and, thanks to Hugo’s eye for the theatrical, it comes pre-loaded with as much drama and emotion as a filmmaker (or musical librettist) could ever want. Jean Valjean is brought back to the Bishop’s house by three officers, it is revealed that his host was not a simple priest but a Bishop, and that Bishop covers for his crime and gives him two silver candlesticks in addition to the silverware, instructing him to use the money to “devenir honnête homme” (p. 113) --  “become an honest man.”

How many of you just sang those words?

The danger in a scene like this if we really want to make the most of reading the book, is that we know it so well from other versions of the story that we don’t really see its details here. So let’s look at it slowly.

The title of this chapter is “L’Évêque travaille” -- “The Bishop Works” or “The Bishop at Work.” As Jean Valjean was arriving in Digne, we saw the Bishop at what might be described as his traditional work, writing a treatise on duties. That treatise, described at the beginning of chapter 2, is oddly disconnected from the way he lives. It seems to organize social life and duty in some rigid hierarchical ways, and prescribes duties according to the letter of the law, but we’ve seen that the Bishop disregards these sorts of formal roles and hierarchies fairly radically. He has seemed so far to be animated more by the spirit of the law, that law being compassion. Perhaps this is why Hugo mentions that his treatise remained unfinished at his death. His real work, which we see in this chapter, is elsewhere. That intellectual work seemed strange based on what we knew about him, but this spiritual work fits him perfectly, and feels like the culmination of everything else we’ve seen him do. 

When the gendarmes enter, dragging Jean Valjean by the collar, speaking to him with contempt, and then salute the Bishop and call him Monseigneur, to Jean Valjean’s great shock, the Bishop ignores all of it. It is a moment that expresses the status of everyone involved--the Bishop’s accepted place high above them all, the automatic suspicion and disgust supposedly due to Jean Valjean, and the job of the gendarmes to reinforce both. But the Bishop seems not to notice that any of it happened. He doesn’t speak to the gendarmes at all, doesn’t confirm his own title, and immediately addresses Jean Valjean with the respectful “vous” form. 

Next, we notice a way in which the musical diverged from the book, and the book’s story is quite a bit more impressive, if a bit less believable. In the musical, you may know, the gendarmes tell the Bishop that Jean Valjean claimed to have been given the silver, and the Bishop is quick to agree. Here, the gendarmes do not supply Jean Valjean’s lie, but the Bishop guesses it, and confirms it. This seems almost impossibly perceptive on the Bishop’s part. But there is another explanation--perhaps for the Bishop, it isn’t a lie at all. Remember that at dinner, he had insisted on showing off all the silverware and the candlesticks to a man who had identified himself right away as a thief; he had explicitly instructed Madame Magloire to bring them out. Perhaps his intent had always been to present Jean Valjean with the moral dilemma he had faced the previous night at the Bishop’s bedside, and he had, in his mind, intentionally relinquished the silver to Jean Valjean one way or the other.

Jean Valjean’s reaction is first described by way of the inexpressibility trope: “une expression qu’aucune langue humaine ne pourrait rendre” (p. 112) -- “an expression that no human tongue could render.” Later, he is described as trancelike, as if he were talking in his sleep, and then he accepts the candlesticks “machinalement et d’un air égaré” (p. 113) -- “mechanically, and seeming disoriented.” The emotion of the moment is beyond the comprehension of character and narrator alike.

One of the more curious moments in this passage is generally left out of the scene in adaptations, perhaps because its banality breaks up the emotional rhythm of the scene. The Bishop encourages Jean Valjean, when he comes for his next visit, to come and go through the front door instead of the garden, that the front door is always unlocked. He says this just before explicitly dismissing the gendarmes, so we wonder if he says it largely for their benefit. But based on what they’ve said, they don’t seem to know that he left through the garden, climbing over the wall and knocking a stone off the top. I am left wondering why the Bishop says this at all--to guard against the gendarmes’ suspicion being rekindled should they discover the damage to the wall? To reiterate his trust in Jean Valjean, by letting everyone hear him tell him about the unlocked door? To be sure that all involved know that his hospitality for Jean Valjean is not a secret? In any case, it is clear that in this moment he bestows trust, dignity, and protection on Jean Valjean one last time.

The next thing the Bishop does is curious as well. After the gendarmes have left, he says something that we might mistake for being for their benefit too, because it is not strictly true, and everyone who is still in the room would certainly know that. “N’oubliez jamais que vous m’avez promis d’employer cet argent à devenir honnête homme.” (p. 113) -- “Never forget that you promised me you would use this silver to become an honest man.” The narrator says that Jean Valjean doesn’t remember making any such promise, because, of course, he didn’t. If the gendarmes had been in the room to hear this, it would be a sensible way to phrase his exhortation, but since he is speaking to Jean Valjean alone, it too is strange. We might wonder if we missed something, but we didn’t. The lyric in the musical smoothes over this problem, saying (and I’ll spare you my singing!) “Remember this my brother, see in this a higher plan, you must use this precious silver to become an honest man.” -- He asks him to remember the lesson, not any promise he hadn’t made. But here, he directs Jean Valjean’s obvious shock and gratitude toward the action that he might have promised, and might still promise, in return for the Bishop’s generosity. 

In the final line of this dramatic scene, he expresses the same concept in terms of a transaction, and one that is a bit shocking, given the references to slavery that we have already seen, and will still see. When he speaks of Jean Valjean “belonging” to good, of “buying” his soul to give it to God, we can’t help but notice the underlying assumption that he and his soul are for sale. It is possible for this declaration, as well as the previous one, to seem shockingly forceful, manipulative, or objectifying. But Jean Valjean was paid so minimally for his 19 years’ hard labor, and with so little hope of true freedom that a comparison to slavery is not entirely misplaced. As we saw last time, being allowed to leave the bagne is not the same thing as being set free, either socially or psychologically. Chapter 7, in its exploration of Jean Valjean’s inner life in the bagne, justified our seeing the prison from which he wasn’t set free--hatred and social damnation--as one and the same with the “pensées noires” and “esprit de perdition” (p. 113) -- “dark thoughts” and “spirit of perdition” from which the Bishop says here that he is buying Jean Valjean’s soul. The yellow passport that ensures his continued persecution, the harshness of life for any poor man, the anger and hatred that he harbors against the people, institutions, and God that have brought him to this point are all the slave masters that the Bishop buys Jean Valjean from. He is giving him both a practical and emotional starting point toward true freedom.

This is stronger medicine than the night before, but it is of the same kind: short-term protection, a practical way to begin rebuilding his life in the longer term, and an emotional and spiritual escape hatch. After a break, though, we will see how well this second treatment has worked.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So we just saw what is usually presented as the decisive moment in Jean Valjean’s life, when the Bishop not only forgives him for violating his trust and stealing from him, but gives him what he stole, plus two silver candlesticks, exhorting him to become an honest man. It’s easy to see why an adaptation like the musical would ride the emotional wave of this scene into Jean Valjean’s conversion, giving us the effect immediately following its cause, and skip the incident with Petit-Gervais.

Even if an adaptation does include Petit-Gervais, a bare telling of the events of the final chapter of Book 2 might suggest a simpler story than the one Hugo tells: Jean Valjean leaves the Bishop’s house torn between tenderness and hatred, good and evil, and it is only when he begins to continue down the path of evil and steals from a child that he realizes how far he’s fallen and finally experiences his moment of conversion. But Chapter 13, “Petit-Gervais,” presents a situation that is a bit more complicated than either of these approaches to the story. 

The first thing I want to note here, which you may well have noticed as you read--if so, congratulations--is the parallel structure to chapters 6 and 7, which we saw last time. Both here and there, Hugo tells us the same story twice, once from a perspective more or less external to Jean Valjean, then again with his inner experience laid bare. In both cases, this way of approaching the character reinforces the division between inside and outside, between what others can see and what they can’t. But here, the division of self will take on another significance entirely, which will take the rest of the novel to play out.

At the beginning of the chapter, Jean Valjean is sort of semi-conscious again, as we might have expected from the way he was described as seeming like a sleepwalker at the end of the previous chapter. He is all emotion at first, and the first paragraph is a flood of emotional vocabulary: “agité” “colère” “touché” “humilié” “attendrissement” “inquiétude” “calme affreux.” (p. 113-114) -- “agitated” “anger” “touched” “humbled” “tenderness” “worry” “terrible calm.” His protective shell has cracked, and he is open to more feelings than he is comfortable feeling, including long-suppressed childhood memories. The tenderness he feels is less familiar than the hatred and hardness that he had come to know in prison, and he thinks he may have preferred his prisons, real and metaphorical.

We should notice that this is one of the many moments of implausible, emotionally-based athleticism in the book. The Romantics did a lot of this sort of thing; they loved to portray characters so overcome with emotion that their bodies start working differently: he spends all day wandering in the fields, with no food or water since the previous night, and only half a night’s sleep. The narrator tells us “il est probable qu’il avait la fièvre” (p. 116) -- “he probably had a fever” (163). We’ll talk more about the way physiology and medicine are used in nineteenth-century fiction in a future episodes, but for now, I’ll just point out that it is often at least as useful to understand it psychologically as physically, and a fever is a sign of extreme, even dangerous, emotional agitation.

But, much of what we see him do in the first half of the chapter is understandable given what we already know about him. We know he’s suffered a great deal, and feared being sent back to prison when he was caught with the Bishop’s silver, so the Bishop’s forgiveness was almost certainly overwhelming. We have also been told that he acts instinctively, and has a history of theft, so when he steals the child’s coin, it’s tempting to chalk it up to that sort of instinct. Then, he realizes what he’s done, and feels guilty. The coin is compared to an eye staring at him from the ground, and he can’t stop looking back at it. This is a manifestation of his feeling of guilt, certainly, but, as a side note, we’ll want to remember this description later when we dig into the importance of seeing and being seen. He tries to repair the harm, and finally falls on his knees in repentance.

There is, however, one detail of this story that doesn’t fit this narrative of relatively ordinary emotional motivations. There are long stretches of time and of action where Jean Valjean seems to be in a trance, or out of his body. He doesn’t react, even as the child is crying and begging for his coin back, and then seems to regain his senses and asks “Qui est là?” (p. 115) -- “Who’s there?” not recognizing the child or knowing what he’s doing there. We clearly saw him speak to the child twice at the beginning of the scene, and once he refuses to move his foot, the child is described as grabbing him by the collar, then trying to dislodge his huge, strong leg from atop the coin. He finally scares the child off, but never really seems clear on what he’s doing. He is only brought fully back to consciousness when he realizes night has fallen and he’s cold. 

When he ultimately gives up on being able to repair the harm he’s done--the first real harm he’s ever done, apart from, I suppose the window he broke in his first crime--he declares “Je suis un misérable!” (p. 118) -- “I am a misérable!” -- perhaps the most significant use of the title of the book at any point in it. Here, it clearly seems to have the moral significance attached most strongly to it. And then, as if these words and his tears were a kind of unlocking spell, we gain access to the internal narrative of what we have just witnessed. 

We are told that Jean Valjean conceives of the moment as a battle against the Bishop’s forgiveness, described as an “assault” and an “attack” on the fortress of his pride and hate. This is an important image because it organizes the situation in a way that I think the Bishop himself would disagree with. A battle is of course adversarial, with two sides working against each other, toward opposite ends. Given Jean Valjean’s emotional state, and the hostility that he has cultivated over the previous two decades, we can understand that this frame might be the most conceivable one for him. Still, it creates a problem in which, in order to answer the Bishop’s call to be an “honest man,” he has to abandon what we saw last time as the only coherent sense he has of himself--the convict.

This way of understanding his encounter with the Bishop in terms of hostility is reflected in the way Jean Valjean remembers that all important conversation with him--that is to say, he misremembers it. Where the Bishop said he was purchasing him from “les pensées noires et l’esprit de perdition” -- “dark thoughts and the spirit of perdition,” Jean Valjean remembers him saying “l’esprit de perversité” (p. 118) -- “the spirit of perversity.” This difference is significant. Perdition--that is, loss, death, destruction of his soul, the opposite of salvation in the spiritual sense--is replaced with perversity, a word that has much more to do with his behavior and morality, etymologically, being turned toward evil. The Bishop’s word choice is in fact kinder, more concerned for Jean Valjean’s welfare and that he not lose his soul. Furthermore, in his misremembering, Jean Valjean leaves out the element of “dark thoughts” altogether. In the original iteration, the Bishop is on Jean Valjean’s side, working with him to save his soul and repair his damaged mind, but in the misremembered version, he makes an accusation, an action much more in line with Jean Valjean’s conception of the situation as a battle, or an assault on him.

But at the same time, the question is raised of his ability to conceive of it at all. He is compared to a drunk man, and the narrator suggests that his metaphorical ability to see the situation is compromised by the sudden light itself, like stepping out of a cave into the sun, and being temporarily blinded. He is particularly blind to the larger spiritual implications of his situation. While he can grasp the sensation that there is a battle raging, he may not quite grasp that this is a turning point in his life, a moment when he must become more significant, either in good or in evil, “qu’il n’y avait plus de milieu pour lui, que si désormais il n’était pas le meilleur des hommes il en serait le pire” (p. 119) -- “that there was no more middle for him, that from now on if he wasn’t the best of men he would be the worst.” Even as he senses the battle, he may not quite understand how definitive it is. That is, his only two choices are to give in to his (supposed) enemy or to resist. Giving in will mean a drastic change in his life and mind, but resisting a moment of this magnitude will be a point of no return. For better or worse, Jean Valjean can’t quite see this full picture.

And the narrator is clear about what Jean Valjean certainly does not understand: that the decision is to a great extent already made. “Ce qui était certain, ce dont il ne se doutait pas, c’est qu’il n’était déjà plus le même homme, c’est que tout était changé en lui” (p. 119) -- “What was certain, what he didn’t suspect, was that he was already no longer the same man, that everything in him had changed.” 

This strange combination of adverbs, “already no longer,” -- “déjà plus” in French, which is a bit prettier, but not less strange, can be seen to explain the semi-conscious state we see him in when he steals from Petit-Gervais. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s already someone else. The convict that the Bishop “attacked” that morning is already something different from himself. He’s sort of out of alignment with himself, and it will take more time for him to understand the new man that he has already become. This higher being is more human. It was his animal side that had stolen the coin, in a sense while his human mind wasn’t watching, distracted by the crisis. This beast chose to fight back against the Bishop’s assault--it could never conceive of doing anything else--by continuing the path it was already on. But in so doing, it had done something “dont il n’était déja plus capable” (p. 120) -- “of which he was already no longer capable.” This same combination of adverbs is even stranger here, the second time we see it, as he does a thing, but at the same time, is incapable of doing it. He is split in two, the beast is separated from the man, who is now, newly ensouled. 

And it is this beast that then appears to him in a vision. Hugo often attributes literal visions, like hallucinations, to his characters. Much has been made of the visionary aspects of Hugo’s writing, and one biographer, Graham Robb, has suggested that they were a reflection of Hugo’s own tendency toward hallucination. Understanding historical figures in modern psychiatric terms is a challenge, since the vocabulary for mental illness was entirely different in the 19th century, if it existed at all. However, Hugo had a brother and a daughter who were both institutionalized for symptoms that may have been schizophrenia, and it has been suggested that Hugo suffered from a milder, more high-functioning form of the disease. In any event, moments of literal visionary clarity like this one are a distinguishing characteristic of his work, and he often uses them to express visually something that would be more diffuse in analytical language.

Here, Jean Valjean sees an image of the bestial version of himself, standing before him as a separate entity. He is as gruff and frightening as he has seemed to other characters all along, “avec sa pensée pleine de projets abominables” (p. 120) -- “with his mind full of abominable plans.” Perhaps the most important change to notice in this passage is that the narrator begins treating the “hideous convict Jean Valjean” as the other, as something external to the main character. The personal pronouns like he and him refer to the person whose experience is being described, and from the moment the vision appears, the convict in the vision is something outside of that person. But, he doesn’t call this vision by his prison number 24601; Jean Valjean, the misérable that he has always been, has become the creature in this hideous vision. So once the “hideous convict Jean Valjean” disappears, we are left in the dark about the character that remains. What parts of the Jean Valjean that we’ve gotten to know over the course of Book 2 will be left? Something has clearly changed, it seems for the better, in this character, but there is little indication as to what. 

Then, little by little, a light appears, and he sees that it is the Bishop, who gradually replaces the convict entirely. He has made his choice, found his way out of his crisis by relinquishing that animal self, and ceding the battle to the Bishop. At the same time, another light, this one in his mind, shines on the horror of his life and soul. This is described as if “il voyait Satan à la lumière du paradis” (p. 121) -- as if “he was seeing Satan by the light of heaven.” On the one hand, it’s easy to understand this image as a renewed understanding of, and disgust for, what he had become. But there is another intertextual reference that complicates this reference to Satan. Around the same time when he was writing Les Misérables, Hugo was also working on an epic poem, “La Fin de Satan,” “The End of Satan,” part of a series of epic poems envisioned on a cosmic scale. The series, alas, was never finished, but “La Fin de Satan” is quite complete. It begins with the archangel Lucifer’s long fall and transformation into Satan, the ruler of hell. This fall bears a number of resemblances to both the man overboard that we saw last time and to Jean Valjean himself. But at the conclusion of the poem, the “end” of Satan is not victory over him, but the redemption of Lucifer, the fallen angel. The final lines, in the voice of God, are, “L’archange ressuscite et le démon finit, / Et j’efface la nuit infâme, et rien n’en reste; Satan est mort, renais, ô Lucifer céleste! Remonte hors de l’ombre avec l’aurore au front!” -- My far less poetic translation: “The archangel is resurrected and the demon ends, and I erase the vile night, and nothing remains of it; Satan is dead, be reborn, O celestial Lucifer! Come back up from the shadows with dawn on your brow!” If this poem is any guide, seeing Satan by the light of heaven is not disgust for an irredeemable demon who must be eliminated, but instead, a supreme opportunity for redemption. So this new man’s conception of his own conversion as the Bishop’s victory in battle over “the hideous convict Jean Valjean,” rather than an effort to save Jean Valjean--that is, to save himself--may be in error. That is a story we will have to wait to see play out. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll meet Fantine, and discuss her introduction in the context of its time. In the meantime--if you already know what’s coming, you’ll understand why it’s time for me to change my sign-off phrase--read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 1, book 3, ‘First Illusions.”

[/Music]

In this section, we’ve left Jean Valjean--or, whoever he’s become--behind, to meet a new character, Fantine. She’s presented in the context first of the year when we pick up her story, then of her place in the world at that time. So our task today will be to better understand both of these, to get a solid foundation in our understanding of this character.  

We’ve jumped a bit forward in time, to 1817, the second year of the Restoration. Hugo begins this chapter, “1817 est l’année que Louis XVIII, avec un certain aplomb royal qui ne manquait pas de fierté, qualifiait la vingt deuxième de son règne.” (p. 122) -- “1817 is the year that Louis XVIII, with a certain royal aplomb that didn’t lack for pride, called the 22nd of his reign.” Louis XVIII was of course the first Bourbon king restored to the throne in 1815 after the fall of Napoleon--just two years before this, not 22. But he makes this declaration because it has been 22 years since his predecessor in the line of succession, the child Louis XVII that we saw mentioned in the chapter on the Conventionist, died in prison. In other words, he is discounting the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras altogether, considering them illegitimate, simply challenging events of the early part of his time on the throne. 

This declaration begins the vexing, single-paragraph chapter called “L’année 1817” -- “The Year 1817,” a sort of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” of a single year 45 years before Les Misérables was published that would have seemed of minimal relevance even then. Some of the items included in this chapter are simply there for nostalgic purposes. But this first sentence reflects a great deal of what many of the more significant items in the chapter will tell us about the year 1817 and the fictional events that Hugo will set then: a denial of a painful past, and a willful blindness toward the likelihood of more challenges in the future. 

You’ll be glad to know that I do not plan to explain the items in this chapter line by line today. That would be a tedious and unnecessary exercise in pedantry, especially in this format. In the late 19th century, after Hugo’s death, a critic tried it, and his discussion is book-length--I will link to an electronic version on the website, so that you can marvel at his tenacity, even if you can’t, or choose not to, read it in French. Instead of taking that route, I’m going to select some items that I consider the most meaningful, and draw out the meaning they contribute to the portrait that Hugo paints here of 1817. Then we’ll consider the synchronicities he creates between the date itself and the events of his story that will take place then.

But first, I would like to briefly point out that we are now in book 3 of the novel, and this is the third book that places a date in the first sentence. Back in episode 4, we talked about the connections and divergence between Jean Valjean and Napoleon. Here, we’ll see a different sort of affinity between Fantine and her time. But the fact that Hugo has begun now three books in this way brings still more emphasis to that date of 1815. We will continue to see why.

OK, so let’s look at a few of the most important items in the list that makes up this chapter. 

The first one is the sentence that opens the chapter, which we have already discussed, where the powers-that-be reframed the recent past in order to emphasize the legitimacy of their own rule and the illegitimacy of other regimes. Related to it is a sentence a couple of pages later that will perhaps ring familiar: “Dire: les régicides, ou dire: les votants, dire: les ennemis, ou dire: les alliés, dire Napoléon, ou dire: Bonaparte, cela séparait deux hommes plus qu’un abîme” (p. 124) -- “Saying ‘regicides’ or saying ‘voters’, saying ‘enemies’ or saying ‘allies,’ saying ‘Napoleon’ or saying ‘Bonaparte’--that could separate men more than an abyss.” In other words, the various factions in French public life were defined, in 1817, by the way they aligned themselves with their recent history. We saw this in the hostility that the people of Digne harbored against the Conventionist; his place in society – or, lack thereof -- was determined by his irredeemable tie to the Revolution. One could distinguish oneself, in talking about those who participated in the Convention, by emphasizing their best-known act of murder and calling them regicides, or, by emphasizing their ground-breaking exercise of popular power and calling them voters. Whether one considered the various powers in Europe allies or enemies through that period was a clear declaration of which “side” one was on. And it was well-known that only Napoleon’s admirers called him by his given name; his detractors called him Bonaparte, or even emphasized his foreignness – the fact that he was born in Corsica, which France had acquired from Italy just before his birth – by pronouncing it Buonaparte. Simply put, in 1817, Hugo is saying, the shadow of the previous quarter-century loomed large over all aspects of French life, including public and private interpersonal relationships. The past, however much Louis XVIII tried to deny it, was present. This fact is represented in the visible symbolism of the pediment of the Odéon theater, where the letters making up the words “Théâtre de l’Impératrice” (p. 125) -- “Theater of the Empress,” that is, Napoleon’s wife Josephine, have been removed, but their trace is still clearly visible. The restored monarchy has tried to erase the past, but its trace remains.

Just as the recent past is willfully ignored in 1817, so too is the recognition of future horizons. Hugo tells us that Saint-Simon and Fourier were working away in this year, ignored. Both Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon were early utopian socialist philosophers whose influence would only increase over the course of the 19th century, and whose ideas Hugo, in 1862, was coming to see as a promising guide toward the future. Similarly, 1817 ignored technological futures, as exemplified by another event whose irony was undoubtedly comprehensible to you: “Une chose qui fumait et clapotait sur la Seine avec le bruit d’un chien qui nage allait et venait sous les fenêtres des Tuileries, du pont Royal au pont Louis XV; c’était une mécanique bonne à pas grand’chose, une espèce de joujou, une rêverie d’inventeur songe-creux, une utopie: un bateau à vapeur. Les parisiens regardaient cette inutilité avec indifférence” (p. 126) -- “A thing that smoked and clacked on the Seine and sounded like a swimming dog went back and forth under the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV; it was a machine that wasn’t good for much, some kind of toy, a dreamy inventor’s imagining, a utopia: a steamboat. Parisiens looked indifferently at this uselessness.” Even by 1862, Hugo knows that their indifference missed the boat, so to speak, as, in the intervening time, steamboats, as well as steam powered locomotives and larger ships, had transformed the industrialized world. 

This first chapter reflects this willful blindness, but it also, ironically but likely quite intentionally, reproduces it. There is a much more explicit and, some might have felt, menacing way in which the future is shown to be dormant in Paris in 1817, but it isn’t even included in this first chapter, as if it lies too far beneath the surface of that year to appear in its official portrait. In chapter 5 of this book 3, though, Hugo reflects on the “faubouriens,” or residents of the city’s outskirts, who are spending their leisurely Sunday on the Champs-Élysées. They are demonstrating their political orthodoxy by wearing fleurs-de-lys, symbols of the monarchy, and Hugo cites a note from the city police chief to the King claiming that they are humble and docile, that he has nothing to fear from them. But, the narrator is then quick to note that the police chief is mistaken, and they have lost none of their capacity for revolt. This is the first part of the novel to take place in Paris, and we will see much more about the city and its Revolutionary potential. Still, even here, in 1817, that potential bubbles beneath the surface.

But the Restoration is not interested in the recent past, or in the future; it is interested in constructing a present built on the model of the slightly more distant pre-Revolutionary past, and that involves some betrayal and violence. He mentions that society was betraying some of its best in the name of the era’s political tastes. The best-known painter of the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, and the Revolutionary intellectual and politician, Lazare Carnot, both mentioned here, were both exiled early in the Restoration. Hugo’s much-admired Chateaubriand--a royalist, but one who had fallen out of favor with Louis XVIII--was mocked when his name was misspelled in a publication. Not only does this reflect the short-sighted pettiness of Parisian culture in 1817, but it also resonates with a fear that Hugo must have had, as he sat in exile while Paris now moved into a new cultural moment without him. 

And, of course, Hugo associates this year with its use of the death penalty in the service of power. He writes, “La légitimité venait de s’affirmer en coupant le poing, puis la tête, à Pleignier, à Carbonneau, et à Tolleron.” (p. 122) -- “Legitimacy had just affirmed itself by cutting off the hand, then the head, of Pleignier, Carbonneau, and Tolleron.” In 1816, these three men had been convicted of plotting against the King, in a case that may have involved some instigation, if not entrapment, on the part of the police. Even though their crimes were all non-violent, they were condemned to death, and their hands were cut off before their execution, as was typical of parricides, and by extension, regicides. Hugo suggests here that this incident, with its spurious motivation for an extremely violent reaction, was used to demonstrate the power of the restored monarchy and the futility of any persistent Revolutionary rumblings, that even considering a renewal of the events of 1793 was call for harsh and decisive measures. This would never have been Hugo’s interpretation at the time, of course, when he was a teenaged royalist, but here in 1862, he provides a much more radical, but not necessarily unjustified, understanding of this event. 

So 1817, in amongst all the detailed references and nostalgia, is portrayed in this chapter as violent and treacherous. Beneath its veneer of newfound peace and stability, prosperity and frivolity, it is dangerous. And that sense of peace and stability is founded on resistance to the lessons of history and blindness to the potential for further upheaval in the relentless march toward the future. 

In a moment, we will think more abstractly about the outpouring of words in these chapters, and the ways in which they create and undermine meaning, what they disclose, and what they hide.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file, extras, and a discussion board, or new this week, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when a text that is so familiar to me takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so other listeners and I will look forward to reading your comments and responding, and there’s a chance you might get mentioned in a future episode!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So far today, we’ve looked at the meanings hiding in the coy first chapter of book 3. But perhaps the most striking--some might say frustrating, annoying, pompous--aspect of this chapter is its overwhelming profusion of language. In my edition, all of book 3 occupies 39 pages; 7 of them, in the first chapter, are one uninterrupted paragraph. Then later, Tholomyès monologue occupies five more, with only a brief interruption--that’s nearly a third of this section devoted to something like stream-of-consciousness, to disorganized, undifferentiated strings of words and sentences. 

I hope you’ve come to expect by now that I’m not the sort of professor to see moments like this as if they were the Emperor’s new clothes, and to justify them by suggesting they contain a genius too subtle for mere mortals. I also find it a bit far-fetched to suggest that Hugo uses passages like these to illustrate postmodern ideas of language’s inability to capture and convey meaning, a century before philosophers would theorize them. These won’t be the last passages like this that we’ll see in the novel, but they also aren’t the first, so we can begin to think about how to understand them. 

First, it’s important to distinguish them from other sorts of sections that are also lengthy and also aren’t strictly necessary to the story--namely, the digressions. Waterloo, at the beginning of Part 2, will be the longest of these, but there are a few other parenthetical discussions, most notably of monasticism and the Parisian sewers. Those are different from the sorts of long passages we’re thinking about here in that they’re organized, intentional think pieces with well-thought-out goals and carefully managed intellectual and emotional trajectories meant to guide the reader toward a conclusion. They are, without exception, in Hugo’s own voice. The passages I’d like to spend the some time considering today are the ones, like the 1817 chapter and Tholomyès’s monologues, that pile sentence upon sentence, reference upon reference, and are more likely to bury readers in an avalanche of details than to guide them toward any particular end point. 

In the first part of today’s episode, we saw one way to understand these passages. It’s possible to take them piecemeal, to separate out individual coherent sections and consider their implications. Sometimes, as we saw in the 1817 chapter, those implications can be assembled into a coherent picture, and that picture enriches the meaning of other parts of the novel. This was also true of the first passage of this sort in the novel, which was the long monologue by the Senator that we saw the Bishop subjected to back at the beginning. The Senator served as a moral and philosophical counterpoint to the Bishop, and we saw the Bishop respond to him in the moment with a sarcastic challenge, while refuting him with the entirety of his life and work. 

Tholomyès’s monologue can be read in this way as well. First, we can collect data about Tholomyès that serve the purpose of characterization. We learn quite a bit about him from some of what he says. The multilingual and intellectual references show his education. He is obviously a bon-viveur and the group’s leader and center of gravity, with the intelligence and charisma, even after a great deal of wine, to hold the group’s attention. But much of what we learn about him in this monologue is also quite unflattering--he comes off as selfish, egomaniacal, and insulting even when he means to compliment. He declares  “La femme est le droit de l’homme,” (p. 145)  -- “Woman is man’s right” and supports the claim with a history of wartime rapes and kidnappings. Later, he says, “Aspasie … c’était la prostituée déesse. Aspasie fut créée pour le cas où il faudrait une catin à Prométhée.” (p. 148) -- “Aspasia was the prostitute goddess. Aspasia was created in case Prometheus needed a harlot.” The Aspasia he’s referring to lived in Ancient Athens, in the 5th century BC, the classical era, and was the partner of the statesman Pericles. She was at the center of an intellectual world that included no less than Socrates. But tradition, and Tholomyès with it, tended to diminish her importance and emphasize suggestions that she was a courtesan. These last examples bring us to another feature of this monologue, which is the foreshadowing that Hugo also sprinkles throughout it. There are multiple mentions of prostitution, one mention of tuberculosis, and some discussion of errors in love. We will see all of these elements reappear.

But above and beyond the meanings of the isolated sentences, we can think about the effect of the presence of these floods of words in the text. It is a question that we can come back to as we work our way through the book, but for the moment, a couple of ideas occur to me.

First, it seems that overwhelming the reader with language in this way tends to obscure any message that it contains. To arrive at the central themes of the 1817 chapter that I proposed, I had to dig a bit, decipher historical, cultural, and mythological references, and find the most meaningful phrases and sentences like needles in a haystack. To the extent that passages like these have a central idea to communicate, Hugo does not approach that idea directly. We know he was capable of writing persuasively for both the mind and the emotions; we’ve seen it in this book and elsewhere. And we know that he was not a writer who hid challenging or unpopular opinions behind nuance; he was in exile when he wrote Les Misérables, in part, because of scathing direct attacks on the Second Empire. So why does he choose obscurity here?

One reason is that this lack of clarity reproduces the characters’ own lack of clarity. If we take Tholomyès’s monologue as the example, we are put in the position of the women at the table, only half understanding what he says, and frankly, only half caring. Because Hugo hasn’t outright told us that Tholomyès is, for example, selfish, egomaniacal, and misogynistic, we hear the evidence of those characteristics go by, but they are immediately obscured by the next, unrelated thing he says. If this is representative of Fantine’s experience of him, we can understand how she might not see his true character entirely clearly. Similarly, in the chapter on the year 1817, we experience the culture of that moment in the way people would have experienced it at the time, in an undifferentiated series of events and experiences, with all details given equal weight, not yet imbued with the force of historical narrative that will emphasize some and diminish others. This is most obvious in the mention of the steamboat on the Seine: it passes in the string of events as many of the others do, because in 1817, they didn’t know the end of the story of that technology yet, so they didn’t know that was an important detail of their lives. It is the force of the importance that readers decades later know that this will have that makes it stand out, but Parisians in 1817 didn’t yet know it was more important than M. de Vaublanc’s failure to get into the Académie Française, which is in the next sentence. 

So I began this discussion by saying that I was disinclined to believe that Hugo was anticipating a postmodern deconstruction of language. But I do think that passages like this do something else that is generally associated with writers a century after Hugo, in the postmodern era, which is to isolate the role of narrative in his writing by removing the coherence it provides. In other words, he doesn’t craft a story of 1817; he doesn’t emphasize some events or eliminate others in order to create a beginning, middle and end, say, or to create a central conflict and resolution. This is remarkable in a book from this era, but disorienting in a book that otherwise conforms to more typical storytelling conventions. But when it appears, it seems to serve the purpose of creating this sense of moment-to-moment sensation, without the anchor or the constraint that crafted story would provide. 

When we return, we’ll finish up by looking at what we learn about Fantine in this first part of her story.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So far today, we’ve talked mostly about the way Hugo presents the year 1817, when the first part of Fantine’s story is set. Fantine is presented similarly to the year 1817 when she enters the story. Bringing to mind the sentence that opened the 1817 chapter, the narrator tells us that she “en était à sa première illusion” (p. 128) -- “was on her first illusion,” also imagining that her present might be different from her past, and therefore unaware of her future. The moment of her life that is described in book 3 is all grace, beauty, luxury, and pleasure--and it will become a striking anomaly. 

The characters in this section are presented as two groups of four, and Hugo emphasizes the number four in two consecutive chapter titles. When I teach this chapter in class, I have the students brainstorm about that number, and its potential meanings. Many of their associations have been religious: the four Gospels, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, the four rivers that flow out of Eden. They sometimes think of the related idea, based on these four rivers, or on the four points on the compass, of the number four representing Earth. There are four elements, four seasons, four humors of Classical medicine and their corresponding four temperaments, four cardinal virtues in Classical philosophy, and four Noble Truths in Buddhism. There is no certain “correct” answer to explain this insistence on the number four, so far as I know, but we will see it again later in the novel. When we get to that point, we’ll think about the two sections together, and see what guesses we can make. 

In the meantime, these two groups of four correspond to a recognizable type in 19th-century France, where it was common, even a bit stereotypical, for young men from the provinces to study in Paris and, while there, have affairs with young working-class women, stereotypically seamstresses. There was even a word for women who fit Hugo’s description at the beginning of this chapter, where he calls them “ravissantes filles, parfumées et radieuses, encore un peu ouvrières, n’ayant pas tout à fait quitté leur aiguille, dérangées par les amourettes, mais ayant sur le visage un reste de la sérénité du travail et dans l’âme cette fleur d’honnêteté qui dans la femme survit à la première chute” (p. 128) -- “ravishing girls, perfumed and radiant, still a bit like workers, who haven’t quite left the needle behind, distracted by love affairs, but who still have a remnant of of the serenity of work on their faces and, in their souls, that flower of respectability that, in women, survives the first fall.” They were called grisettes, originally from the word gris or gray, for the inexpensive gray fabric of working-class women’s clothing. Probably the best-known representation of these young women is Mimi in La Bohème. By the early 19th century, though, the word grisette didn’t refer to all working-class women, but specifically those whose youth and beauty interested Paris’s students, and found them in this sort of arrangement.

As chapter 2 here describes, this seemed to be a win-win – the men, who were generally from financially comfortable middle-class families and were preparing intensively for professions in areas like law or medicine, were entertained during their free time, while the women supplemented their meager income with the meals and presents their lovers could afford to buy them. We don’t need to look all that closely to see the problems with the situation, though. While it isn’t prostitution in the barest sense, and there was often at least some emotional investment and sense of relationship from both sides, the arrangement is more than a little venal. The stigma for that venality fell, perhaps unsurprisingly, more heavily on the working-class women than on the middle-class men. Boys will be boys, it was thought, and when they go off to the city, they will have adventures. But women were expected to remain pure if they wanted respect, and the word grisette was often pronounced with a disapproving tone. We will have the chance to discuss at much greater length the particular challenges facing poor women in this society, but Hugo hints at their dilemma immediately. He points to the temptation of being hungry, and having beauty and sexuality available as a resource, but one that they’re supposed to leave unused in the name of an impossible ideal. “De là les chutes qu’elle font et les pierres qu’on leur jette. On les accable avec la splendeur de tout ce qui est immaculé et inaccessible.” (p. 128) -- “That is the source of their falls and the stones that are thrown at them. They are burdened with the splendor of all that is immaculate and inaccessible.” 

And, of course, it was only a win-win for those who had, like Fantine’s three friends, and like the year 1817 itself, a tunnel-vision focus on the present. Relationships like these overwhelmingly ended in the way that the men’s letter here describes: the boys grew up, recognized their family and civic responsibilities as members of the property-owning, politically active, and professional class, and abandoned their grisettes to return to the provinces. The letter at the end of chapter 9 could not be clearer about the distance that separates their lives from the grisettes’: “Sachez que nous avons des parents. Des parents, vous ne connaissez pas beaucoup ça.”(p. 150) -- “You should know that we have parents. You don’t know much about parents.” Or, “l’abîme, c’est vous [. . .] nous rentrons dans la société” (p. 151) -- “You are the abyss [. . .] we are returning to society.” For those who accepted these relationships as temporary meal tickets and anticipated their end, this was not a significant downside; we’ll remember that Favourite already has her eye on a new lover. But Fantine’s first illusion includes ignorance of the realities of her social world, and credulity of Tholomyès’s declarations of love.

This is why Fantine stands out from the group as being less experienced and more moral, and her love is truer and purer. We should also note that all of the grisettes in the group, but especially Fantine, share a great deal in common with the characteristics of the misérable that we saw in Jean Valjean. They are all dislocated from geographical place and strong family identities and they are all known by something other than a formal, legal name. None of them is well educated; only Favourite can write at all, and the one sentence we see her write contains multiple errors. But Fantine expresses this state most strongly of all of them. She has no family connections whatsoever, not even a real name. He describes her as simply having appeared one day on the streets of her hometown of Montreuil-sur-mer, and an anonymous passerby gave her the name Fantine. Hugo depicts the upheaval of the Revolution as deepening her anonymity, as the church no longer fulfilled the role of baptizing and recording births among the poor. 

In place of a dowry, which would normally represent the importance of her sexuality to a family lineage and legacy, nature itself has bestowed upon her beautiful blond hair and good teeth, the latter being especially rare. From a practical point of view, dentistry at the time was primitive, and having and keeping good teeth was largely up to the genetic luck of the draw. Teeth will also take on a more complex symbolic meaning as we move through the novel, but for now, we will simply note that Fantine’s are excellent, whereas the same chapter tells us that her lover Tholomyès is beginning to lose his.

But, as we have seen before, her birth into this state outside of social structures places her closer to nature, and this makes her seem innocent, more pristine, and more beautiful. She is presented in a series of parallel descriptions, much as Jean Valjean was--the first describes her in terms of her past and her origins, the second, at the height of her beauty and glory on the day of the four couples’ country outing, and the third as part of Tholomyès’s drunken monologue. In each, though, she is a classical, statuesque beauty, and is described as modest and virginal. She is the only one of the women to have her bosom covered with a shawl on their summer outing, and the only one who doesn’t take a turn on the swing, which causes their skirts to fly up and show their legs. She is also dreamy and distant in a way that seems aloof, and contributes to an air of respectable dignity. 

On the surface, it is also this sensitivity and closeness to nature that makes her the only one of the two groups of four to have sympathy for the horse who collapses and dies from overwork in front of the café during their final meal together. But the death of the horse also echoes an earlier work of Hugo’s, the poem “Melancholia” from the 1856 collection Les Contemplations. That poem is a long litany of many types of suffering, often called a sort of Les Misérables in miniature. It reproduces the story of this horse in an even more heart-wrenching form, and it also contains a version of the stories of Fantine, Jean Valjean, and others. I will link to it, for the moment only in French, for those who might be interested, although it is so similar to some of the stories in Les Misérables that if you don’t yet know what’s to come, you might prefer to avoid it. But here in this chapter, Dahlia finds her sympathy for the creature ridiculous, saying, “Voilà Fantine qui va se mettre à plaindre les chevaux! Peut-on être fichue bête comme ça!” (p. 148) -- “And now Fantine is going to have pity for horses! Can a person be so darned stupid?” This final sentence associates Fantine even more closely with the animal, though, as the word that I have translated here as stupid is “bête,” which can also mean “beast.” The context certainly seems to suggest that Dahlia thinks Fantine is being stupid, but the sentence could just as easily be expressing incredulity that Fantine is such an animal, perhaps in her naiveté, or unsophistication. The last time we saw humanity, animality, and pity juxtaposed was when Jean Valjean told the bishop, “Vous êtes humain” -- either “You are human” or “You are humane,” when he had pity on him. There, mercy was presented as a human characteristic, whereas guarding the boundaries of polite society against its outcasts was the work of a guard dog. Here, one of this hardened and pitiless group sees mercy as too stupid to be human.

But Fantine’s first illusion is blind to this heartlessness, just as 1817 is blind to the dangerous undercurrents in its newly restored monarchy. This orphan is endowed by nature with grace, beauty, innocence, and dignity, but burdened by society with every disadvantage. In 1817, she doesn’t question that her assets will win out, in one way or another in whatever is to come.

Meanwhile, though, Hugo hints at what’s to come in the last line of this chapter--Fantine, now abandoned by Tholomyès and alone in the world, has a child. We will see what this means for their fate.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll see the next step in Fantine’s journey, and meet new characters who will redirect her path. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. In this episode, Part I, Book 4, chapter 1 through Book 5 Chapter 4. “New Misérables.”

[/Music]

In this section we see Fantine’s story continue, and we meet four new characters, all of whom will be of tremendous importance: the child Cosette, the Thénardiers, Mr. and Mrs., and Monsieur Madeleine. In spite of all this action, though, my comments today may be a bit less robust than usual. But that does not, I repeat, NOT suggest a lack of importance of these pages. The challenge with a section like this is that Book 4 contains a tremendous amount of foreshadowing, and it sets the stage for some of the most foundational moments in the story, but their importance will only become apparent later. So it’s one that we’ll refer back to frequently, even well into the second half of the novel, so much so that you may want to put a little marker in these pages to make it easy to return to them. But much of what there is to be said about this section will be much better said later. 

Also, as we’ve moved through the book and more geographical locations have become important, I have started to mark them on a Google map. You can find a link to that map on the website starting this week, and I will keep it updated as we keep reading. 

So, with that said, we can turn to the book. We start this section by picking Fantine’s story up 10 months after we left her, and it’s clear she has deteriorated. Tholomyès’s abandonment has cast her into poverty. Cosette is still well-dressed and doted upon, but Fantine has had to sacrifice such graces for herself, and her health is deteriorating, as we’re told she has a persistent little cough. While most readers probably have a sense that being a single mother would have been more difficult then than now, it’s worth spending a moment considering the challenges that Fantine would have faced. They fall into two basic categories.

The first is a lack of employment opportunity. The likelihood of a woman of Fantine’s class having a good education was small; the literacy rate in France overall in 1820 was 38%--I will link on the website to an interactive source for this sort of information. Women were less likely to be educated than men, the poor less likely than the rich. As we see, Fantine can read, but cannot write beyond signing her name, and that would have limited her opportunities. Furthermore, women were limited in the types of labor they would be hired to do. The most common jobs for unskilled and uneducated women like Fantine would have been sewing and laundering, household service, and, increasingly commonly around this time in France, some, but not all, kinds of factory work. The challenge, of course, is that the labor market would not have been in her favor; there were many women with her level of rudimentary skill--the sewing we see her do is not likely to have been for fine expensive garments requiring high levels of skill and training--and such labor was eminently replaceable. And, additionally, we see here that the time she spent with Tholomyès not only got her out of the habit of working, but also allowed her connections to potential employment go cold. So her proverbial foot in the door is gone--another, less emotional but no less critical way in which social isolation participates in misère.

And that door will be that much harder to reopen because of the other result of her time with Tholomyès: her child. Not only does she have to support the child in addition to herself and provide for her care while she is working, but the existence of a child born out of wedlock carried a permanent stigma that was particularly dangerous for a poor woman. Just as is the case now, France was not known at the time for having the strict sexual mores that are associated with, say, Victorian England, but in that tight labor market, and in the environment of the generally limited resources of the poor, such a sign of immorality could nonetheless be used as an easy way to determine who did or did not deserve something like employment or charity. Wealthier women might have indiscretions similar to Fantine’s, but family support structures and financial resources had many ways of helping to mitigate the catastrophic effects it might have on their lives. And, of course, they didn’t often need employment or other help from people who might hold the existence of such a child against them. 

This is of course why Fantine makes much here of having to “hide her mistake.” It is interesting to note in passing that, when she is talking to the Thénardiers, she finds a way to “hide her mistake” while admitting the existence of the child--she simply tells them that her husband had died. But for some reason she feels she can’t tell this lie in Montreuil-sur-mer, where she hopes to settle long-term. Perhaps she feels it won’t stand up to scrutiny, as records, were they to be examined, would indicate no such marriage or death. And in fact, the Thénardiers do come to see through the story themselves. To hide her mistake, she must hide her child. 

And, of course, as we said about the stigma attached to the student-grisette relationship, the stigma of an illegitimate child fell almost entirely on the mother. Hugo already hints at the injustice of this, as he juxtaposes Tholomyès refusal to, as one woman puts it, “take such a child seriously,” with Fantine’s need to hide her. Where Tholomyès could simply abandon the child and bear no penalty for the love affair, the existence of the child is seen as proof of Fantine’s immorality, even though, “Elle avait commis une faute, mais le fond de sa nature, on s’en souvient, était pudeur et vertu.” (p. 156) -- “She had made a mistake, but the foundation of her nature, we remember, was modesty and virtue.” Hugo had much less laudatory things to say about Tholomyès’s nature, but as a wealthy male, he will live unaffected by his relationship with Fantine. She, on the other hand, will be defined by her “mistake” with Tholomyès for the remainder of her days. 

In a moment, we will discuss the Thénardiers, one of the mechanisms of this fate.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file, extras, and a discussion board, or you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

As we are reintroduced to Fantine as she is after Tholomyès’s abandonment, we see her come across Monsieur and Madame Thénardier, who will be important characters throughout the rest of the novel. We see more of Madame Thénardier here than Monsieur, but we will see a lot more of both, so our discussion of them today will be as preliminary as their appearance is. 

We see that Thénardier presents himself as a sergeant who had served at Waterloo and saved the life of a general. We will see more about the image on that sign, but for the moment, this claim connects to our broader discussion in two ways. First, it begins book four with yet another reference to that year, 1815, this time not to the triumphal beginning of Napoleon’s Hundred Days, but to his final and definitive defeat in that battle, which ended the Hundred Days. So, to review, Books 1, 2, and 4 have begun with a reference to the year 1815 and Napoleon, and book 3 began by putting an outsized emphasis on the year 1817. Let’s be sure to keep that information where we can reach it. The second way Thénardier’s reference to Waterloo is important is that it comes in the context of everything we learned last time about the importance of a person’s orientation to the past in this early part of the Restoration. The sign on his inn is a choice to present himself publicly as having served Napoleon, now in an environment when that service would have fallen out of political favor. If that feels a bit misguided to you, that is a good instinct--Thénardier’s efforts at image-crafting will tend not to go the way he plans, and this is a good first hint at that tendency.

The Thénardiers are, of course, meant to be unlikable, unsympathetic, and they are presented as physically ugly as well. This raises the matter of other instances of physical ugliness in Hugo’s work, that is, his use of the grotesque. Hugo has a pattern of creating characters who are distinguished by physical deformity and ugliness, but the Thénardiers are a somewhat different sort of case. The best known of Hugo’s grotesque characters is Quasimodo, the arguable hero of his 1831 Notre-Dame de Paris, the cathedral’s deaf and deformed bell-ringer who gives the novel its most common English-language title, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His character is more complex in the novel than in adaptations that you may have seen, but the adaptations are not entirely wrong to make him an example of the radical difference between inside and outside, with visible ugliness masking kindness. The other significant example of the grotesque from Hugo’s work is Gwynplaine, from his 1869 novel L’Homme qui rit, The Man Who Laughs. This story takes place in late 17th-century England. Gwynplaine, the story goes, was kidnapped as a child by a criminal gang who were in the business of grotesquely mutilating children and selling them as entertainment. They cut Gwynplaine’s face into a permanent smile, giving the novel its title and forcing him to live with the lifelong irony of appearing happy but never finding happiness, and, like Quasimodo, appearing grotesque, but having a kind heart. Both of these novels inhabit slightly unreal worlds--they aren’t fantasy, exactly, and they are situated in real historical times and places, but they are full of hallucination and strangeness. They feel like wildly imagined versions of their historical moments, and these grotesque characters are no small part of that. 

Les Misérables on the other hand, is as close as Hugo will get to realism, even though, as we’ve mentioned before, it still isn’t literary realism like his contemporaries were writing around 1860. We mentioned that Hugo wasn’t interested in reflecting the sorts of characters one might find in real life through subtle portraits of everyday people. His characters serve other purposes, and even in a story as grounded in reality as this one, they tend to feel larger than life, or just slightly amplified in other ways. So, it stands to reason that when grotesque characters show up in this novel, they wouldn’t have the sorts of strange deformities that Quasimodo or Gwynplaine have, Instead, they are types that are recognizable from the real world, with their most grotesque features just slightly amplified--and, as we’ll see, with their true horrors hiding beneath the surface. 

The characteristic of Madame Thénardier that he amplifies is her size, and her angular masculinity, so much so that the narrator suggests that if she had been standing when Fantine first met her, Fantine might have been frightened and chosen not to leave Cosette with her. Her husband, on the other hand, is only described so far as nervous and sneaky; he simply feels untrustworthy--which was, we’ll remember, another way of understanding the word misérable. His description, in this early pass, is cursory, and we only barely see him, as he makes most of his demands of Fantine by shouting them from a position of invisibility inside the house. Both characters are frequently described as only partially inhabiting their characteristics, as both being and not being almost everything. This is true in simple things--Thénardier paints, but paints badly. Madame Thénardier reads, but Hugo disparages her literary choices in no uncertain terms, and suggests that they do more harm than good to her mind. Madame Thénardier is, as the title of the first chapter in book 4 announces, recognizable as the character type of the mother, but she couldn’t be more different from Fantine, and her feelings of maternity end abruptly with her two daughters; she takes on the care of Cosette, but doesn’t quite care for her. We might also see this as Madame Thénardier divided in two, perhaps as a sinister version of the way Jean Valjean was divided in two. All the good in her goes to her daughters, while all the bad in her goes to Cosette. As Hugo promises, we will see this sketch develop.

The inn, too, is already portrayed as grotesque based on the little we know about it. The vehicle, or part of a vehicle, that is in front of it is dirty, rusting, and described as unreasonably gigantic and deformed. And it is made quite explicitly into a metaphor. The narrator jokingly says that it’s there “D’abord, pour encombrer la rue; ensuite pour achever de se rouiller.” (p. 153) -- “First, to block the street, and then, to finish rusting.” But he goes on, “Il y a dans le vieil ordre social une foule d’institutions qu’on trouve de la sorte sur son passage en plein air et qui n’ont pas pour être là d’autres raisons.” (p. 153) -- “There are, in the old social order, a lot of institutions that one encounters like this along the way, out in the open, and that don’t have any other reason to be there.” He also leaves little doubt about what one of these institutions might be, as references to the enormous chain on the vehicle and the bagne that it evokes hang over this scene. Meanwhile, its use as a swing reminds us of the joyful outing on Fantine’s last day with Tholomyès that we read about for last time. Already this environment is less idyllic, more grotesque; the vast unjust social world that crushed Jean Valjean in prison looms over the carefree playtime of mother and daughter alike. 

Indeed, the Thénardier household becomes a microcosm for the larger social world. We recall the unequal blame that fell on Fantine and Tholomyès when we see all the love and good care in the household go to the Thénardier daughters and all the punishment go to Cosette. Good luck and bad luck, kindness and cruelty, are distributed unevenly, and mostly arbitrarily, certainly not based on merit. From another point of view, when the toddler Cosette is left in this place, it is as if she is sent to the bagne like Jean Valjean, with the fortunate members of society nearby, in the Thénardier girls. Cosette is subjected to forced labor at what Hugo admits is an implausibly young age. She is burdened with punishment and work, fed scraps and dressed in rags while the other girls enjoy a childhood version of prosperity. Then, when Cosette doesn’t grow strong and happy as they do, she is insulted, and her worried posture--fear of Madame Thénardier’s cruelty, no doubt--is interpreted as sneakiness. Misfortune and poverty leave her distrusted as well, and she becomes truly a misérable. She also joins the ranks of the other misérables with the changeability of her name: her legal name is Euphrasie, which Fantine has morphed into the pet name Cosette, and once she enters the depth of her misère, the anonymous townspeople give her a name, as they had given one to her orphaned mother--she is l’Alouette, the Lark. And in this way, also like Jean Valjean, she is further deprived her of her humanity with an animal comparison. 

Shrinking this social order down to child-size also gives us an answer to the question we asked a few weeks ago about Jean Valjean--Cosette, in her misère, does indeed bear a punishment for others. In episode 4, when Jean Valjean’s suffering had been compared to Christ’s crucifixion, we had wondered if it was somehow substitutive--if he was, like Christ in Christian theology, bearing others’ penalties. With Cosette, this is not left in question: any anger Mme Thénardier may feel falls upon her. She takes on the punishments and bears Madame Thénardier’s bad temper for all the children. 

After a break, we will finish up with the other major character who was introduced to us in these pages, Monsieur Madeleine.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on the website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Now, to end today’s episode, we come to the other new character who was introduced here, Madeleine. He may feel somewhat familiar, and/or you may already know where this story is headed, but in the name of protecting any potential uninitiated listeners from spoilers, I will only talk about what we already know. 

Madeleine was a mysterious stranger who had arrived in Montreuil-sur-mer in December of 1815 with a few hundred francs and a manufacturing idea that had made everybody rich. Very little is known about him in town, and for the moment, we know only as much as the townspeople do. 

But to our eyes, he resembles the Bishop. We know he is charitable, giving away far more of his earnings than he keeps, and funding the local hospitals, schools, and other resources for the poor and sick. Morality is important to him, and he provides moral leadership for his workers, insisting that men and women work separately so that the women, in particular, will avoid the sorts of mistakes that Fantine will have to hide when she arrives here. He also provides moral leadership for others in the town, because people assume he has political ambitions, which forces anyone else who would like to succeed politically to follow his charitable lead. At the same time, though, he refuses honors and offices that are offered to him as a result of this leadership for as long as he can, preferring the respect and affection of the poor to glory and power.

He also resembles the Bishop in the way he’s presented. The narrator adopts the point of view of the people of Montreuil-sur-mer, much as he adopted the point of view of the people of Digne. Information about his past is scant, and mostly based on observation and extrapolation, that is to say, guesswork and rumor. And what they observed is presented in a tone and with a rhythm that resembles the stories from the gospels, as it had with the Bishop: many short anecdotes that express something more general about his character. And, of course, we finally learn that this Madeleine character has a connection with the Bishop of Digne when, in 1821, the local paper reports the Bishop’s death, and Madeleine dresses in mourning for him. 

This resemblance to the gospels is enhanced in Chapter 3, with what we might call a parable--Madeleine takes the opportunity of a mundane moment in agricultural life to draw out its metaphor and convey a spiritual lesson. When he sees peasants pulling out nettles as bothersome weeds, he explains all their possible uses, then concludes, “Avec quelque peine qu’on prendrait, l’ortie serait utile; on la néglige, elle devient nuisible. Alors on la tue. Que d’hommes ressemblent à l’ortie! [...] --Mes amis, retenez ceci, il n’y a ni mauvaises herbes, ni mauvais hommes. Il n’y a que de mauvais cultivateurs.” (p. 172) -- “With a little work, nettles could be useful, but if we neglect them, they become harmful. So, we kill them. How many men resemble nettles! [...] --Friends, remember this, there are neither bad plants nor bad men, there are only bad cultivators.” This lesson might as well have been the Bishop’s, but it is also closely connected to Hugo’s own messages so far on social ills and the justice system. We are reminded in particular of the final line of the novel Claude Gueux, which we cited in full a few weeks ago. It used a similar metaphor, saying that if people’s minds were cultivated and used, they wouldn’t need to be subjected to capital punishment.

We should notice in passing the short digression, accompanying the mention of the Bishop’s death, about his blindness in the final years of his life. Hugo depicts his disability, paradoxically, as a reward, as an opportunity to know with certainty that he is loved. But this blindness also connects him to a long lineage of literary, religious, and mythological figures, such as Oedipus or Saint Paul, for whom improved spiritual vision, or some sort of revelation, is accompanied by a loss of physical vision. The narrator only tells us that he had been blind for “several years,” but we know he was not blind six years earlier in 1815, leaving us to presume that his sight failed soon after we left him. We are left to wonder if his encounter with Jean Valjean played some part in his transformation: we remember that the silver he gave away when last we saw him was one of his final connections to a life of opulence; perhaps this sacrifice was the final step in his ascension to clear spiritual vision, and this paradoxically idyllic infirmity of his old age was his reward.

Like the story of the Bishop, Chapter 2 here is also the story of an ascent, by its own admission in the last paragraph, as Madeleine arrives in Montreuil-sur-mer and gains wealth and respect, supporting the town’s ascent as well. However, the title of the book it’s in, book 5, is “The Descent.” It echoes the title of Book 2, “The Fall,” where we saw Jean Valjean arrive in a new town and follow a precipitous trajectory until he arrived at the Bishop’s house. Seeing these two processes together allows us to begin to see a more intricate network of ascents and descents among the book’s misérables, and we will keep an eye on that as we progress. 

But here the ascension is even visible in his name, “le père Madeleine était devenu monsieur Madeleine, monsieur Madeleine devint monsieur le maire” (p. 171) -- “Old Man Madeleine had become Mr. Madeleine, and Mr. Madeleine became Mr. Mayor.” The name Madeleine is a common female name in French, but it is also the French version of Magdalene, as in Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene was a disciple of Jesus, and appears relatively frequently in the gospels, notably as a witness to both the crucifixion and the resurrection. Tradition, however, drawing to some extent on apocryphal texts and gnostic gospels, has complicated this story. Some have her as a favorite disciple of Jesus, and some as his spouse, spiritual if not physical. The most common idea about her, though, is the one that conflates her with a reformed prostitute who also appears in the gospels. Beginning as early as the early Middle Ages, she is most commonly represented in this way, so much so that in French, the name Madeleine and its many variants are often taken in literature to signify female sexual sin, even in the absence of explicit references to Mary Magdalene, or to any religious context whatsoever. All of this makes it an interesting name for a male character; for the moment, we will note it in the context of his keen interest in preserving his female employees’ virtue, and return to the question in a future episode. 

I will also note that by the end of chapter two, Madeleine accepts his appointment as mayor, when an old woman asks him, “Est-ce qu’on recule devant du bien qu’on peut faire?” (p. 171) -- “Should you hold back when there is good you could do?” This title makes his name even more interesting, as he becomes, in French, Monsieur Madeleine, maire de Montreuil-sur-mer, sometimes called le père Madeleine. Let me explain, first, the difference between calling him “le père Madeleine” and “Monsieur Madeleine,” as the first one, in particular, presents a translation challenge. Adding “le père” to an older man’s name demonstrated affection, perhaps, but not really respect. It wasn’t mocking or pejorative, but was perhaps a bit…. condescending, maybe something like the way “Old Man” could be affixed to a man’s name, as I translated it a moment ago. It’s a way of addressing an older man that is perhaps best known in English thanks to the 1834 novel Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, with the title sometimes translated as Old Goriot. “Old Madeleine” or “Old Man Madeleine,” we imagine, is someone we don’t dislike or disparage, but that we also don’t revere enough to use a more respectful title, even “Monsieur” or “Mister.” This is why, when he became rich, people stopped calling him this. It’s also why he doesn’t mind it when his employees and the local children keep calling him le père Madeleine--they don’t see his wealth as changing their relationship to him, and continue expressing the familiarity of the way they’ve always addressed him. 

Literally, though, le père Madeleine means “father Madeleine.” This would be a terrible translation, even though it’s literally correct, because in English, father Madeleine would be understood to be a priest, and in French, this has nothing to do with the priesthood. But it is important for those reading in English to recognize the presence of the word “father” in his growing complex of names, because the word “mother” is present in it as well--through homophones. The French word for “mother” is mère, pronounced identically to the word mer in the name of the town Montreuil-sur-mer. This literally means Montreuil-on-sea--it is not uncommon in French to append a nearby geographic feature to the town’s name, much as British towns, especially, sometimes do. But in Montreuil-sur-mer, the presence of the word mer is that much more remarkable for the fact that it is not, in fact, on the seacoast; Hugo noted this in a travel diary in 1837, two and a half decades before he published Les Misérables. You can see on the map that I’ve created for the website how far it is from the sea. He did not fabricate the name of the town for his novel, but he did select a place where the word mer, sea, homophone of mère, mother, stands out particularly, for its inaccuracy. Above and beyond this, even, the French word for mayor, maire, is also pronounced identically to these two words--mère, mother, mer, sea, and maire, mayor. Their spellings are different, but their sounds are identical. For the poet Hugo, affinities among these words, which would make for clever and sophisticated rhymes, would be especially tempting. So, we hear both father and mother, along with Mary Magdalene in the name that he ascends to by the end of chapter 2, le père Madeleine, maire de Montreuil-sur-mer. 

In the coming weeks, we’ll see how he grows into this name.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll begin to see these characters converge in their effect on Fantine’s fate. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 1, book 5, chapters 5-11, “Predators and Prey.”

[/Music]

In this section, we meet Inspector Javert, and see Fantine’s continued deterioration, where much of the ill-fated feeling that has been hanging over her since she entered the story is painfully fulfilled.

But before we turn to Fantine, I would like to spend some time discussing our first glimpse at Javert. He is a character who somehow manages to be both nearly allegorical, as Law made manifest in human form, and extremely compelling in his moments of human crisis. The good news for us, if not for the other characters, is that he will be with us for a while, so that makes this a good time to begin to understand him.

Perhaps because he is both intriguing and intimidating, both strangely apart from our experience and strangely familiar, Javert is compared more than any other character to a dog. We have, of course, seen animal comparisons used to describe other characters too, but for Javert, they are more frequent and more extensive, and more specific to canine images. Hugo also chooses this moment to express respect and affection for animals; as he embarks on another use of animality to express human deficiency, he hesitates, wanting to be sure that his readers understand that he believes animals’ surface behaviors mask souls that are more like ours. Even as animals do serve as shadows of human characteristics, and even as their capacity for education, in the human sense of the word, is limited, they also have their own personalities and selves, their own value. Particularly at Hauteville House, on Guernsey, Hugo surrounded himself with animals, and was inspired by the possibilities for relationship with them--his pets appear in a number of light-hearted and readable poems. 

But Javert is nobody’s affectionate pet, except maybe that of the Law itself. His animal instinct is always seeking to root out transgressors. Specifically, the instinct that makes him suspicious of Madeleine is said to be the one that “avertit [...] l’homme-chien de la présence de l’homme-chat, et l’homme-renard de la présence de l’homme-lion.” (p. 176-177)-- “alerts the dog-man to the presence of the cat-man, and the fox-man to the presence of the lion-man.” Um… what? 

The first thing to do with a strange description like this is to find those parts that we do understand. These animals hyphenated with the word “man” seem to hearken back to the declaration earlier in the chapter that the natures of various animals are in humans; the nature of the animals in Javert are suddenly on the alert to the nature of other animals in Madeleine. The dog in Javert is aware of the cat in Madeleine, and the fox in Javert is alert to the presence of the lion in Madeleine. So, what do we know about each of these animals? The first pair is domestic, and the second pair is wild, but the second pair is also much more gravely mismatched: the domestic canine becomes aware of domestic feline, whereas a small wild canine becomes aware of a much more dangerous wild feline. The meaning of this second pair is actually much more immediately apparent. Foxes are small; they are known not for aggression and hunting, as wolves are, but for sneaky wiliness. Their alertness to the presence of a lion would, without question, be in the service of self-defense.

The image created by the first pairing, that of the dog becoming aware of the cat, is not as immediately apparent, particularly for those who may not live with both species, as Hugo did. Where dogs and cats are both domestic, a dog is much more so; a cat, as any pet owner knows, is far closer to being a wild animal, and is far less inclined to obey. Anyone, especially any domestic dog, who has had the misfortune of making a cat angry, has seen how it is related to its larger wild cousins. Hugo has already referenced this description in this novel, in the chapter when Fantine, Tholomyès, and their friends were enjoying their final dinner together on the Champs-Élysées, and Hugo included a description of the people of Paris and its surrounding Faubourgs enjoying a leisurely Sunday afternoon. In this description, we remember that he included the police chief’s note to the king about the docility of the people of Paris: “Ils sont insouciants et indolents comme des chats.” (p. 139) -- “They are carefree and lazy like cats.” But, a few lines later, the narrator explains the error in this: “Qu’un chat puisse se changer en lion, les préfets de police ne le croient pas possible; cela est pourtant [...] Le chat d’ailleurs, si méprisé du comte Anglès, avait l’estime des républiques antiques; il incarnait à leurs yeux la liberté” (p. 139). -- “That a cat might turn into a lion, chiefs of police don’t believe such a thing is possible, but it happens. [...] Besides, the cat, who was so disdained by Anglès, had the esteem of the republics of Antiquity, for he incarnated liberty in their eyes.” The lazy housecat-people of Paris may seem domesticated enough to the authorities of the early Restoration, but they remain partly wild, the cousins of lions. They were heroes to the republics of Antiquity because they were not submissive subjects, but citizens who would never truly relinquish their freedom. So, the alertness of a dog, man’s faithful and subservient companion, to the presence of its wilder housemate the cat, is one of vigilance against the potential for wildness, on behalf not only of its own safety, but of general order. 

Later, it is this same instinct to detect unwelcome wildness that makes Javert feel, seeing Madeleine as the mayor, “cette sorte de frémissement  qu’éprouverait un dogue qui flairerait un loup sous les habits de son maître” (p. 184) -- “that sort of trembling that a dog would feel if he picked up the scent of a wolf in his master’s clothing.” The relationship between dogs and wolves is another animal metaphor that is important to understanding how Hugo situates Javert in these chapters. He recounts a legend that claims that every litter of wolves contains one dog, but the mother wolf kills that pup so that it won’t grow up and betray and kill the rest. Javert, Hugo tells us, is that dog. This is curious initially, as we think of wolves as being much more dangerous animals than dogs are. But that is from a human perspective, in which the safer animal is the one we can control. From the perspective of that mother wolf, the situation is a bit different, as a dog’s loyalty to human interests makes it dangerous to her and her pups, and sets them at odds, even to the point that specially bred and trained dogs were used to hunt wolves.

This idea draws upon the long-standing use of the relationship between wolves and dogs to meditate on wildness and tameness, freedom and servitude, comfort and deprivation. One of Aesop’s fables, adapted into the French tradition by Jean de la Fontaine, expresses it concisely. In it, a skinny wild wolf meets a plump domestic dog, and asks him where he’s gotten so much to eat. The dog responds that a man feeds him well every day. The wolf is jealous for a moment, then sees a spot on the dog’s neck where the fur is rubbed bare. He asks what caused that, and the dog responds that it is the collar that the man uses to keep him tied up. The wolf decides that it isn’t worth trading in his freedom to be fed by the man, and returns to the forest. Wolves, then, like cats in the previous comparison, are wilder, more dangerous, but freer, even at the expense of comfort. The dog has sacrificed his freedom in pursuit of comfort. Then, when we think back to the wolf hunt, we see that this close relative of the wolf, having traded in its own freedom to serve man in exchange for comfort, now comes in aggressive pursuit of the wolf, either for murderous pleasure or because it is seen as dangerous in its wildness. 

This way of describing Javert expresses a great deal about him. We are told that he was born to criminals--his mother was a fortune-teller, probably a swindler, and both his parents were in prison when he was born. But he was of a different nature. He was born loving order and wishing to serve society--he was born a dog, not a wolf. The narrator tells us that he despaired of ever re-entering society, and we already have enough information to understand why, since we saw the weight of social damnation on Jean Valjean and the Conventionist as examples. The narrator tells us, “Il remarqua que la société maintient irrémissiblement en dehors d’elle deux classes d’hommes, ceux qui l’attaquent et ceux qui la gardent” (p. 178) -- “He noticed that society keeps two classes of men irremissibly outside of it, those who attack it and those who guard it.” No canine, wolf or dog, can ever become human, but a dog can be assured of society’s comforts. So, he became a guard dog, like the one that chased Jean Valjean out of his dog house back in book 2. He even looks like a mastiff. 

So as a guard dog, Javert separates insider from outsider, and it is a position that he has taken to avoid being an outsider himself. Once we have stepped inside his point of view, though, the metaphor changes. With his uncompromising, absolute belief in authority and in the law, “il partageait pleinement l’opinion de ces esprits extrêmes qui attribuent à la loi humaine je ne sais quel pouvoir de faire, ou, si l’on veut, de constater des démons, et qui mettent un Styx au bas de la société” (p. 179) -- “he fully shared the opinion of those extreme minds that attribute to human laws some kind of power to make, or, if you prefer, to identify demons, and place a Styx at the bottom of society.” Now, he no longer protects society from wolves, but from demons, no longer from wild things that have chosen freedom, but from beings of evil. The river Styx, which is mentioned here, formed the boundary to the underworld in Greek mythology, and was later adopted by Dante for a similar purpose in the Divine Comedy. This passage recalls the phrase we saw in the Preface about social damnation “artificially creating a hell in the midst of civilization.” A main way in which this hell is created, it stands to reason, is by a boundary being created around it. Javert may not have built that boundary, but he fully shares the opinion of those who did, with their belief in laws and in the irredeemability of criminals, and he will guard it with his life. Once one crossed into hell, there was no return--we have already had occasion, in talking about the bagne, to cite the notice that Dante placed at the entrance to hell “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Javert will see to it that that promise of despair is kept.

Javert, then, is the incarnation of that power to create demons, or, in the version of the phrase that Javert himself would probably prefer, to identify those that already plague society. He is the incarnation of Law--of its watching, merciless punishment lying in wait for a hungry man like Jean Valjean to steal some bread. And this is the Javert that watches Madeleine lift the cart off of Fauchelevent, thinking how it reminds him of the strength of a certain convict he knew from his time working in the bagne in Toulon.

After a short break we will turn to Fantine and her painful descent.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file, extras, and a discussion board, or you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when a text that is so familiar to me takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so other listeners and I will look forward to reading your comments and responding, and there’s a chance you might get mentioned in a future episode!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So now, we turn to the devastating continuation of Fantine’s story, which gives this book 5 its title, “La Descente” or “The Descent.” In it, we see the powerful work of the “custom” portion of the law and custom that enforce social damnation. 

It is worth noting, first, that there is something between law and custom at work in the dismissal of Fantine from her factory job, and that’s the strict moral code that Madeleine applies to his factories. He establishes a system meant to protect women’s virtue but, unbeknownst to him, the application of that system becomes the force that pushes Fantine off the first long step down in her descent. Some part of the blame, it seems, falls on the distance this system creates between his intent and the execution of his stated wishes.

But of course, the greatest major contributor to Fantine’s descent is the Thénardiers’ extortion. The dramatic moments of her descent, like Jean Valjean’s stops in Digne, and like Madeleine’s ascension in Montreuil-sur-mer, come in a set of three. The Thénardiers claim Cosette needs warm clothing, and she sells her hair; they claim she needs medicine, and she sells her two front teeth. We’ll recall that, when she was first introduced, her hair and her teeth were called her dowry, the gold and pearls that were her only objects of value. Finally, the Thénardiers send an ultimatum demanding her late payments or they’ll turn the child out on the street, and she takes the final step to “sell the rest.” 

But the real trouble begins, the narrator makes clear, thanks to the idle curiosity of others, and that curiosity is presented as predatory, as consumption. We’ll remember way back from the Bishop’s meeting with the Conventionist that the Bishop tried to avoid idle curiosity, believing that it was “contiguë à l’offense” (p. 41) -- “adjacent to offense.” He allowed himself such intrusions only when their goal was understanding or sympathy. Here, the narrator compares the way idle curiosity devours gossip to fireplaces that burn wood up quickly, and consume a lot of it. Later--it’s actually in the section for next week’s episode, but it’s a lot more relevant today--we will see of the same crowd, or a functionally comparable one, watching her at her lowest and most desperate moment, and the narrator will say of that crowd, “La curiosité est une gourmandise. Voir, c’est dévorer” (p. 199) -- “Curiosity is a kind of gluttony. To see is to devour.” Their delight in discovering her sin and watching her misfortune is tantamount to gorging themselves on her, consuming her for their own pleasure. 

Meanwhile, as she becomes poorer and poorer, she also becomes sicker, with symptoms that would have been easily recognizable at the time as the lung infection tuberculosis -- or, as it was called then, consumption. Tuberculosis can be treated today with antibiotics, but two centuries ago, before such treatments, it was often fatal. It is also a disease whose severity can depend on the strength of a person’s immune system, but that was also poorly understood at the time. So the lived experience of it in the nineteenth century was that it was associated with poverty, hunger, and stress like she is facing here, and these aggravating factors were often believed to be its cause. It was an epidemic in this period, particularly among the urban poor. 

But on the symbolic plane, it is surely not a coincidence that she would suffer from this disease in particular, as she is also being metaphorically consumed by the curiosity of others. The French words for this disease, consomption, and for the act of consuming something, consommation, are not the same today, but they are close etymological siblings, and Hugo, with his keen linguistic awareness, would certainly have known that. At the same time, her disease is given a second meaning by the Romantics, who believed that tuberculosis, and lung diseases in general, were connected to the emotion of love, that those who fell ill with the disease were in part being overpowered by love. Some Romantics even, as it were, romanticized tuberculosis, believing it was a sign of greater sensitivity more generally, and saw it as a kind of badge of honor. Here, we have Fantine still suffering a bit from losing her lover, and a lot from the separation from her daughter, increasingly suffering from this disease of love. In fact, the first time her cough was mentioned, back in book 4 when she was leaving Cosette at the Thénardiers’ inn, it was closely associated with her daughter: “Fantine avait nourri sa fille; cela lui avait fatigué la poitrine et elle toussait un peu.” (p. 156) -- “Fantine had fed her daughter; it had wearied her chest, and she was coughing a bit.” This first mention of her illness is connected to love for her daughter, but also, with breastfeeding her daughter. Now, it is worth noting that, from a strictly scientific point of view breastfeeding has no more connection with tuberculosis transmission than any other close contact between two people. Hugo’s claim that Fantine cough originated from the wear and tear of feeding a child is purely symbolic, and it is rooted in both of these associations with the disease that was then called consumption. Fantine loved her daughter without measure, and thus became vulnerable to the noble martyrdom of the disease of love. But also, innocently and naturally as it may have been, Cosette began Fantine’s consumption, the process of feeding on her, and it was completed by the people of Montreuil-sur-mer.

So now, the anonymous crowd that has reported rumors about the Bishop, the Conventionist, Jean Valjean, and Madeleine here becomes predatory, no longer simply speculating about some and maintaining the outcast status of others by repeating what they happen to hear, but now actively seeking someone to ruin for their own entertainment. And, they are incarnated in the person of Madame Victurnien, who is for matters of virtue what Javert is for matters of law. Just as Javert compensates for his criminal origins by becoming a guard against lawbreakers, Madame Victurnien compensates for her blasphemous marriage to a Revolutionary monk in violation of his vows during the chaos of 1793 by now overseeing the virtue of others. They are the law and custom that create social damnation, both revealed to be just barely escaping it themselves, and rarely, even in this novel designed to show us this very thing, is it clearer how this happens than it is here. A single error means Fantine has crossed to the other side of the barrier that separates the moral from the immoral, and that exclusion makes her unable to find work, the key entryway into society. Then, just as happened when Jean Valjean was sent to prison, she increasingly becomes what she was at first mistaken for. Whether it is by law or custom, the judgment that produces social damnation is self-fulfilling. 

Part of the way this is accomplished is simply by them seeing her, as the phrase I mentioned a moment ago suggests--”To see is to devour.” This is not only true in the initial phase of her descent, as they discover her secret and Madame Victurnien returns from the Montfermeil saying “J’ai vu l’enfant!” (p. 187) -- “I saw the child!”, but it is also true as her living conditions worsen, her suffering becomes more visible, and the shame driven by others’ negative view of her becomes more powerful. Shortly after she is fired from the factory, she wishes for the anonymity of Paris, but, unable to get there, she is forced to get used to the scorn of a small town that knows her secret. She consoles herself by reaffirming her beauty to herself in the mirror--by countering the negative view of others with her own positive one, doing a bit of seeing herself, perhaps nourishing herself. As her beauty deteriorates, though, and as she is later forced to sell it off to feed the greed of the Thénardiers, this becomes more and more difficult, and after she sells her teeth, she literally throws her mirror out the window. After that, she will only be seen, and devoured, by others. 

In a moment, we will discuss the final step on Fantine’s descent, the context and meanings surrounding prostitution.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Now we come to the final lines of the section we’re discussing today, and we will linger here, on Fantine’s decision to sell the only resource she has left, her body. 

I feel I should issue a brief warning here that I will be discussing this issue in some fairly frank terms. Not graphic or explicit, but still perhaps not appropriate for children. Parents may at a minimum wish to preview this section before deciding whether to share it with the younger set.

We have seen this moment foreshadowed in more or less powerful ways since the beginning of the novel, and certainly since the beginning of Fantine’s story. We recall the references to prostitution by Tholomyès during his drunken monologue just before he abandoned her. As he was delivering this monologue, in Bombarda’s, the narrator mentions the detail that there was a bed in the room, a not-unheard-of feature of some such establishments, but one that smacked of prostitution. We discussed the air of prostitution about the arrangement between students and grisettes, even though Fantine herself seemed unaware of the arrangement’s usual venality. We discussed the association to prostitution of the name Madeleine, and the close association between that character and the word mère, mother -- how all of that connects to Fantine is somewhat clearer now, if still not entirely clear. 

And subtler still, all the way back to the Bishop, in the chapter “What he Believed,” when the narrator is describing that his faith is based on love, there is an early oblique reference to prostitution, one that connects the Bishop to both Madeleine and to Fantine. In the midst of this description, the narrator used a Latin phrase that is also a Biblical citation, often cited in literature, quia multum amavit, from Jesus’s pardoning of a prostitute – the one that tradition has conflated with Mary Magdalene -- “because she loved much.” In its immediate context in Les Misérables, this phrase is not related to prostitution or even to sin more generally; the narrator is explaining that some around him fear the Bishop is vulnerable to unscrupulous types, “because he loves much” -- but, we shouldn’t forget that rumor suggested the Bishop had himself been a man of pleasure before the Revolution. And, Fantine’s great love is connected to vulnerability as well -- vulnerability to consumption, in both senses. In the context of its source, in the gospel of Luke, this phrase allows for two possible interpretations, as various translations and commentaries suggest the original grammar is ambiguous. When Jesus says that the prostitute in the story is forgiven, for she loved much, he may be saying that she is forgiven her many sins because of her great love, presumably for Jesus, or he may be saying that her great love for him demonstrates her gratitude for a great deal of forgiveness. In other words, either her forgiveness is a reward for her great love, or her forgiveness has provoked great love -- this is a theological question that is above our pay grade here today. In either interpretation, though, poets in particular have long appreciated that her sin -- in a sense, giving a lot of love -- becomes her virtue. While she is accused of living a sinful life, in which she loves, perhaps, too much, she is ultimately praised for her great capacity to love. Everything we know about Fantine points to this same capacity -- her adoration for the undeserving Tholomyès, her extreme sacrificial devotion to her daughter, even her illness. At the end of her descent, when everything else she had has been turned into a commodity, this capacity is finally sold as well. But, we already have a hint, in this quotation and in the long threads of the Bishop’s influence over this story, of the potential for her redemption.

This section and Jean Valjean’s early story are some of the oldest parts of the novel, that Hugo conceived of in the 1830s and 40s. Around that time, a major study of Paris’s prostitutes was published by a specialist in public health, Alexandre Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchâtelet, who had also, as it happens, studied the sewers. In that work, he assembled statistics that showed a majority of Paris’s prostitutes were in a situation like Fantine’s -- young women, having lost someone who should have supported them through either death or abandonment, poorly educated and unable to find other work, often with a child or other family member to support. Parent-Duchâtelet’s attitude toward whether the women were victims of misfortune or immoral sinners is ambivalent; Hugo’s, as if in response, is utterly unequivocal. When he announces Fantine’s choice, “L’infortunée se fit fille publique” (p. 195)-- “The unfortunate woman became a prostitute,” the word he uses to refer to her, l’infortunée, is one of the two most common used by Parent-Duchâtelet; the other is la débauchée, the debauched, or immoral woman. It is telling that Parent-Duchâtelet uses these words interchangeably, whereas one emphasizes the women’s misfortune, and the other, her immorality. It’s as if he can’t decide whether or not they should be held responsible for their profession. But Hugo decides for him, using the word that reflects the story he has created for Fantine, that of profound misfortune and mistreatment by a moralizing and merciless society. 

None of this work discusses prostitution as a crime, though, because it wasn’t one in the sense we think of today. The practice of prostitution was regulated and tolerated; in Paris, women needed to submit to regular medical examinations and ply their trade in carefully circumscribed ways -- those who failed to comply, called insoumises, unsubmissive, were subject to prosecution. But, within those bounds it was allowed. This was because prostitution was seen as an unfortunate but necessary release for unmarried bourgeois men when unmarried bourgeois women were expected to remain virgins. The mentality justifying this dated back to Antiquity, and frequently compared the availability of sex for hire to a city’s sewer system -- a way of evacuating excess as waste and keeping the visible, respectable parts of society clean. At the same time, the women who became prostitutes were socially condemned, treated as criminals in every way except legally. They were, in a sense, sacrificed to the broader social order and to men’s sexual desires. Even though on the surface they are quite different, Fantine’s story comes to resemble Jean Valjean’s: a binary understanding of people’s goodness -- the belief that they must be either all good or all bad -- devalues people who find themselves on the wrong side of that binary. It makes them into things to be used at will -- Jean Valjean, for labor, Fantine, for sex.

Seen in this way, it becomes easier to see how Hugo compares their state to slavery, as human beings are used, essentially, as infrastructure. From our American point of view, it is important to make a distinction that Hugo doesn’t make in chapter 11 here, between the situations of Jean Valjean or Fantine and chattel slavery, the hereditary status as property that the United States were fighting a Civil War over at the moment when Les Misérables was published. Jean Valjean was paid, however minimally, for his 19 years of work, and he was eventually released -- although we saw just how much freedom that really gave him. Fantine, too, is not a slave in the sense that people of African descent were from generation to generation for hundreds of years. But Hugo’s comparison to slavery here rests on a few similarities. First, exploitation. For Jean Valjean, hard labor as punishment meant someone else profited from unpaid, or minimally paid, labor. For Fantine, wealthier men, and by extension, the whole complex of bourgeois sexual mores, benefit from her simple need to survive and her lack of other resources. This brings us to the second resemblance to slavery, and that is the limited choices of those involved. Their situation is imposed upon them as their only choice that can ensure survival; whether by violence or societal neglect, their choices are to comply or face death. A third similarity is the unlikelihood of their return to any kind of real freedom. Like Jean Valjean with his yellow passport, the social forces surrounding Fantine mean she is unlikely to be able to find her way back to a life of respect, material ease, and control over her fate. And finally, and most importantly to Hugo, these states resemble slavery in that they are utterly unacceptable. Hugo spoke against slavery in the United States in terms similar to those that are beginning to take shape in Les Misérables: that no human should be treated as less than human, for any reason. For Hugo, I suspect that a discussion of the distinctions between chattel slavery and the slavery he sees in Fantine’s prostitution would be beside the point; both, to his mind, are beneath the dignity of humanity.

Chapter 11 is titled with bitter irony, “Christus nos liberavit,” Latin for “Christ Has Freed Us.” This is a quotation from the Bible, from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, when he is exhorting them not to allow themselves to be made slaves to religious legalism. However, apart from the Thénardiers’ naked greed and extortion, it may be religious impulses toward morality that fall under the harshest criticism in the story of Fantine. In imposing strict sexual norms on his employees, Madeleine may have intended to discourage predatory behavior and protect those, especially women, who might become prey. The effect, though, was quite different. Religiously-inspired morality in this form did not bring her freedom, but only a harsh and destructive social damnation and, at length, slavery.

Hugo tells us in Chapter 11 that prostitution “n’est pas une des moindres hontes de l’homme” (p. 196) -- it “is not the least of men’s shame.” Hugo places the burden of shame for creating this suffering on men generally, and we have to read this as including his male characters, and even the author himself. We will see what this means, and what it does not mean for Fantine’s future. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll see a significant moment in the author’s life written into the novel, and consider how he represents himself in this story of male wrongdoing and female suffering. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 1, Book 5, chapter 12, though Book 6 chapter 2, “Heroism and Complicity.”

[/Music]

In January of 1841, two days after he was elected to the Académie Française, the utmost authority on matters of French language – a high and rare honor indeed for a man who had not yet turned 39 – Hugo was invited to a dinner party with some of Paris’s elite. At the end of the evening, as it was snowing, he decided to wait to take a carriage home, rather than walking. As he was waiting, a woman in a low-cut dress stood on a corner nearby. As Hugo watched, a well-dressed young man approached her from behind, scooped up a handful of snow, and put it down the back of her dress. The woman descended on him violently, the ensuing altercation attracted the attention of a crowd and of the police, and the woman, not the man, was arrested.

Hugo followed the crowd to the police station and watched as the woman was sentenced to six months in prison for assault while she made a tearful plea for her innocence and freedom. Having seen the man initiate the incident, Hugo could see the injustice of the sentence, but feared being implicated in such a situation; given his newly elevated profile, it would be perfect fodder for gossip, and would put his reputation at risk. Finally, though, compassion got the better of him, and he entered the police station and offered to enter a statement on the woman’s behalf. He insisted that not only was she innocent, but that depriving her of her living for a period of six months would be catastrophic for her, and that if anything, the man owed her damages for her dress. The police officer initially confirmed Hugo’s fears, tacitly questioning what Hugo’s interest in such a woman might be, but once he identified himself as the Victor Hugo, newest member of the Académie Française, the officer tempered his disrespect, but insisted that justice needed to run its course. It wasn’t until Hugo entered his signed statement that the woman was freed.

Sound familiar? This story was recorded shortly after it happened by Hugo’s wife Adèle, as he told it to her, and it is, as you might expect, the origin of the incident that we see in this section of Les Misérables. In accordance with 19th-century norms, Adèle’s telling of the story does not say explicitly that the woman on whose behalf Hugo spoke was a prostitute, but it is made clear by the use of the word “fille” – literally, girl, but when used for a grown woman, almost always implying “fille publique,” that is, public girl, or prostitute – along with the fact that she is standing on a street corner in the snow in a revealing dress, and the oblique reference to the way she makes her living – which, in Adèle’s account, Hugo describes as “misérable.”

In the novelized version, as Javert drags Fantine off to the police station, we also see the narrator call her la misérable for the first time. He has mentioned her living in the state of la misère, extreme poverty, since she lost the factory job, and she has always had some characteristics of the misérable. We saw her lack of familial connection, for example, in this light a few weeks ago, but it is only now that she has crossed the Styx that Javert places at the bottom of society and fully taken on this label. And the general disdain of the assembled crowd reinforces socially what Javert is accomplishing legally, as they follow and mock her, their curiosity still voracious. It is here that we see the sentence that we talked about last week, “Voir, c’est dévorer.” (p. 199) -- “To see is to devour.” The crowd that watches her arrest is only completing the work, or, we might say, the feast, of Madame Victurnien, who went to Montfermeil to see Fantine’s child and begin her descent.

This story is in many ways an indictment of male behavior, first and foremost, that of Bamatabois. The bourgeois Bamatabois is presented quite negatively, as a self-important big fish in a small pond, whose confidence is only justified by the limited scope of experience to be found in a backwater. But for the most part, he doesn’t do much more harm than he does good. This sort of near moral neutrality he seems to have is only owing to the fact that he does very little at all, including leave the provinces. Bamatabois, we are told, is a version of Tholomyès that never went to Paris. But we know that Tholomyès did do great harm as a result of the adventures that he had when he left his province, and it has been suggested that the rest of his professional career will do the same. He will become influential, a “strict” jurist, and continue to be a man of pleasure. Bamatabois may be less consequential in proportion to his lesser ambition, but he is nonetheless seen as one and the same with Tholomyès and the type of young man that he represents: well-to-do, idle, mischievous with impunity in youth, and powerful and selfish in maturity. These are also the sorts of men who sentenced Jean Valjean to 5 years of hard labor for stealing bread, or extended his sentence for his escape attempts until two decades of his life had been consumed by the weight of so-called justice. 

But if Javert is society’s guard dog, as we saw last time, then these men – Bamatabois, Tholomyès, and the rest – are his master. Later in the episode, we’ll dig more deeply into this scene from Javert’s point of view, but for now, we can simply say that his protection of them goes a long way toward creating their impunity. When the shock of cold snow causes an instinctive reaction in Fantine and she lunges at Bamatabois, she is, like the other misérables we have seen, compared to an animal, a wild cat, this time a panther. Ever on alert against dangerous and unwanted wildness, Javert appears, and as in the incident Hugo witnessed, only she is arrested; the man leaves the scene.

Javert declares that she will spend six months in prison--this time, the text does use the word “prison,” as women were not sent to the bagne, but to facilities more like modern prisons, where they were detained but still required to work with their hands, often sewing or otherwise in textiles, for minimal wages – here, Fantine cites 7 sous, less than half a franc, per day. We actually saw this sort of work earlier in book 5, as it was mentioned that prison labor was driving down the wage that Fantine was able to make as a free seamstress. 

The sentence provokes a monologue from Fantine, a flood of words not unlike the ones that we examined back in book 3, with the chapter on the year 1817, and then Tholomyès’s half-drunk monologues. Then, we stressed that such long, disordered monologues, either in the voice of the narrator or that of a character, tended to emphasize moment-to-moment experience over any broader narrative, and they reproduced an inability, on someone’s part, to understand the story that they’re in or to prioritize some details over others. When Tholomyès pronounced such a monologue, we suggested it was principally the women at the table, including Fantine, who failed to see the forest for the trees, as it were, to draw any conclusions from what he said. Here, we can guess that it is Javert who is in that position. Her initial monologue, when he pronounces her sentence, is addressed to him; his name both begins and ends it. But above and beyond that, he is the person who is deaf to its meaning; even though he responds by saying “Je t’ai écoutée.” (p. 201) -- “I’ve listened to you,”, he hasn’t heard her in any meaningful sense. All he has heard is the rambling, untrustworthy excuse-making of a misérable, or as he would put it, “une créature en dehors de tout” (p. 200) -- “a creature outside of everything.” 

At a first pass, the only significant male character in this incident who is free from guilt, at least, within the scene itself, is Madeleine. In yet another scene that shows off Hugo’s eye for dramatic stagecraft, even, as we’ve said, anticipating cinema, he enters as a hero, from the shadows, just  after Javert declares “le Père éternel en personne n’y pourrait plus rien” (p. 201) -- “the eternal Father in person couldn’t do anything about it.” He insists she be freed, and applies all the weight of his power as mayor to overcome Javert’s guard-dog tenacity. Hugo’s role in the original scene is made more dramatic and more powerful, and his word more final. And he is not only her legal hero, as Hugo had been, but Madeleine is her spiritual hero as well. Where Javert claimed to hear her in order to dismiss her, Madeleine hears her, believes her story, and declares as if in a benediction, “[É]coutez, je vous le déclare dès à présent, si tout est comme vous le dites, et je n’en doute pas, vous n’avez jamais cessé d’être vertueuse et sainte devant Dieu.” (p. 208) -- “Listen, I declare to you right now, if everything is as you say, and I don’t doubt it, you never ceased to be virtuous and holy before God.”  Hugo magnifies his own role in this scene from generous bystander to authority, both civil and spiritual. But at the same time, he takes away his character’s heroism.

After a break we’ll see how.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file, extras, and a discussion board, or you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

In July of 1845, four and a half years after he rescued the woman who would later provide the origin of Fantine’s story, Hugo had rented an apartment under a false name for amorous getaways--not with his wife Adèle, and not with his official mistress of twelve years and counting by that time, Juliette Drouet, but with Madame Léonie Biard, wife of the painter Auguste Biard. Léonie was two decades younger than both Hugo and her husband, with whom she was on the outs, but not in any way legally separated, as divorce was difficult at that time. During the night of July 4-5, 1845, on the request of Léonie’s husband, the police entered the rented apartment and caught Hugo and Léonie in the act of adultery. 

The consequences for the two lovers could not have been more different. Hugo had been named a pair de France, or Peer of France, by the King the previous April. This gave him a seat in the upper house of the French Parliament at the time, and, crucially to this story, immunity to prosecution for this sort of crime, although he suffered some ridicule and finger-wagging from the other pairs de France, for allowing himself to get caught, if not for the adultery itself. Léonie, however, had no such protection. She was taken to the Saint-Lazare prison, the women’s prison of Paris, populated substantially by prostitutes who had been caught operating outside of the bounds of the regulatory system, and adulteresses like Léonie now was. She would remain there for two months before being transferred to a convent, from which she would only emerge in 1846. During her incarceration, Hugo began working on a novel that was originally titled Jean Tréjean, then Les Misères--but both the book and its central character would be renamed.

Biographers differ on the extent to which they see guilt about this incident, as influencing the way Hugo inserted himself in Les Misérables. His affair with Léonie continued after she was released from custody, and she was also befriended by his wife and family. Since Hugo is no longer here to interview, and might not tell us the truth if he were, we can never be sure how this scandal affected him long-term. But in light of this story, it’s difficult not to see Hugo in Tholomyès and Bamatabois as well as Madeleine, as they go free while Fantine pays the price for their pleasure. And, when we compare the story I recounted at the beginning of this episode to the similar scene in the novel, there is one key difference that begs us to consider what ambiguities in his own behavior might have been hiding in his mind as he wrote himself into this moment and inflated the grandiosity of his heroism.

As soon as Fantine recognizes who Madeleine is, after he insists that she be set free, and before Javert relents, she spits in the mayor’s face. This is, of course, an addition to the original story in which Hugo was the hero. On that original night in 1841, when Hugo came to the rescue of the prostitute under similar circumstances, it was him, as a person of status going on record for her that had convinced the officer to free her. And here, it is Madeleine’s status as mayor that gives him that same right, only more solidly, as a matter of law that even Javert cannot refute. But for Fantine, recognizing that he is the mayor also identifies him as complicit in her suffering, as the person who, intentionally or not, began her descent by allowing his supervisor to police her morality, writing public scorn into policy. When she spits on Madeleine, Fantine offers a sort of visceral counterargument to the heroism of Victor Hugo, literary giant, pair de France, member of the Academie Française, and rescuer of women of ill repute. As Hugo wrote himself into Madeleine’s heroic action, he must have been aware that he was in no position to paint himself as rescuer, that he was as complicit in the particular dangers of being female as any of the male characters in his story, and that the woman in question would know that, even if no one else did. 

Perhaps this is why his order to release her unleashes another long monologue, only this one is much stranger. It is still entirely addressed to Javert, and with compliments and caresses, she seems to credit Javert with freeing her. It is a disconnect from reality similar to when Jean Valjean didn’t seem to recognize Petit-Gervais, after clearly speaking to him and stealing from him, and it only makes sense, I think, in a similar way to that scene. When Jean Valjean stole from Petit-Gervais, we said it was the animal part of himself, the brutal convict solely focused on survival, that committed the crime while his newly ensouled self, the one that had been deeply affected by the Bishop’s mercy, was lost in contemplation of the immensity of what it had witnessed. He was, in a sense, split in two, and his two parts were out of sync, such that one, the more human one, was unable to comprehend the reality around him. Here with Fantine, we might say the same thing. The animalistic part of herself, entirely focused survival, has been cultivating hatred for the mayor since she was fired from his factory, and to be pardoned by that same person has begun a change in her. Like Jean Valjean, she is already no longer the same person, and when she spits on him, she does a thing of which she is already no longer capable. It is not until Javert leaves the office on Madeleine’s order that she begins to comprehend what has happened: that the mayor she has blamed for her misfortune for so long is now her liberator, and she wonders if she must “changer toute son âme” (p. 207) -- “change her whole soul.” At this point, her rambling monologue ceases. While Javert is still there for her to address, to give her old, animalistic self a way of discounting Madeleine’s kindness, it seems that the deaf ears that her monologue falls on are also her own, that these undifferentiated strings of words represent, rather than someone else’s inability to discern a story, her own inability to construct the one that’s before her. But meanwhile, the change is already happening, as she feels “de la joie, de la confiance, et de l’amour” (p. 208) -- “joy, trust, and love” being reborn in her heart. 

Meanwhile, Madeleine has manifested an interesting sort of repentance as well. He has recognized the harm he has caused through simple inattention, through the distance from his own policies that we saw last time that allowed for their distortion. He is careful not to shift the attention in Fantine’s moment of distress to his own guilt, although he does say in passing, “J’ignorais même que vous eussiez quitté mes ateliers. Pourquoi ne vous êtes-vous adressée à moi?” (p. 208) -- “I didn’t even know you had left my workshop. Why didn’t you bring your problem to me?” He moves on quickly from this question, not waiting for an answer, seeming to realize that it is well beside the point. But the fact that Madeleine asks it points to the answer that we already know--that Fantine understood his strict moralistic systems and policies to represent his wishes, and saw no point in discussing it with him personally--and, it suggests that he is beginning to see the harm that he’s caused, and consider a change of his own.

When Fantine finally understands what has happened, and when Madeleine promises to support her and Cosette from then on and declares that she has never lost her virtue in God’s eyes, she faints. This is understandable on the literal level, as she is ill, and has suffered a series of emotional shocks. But we will also continue to see losses of consciousness at moments when characters undergo profound change, and will talk more about that in future episodes. Just before she faints, though, she kneels before Madeleine, as Jean Valjean knelt before the Bishop’s door, and she kisses his hand. We begin to see, in this moment, the importance of his being named Madeleine. We’ll remember that the name Madeleine in French is associated, rightly or wrongly, with a reformed prostitute from the gospels. So, as Fantine is on the threshold of becoming someone new, of her own redemption, she kneels before an image constructed especially for her, an echo of a woman who has traveled this road before her, named /mεr/ (maire/mer/mère) (mayor, sea, and mother) not once but twice, in the person of someone she has seen repent and be restored from evil to good before her eyes. But, he is also someone with the ability to see through what she has become, discern her virtue, and to repair the harm done by society’s negative view of her, and with the authority to declare it and make it so.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything that you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

As Fantine’s crisis and transformation play out in these scenes, the police inspector Javert is also experiencing quieter enormities. We hinted early in this episode at Javert’s role in the unequal treatment of Fantine and Bamatabois, but for the time that remains today, I’d like to delve more deeply into this role, the crisis that Madeleine’s intervention provokes, and finally, the strange paradox of his actions in book 6. 

First, his understanding of the situation with Fantine provides the beginning of an explanation of his choice to arrest only her. Once again in free indirect discourse, the narrator takes on Javert’s tone and point of view: “Il était évident qu’il venait de voir commettre un crime. Il venait de voir, là dans la rue, la société, représentée par un propriétaire-électeur, insultée et attaquée par une créature en dehors de tout.” (p. 200) -- “It was obvious that he had just seen a crime committed. He had just seen, there in the street, society, represented by a voting property owner, insulted and attacked by a creature who was outside of everything.” This is clearly a highly symbolic and extremely categorical way of seeing the situation. And, it bears mentioning in passing that the social statuses Javert assigns to Bamatabois here were not available to women. Women could not own property, and eligibility to vote was also, at this time, dependent on paying a minimum amount in taxes on property. So considering the fact that Bamatabois is a “propriétaire-électeur,” which I have translated as “voting property owner,” as evidence that he is worthy of protection would disadvantage any woman he chose to harass, even the most respectable. But Javert’s explanation of the situation also casts into sharp relief how his way of understanding it fails to accommodate human stories, and leads to gross misperception. Hugo’s rich characterization of Fantine, and his briefer description of a nonetheless recognizable type in Bamatabois, are distorted to the point of being unrecognizable in Javert’s assessment. 

But at the same time, that assessment is, of course, technically correct, and shows us in remarkable fashion how the law in human form might think. Bamatabois is indeed in a position of influence and importance in society, and Fantine is subject only to ever-increasing rejection and scorn. Javert’s main flaw is his inability to question this assessment, but when Hugo presents it to us through his eyes, the discrepancy we see between it and the story we know demands a reconciliation--either our understanding of the story or Javert’s must be wrong. When he debates her case with Madeleine, it becomes clearer still that the clash is between two different lenses, two ways of framing the story. Javert’s story emphasizes the legal categories and seeing Fantine, Bamatabois, and eventually Madeleine as symbols of a grander struggle that the police officer is forever charged with arbitrating: a creature outside of everything attacks pillars of society, and he must guard. For Javert, there is no need to wonder why a creature outside of everything would attack a voting property owner or spit on a mayor; we’ll remember that he sees people outside of society as necessarily attacking it--unless, like him, they have chosen to guard it. Someone like Fantine attacks society simply because she does; that is her nature. Madeleine, however, sees the stories as individual, and this makes him look more closely at the incident in the street. His question is different--it is not why someone like Fantine would do this, but why this individual, on this occasion, did. Pursuing this question, the one pertaining to individuals rather than categories, the one based on sympathy rather than prejudice, leads Madeleine to a different answer, to a story that is more textured and nuanced, and to a solution that is closer to justice.

Because he can only see this situation through the lens of legal categories, Javert “se sentit au moment de devenir fou” (p. 202) -- “felt that he was about to go mad” when Madeleine ordered him to free her. From the point of view of society’s guard dog, Fantine’s situation was clear--she was an attacker from outside--and so Javert’s role was clear--he must defend. But when the mayor, an authority figure and the dog’s master, undertakes to disregard that attack as well as a second, when she spits on him, Javert is thrown into a state of crisis. He must defend society, and he must obey authority, and suddenly, these duties are in conflict. His categories begin to dissolve, and his understanding of his place in them is at risk. Might he too have to become someone else?

He certainly begins showing the signs. Like Fantine, and like Jean Valjean after the Bishop gives him the candlesticks, Javert seems to be in a sort of trance, and when Fantine opens the door to leave, he too seems not to understand the reality before him, momentarily not knowing where the order to release her came from. He is described as resembling “une statue dérangée qui attend qu’on la mette quelque part” (p. 205) -- “a statue that is out of place, waiting for someone to put it somewhere,” and later, as having been “jeté hors des gonds” (p. 205) -- “thrown off his hinges” by Madeleine’s order. The inner workings of his mind, like Jean Valjean’s before him, now become impenetrable, and the narrator can only guess how it is that he justifies to himself disobedience to the mayor’s authority--perhaps he thinks the mayor has made a mistake, or perhaps he saw this as an extreme circumstance when he must personify all that is lawful, good, and orderly. Even as he considers this intensification of his role, though, the incident shows the precariousness of the paradoxical situation he has created for himself, both inside and outside of society, guarding its boundaries. What will he become if those boundaries dissolve?

A second weakness in Javert’s rigid system is revealed in the second chapter of book 6, titled in French “Comment Jean peut devenir Champ,” in English most likely translated and pronounced “How Jean can become Champ.” If you pronounced it in your head without any knowledge of French, you may have been left with the impression that the name transformation Javert proposes is pretty implausible. But in French, it works, Jean becomes Champ. It is not inconceivable that Jean Mathieu could become Champmathieu.

But, coming back to Javert: at the beginning of this chapter, we perceive his emotional turmoil via outside clues, again as we did with Jean Valjean when he was first introduced. Here, it is suggested that perceiving his emotions might even require an expert eye, that of a physiognomist who had studied him. Physiognomy is a discredited field that studied a person’s inner traits based upon outward appearance. Its lack of scientific foundation, plus its use for nefarious purposes such as justifying racism, have made it fairly notorious since the end of the 19th century. You will see it mentioned from time to time here, though, as it was still practiced in Hugo’s day, and it has a great deal of appeal for a novelist for precisely the purpose we see it put to here: it allows the introduction of an emotional state through an external point of view, but still using a supposedly objective standard, not just the narrator’s impression. 

The first thing we notice in this chapter is that it’s in these same terms, of legal categories and structures rather than individuals, that Javert presents his own case to Madeleine, just as he had seen Fantine’s case. He had written to the central office in Paris about his suspicion that Madeleine was the convict Jean Valjean. This case, like any other, is a matter of hierarchies and duties; he is an inferior who showed a lack of respect to his superior, and such a person must be removed from his post. He did it in anger, and he thought his unproven hunch was a good one, but that doesn’t matter, right is right. When Madeleine, predictably, refuses to remove him, Javert suddenly finds himself in the same position he was in with Fantine: forced to insist, unsuccessfully, on strict application of the law in the face of Madeleine’s merciful understanding of a personal story and an honest mistake. Madeleine believes, as he did when Fantine spit on him, that the offense is against him personally, not against anyone or anything grander or more general.

This time, though, Javert’s dilemma is more complicated. In this situation, he is both the offender and the law officer, both the one who has attacked society and the one who guards it. He asks the mayor to fire him, paradoxically, so that he can retain his role as society’s guardian, by guarding it from himself, to avoid being, as he puts it near the end of the chapter “un misérable.” (p. 220). Javert, like the others before him, is split in two by an act of mercy, and like them, he must choose which version of himself to inhabit and become. But for him, with the identity that he has created for himself as society’s guardian, this creates a paradox. We’ll remember that he entered the police force because he was born to criminals, and knew that he could never re-enter society, so his only honest option was to guard it. In order not to be the law-breaker that he has identified in himself, that others might identify in him, he must take action as the law enforcer who persecutes him. But when he says, “J’ai des bras, je travaillerai à la terre, cela m’est égal” (p. 220) -- “I have arms, I’ll work the earth, I don’t mind,” he imagines himself becoming an honest laborer, not a criminal; he doesn’t, ironically, imagine himself falling back outside the boundaries of society when he is removed from his post. By provoking his own dismissal, he remains society’s guard dog, even if he outwardly becomes a regular citizen. 

If none of this seems particularly sensible, I think that means you’ve got it. All we’ve seen of Javert in this section shows weaknesses in the system he personifies--it is complicit in protecting those who cause harm and in reinforcing the suffering of the weak, its rigid categories fail to hold in the face of human stories, and sooner or later, it turns in on itself and proves untenable. Hugo is of course not arguing for a world without laws, but he sees deep flaws in a legal system that imagines the world as Javert does. 

Of course, as he asks the mayor to relieve him of his post, of course, he tells him that the real Jean Valjean has been found, hiding under the name of Champmathieu. The first time he mentions him, Javert calls Champmathieu “très misérable,” and we recognize traits of the novel’s other misérables in him – most importantly, the confusion about his name, and the missing pieces in his story that allow for a great deal of uncertainty about his identity. The most solid information Javert has, before he sees the man with his own eyes, is the word of Brevet, Cochepaille and Chenildieu, convicts themselves. Champmathieu is too unsophisticated to even understand what he’s being accused of, never mind defend himself, as he is crushed beneath a judicial system that can easily overwhelm him. 

At the end of their conversation, the matter of Javert’s dismissal is left pending, and Champmathieu will be judged in Arras the following day. And, of course, Fantine grows weaker and sicker as she waits in hope to see Cosette again. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll see the effect that all of this has on Madeleine in particular. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 1, Book 7, chapters 1-4 “The Truth About Madeleine.”

[/Music]

Well, phew. We can finally talk about who Madeleine is! Of course, it wasn’t particularly well hidden, was it? And in adaptations, of course, it can’t be hidden at all -- when Jean Valjean is played by Hugh Jackman, or in well-known French versions, by someone even more well known like Gérard Depardieu or Jean Gabin, we recognize him even after he’s dressed up in a nicer costume. But in the novel, if we imagine reading this story when it was new, I suspect the word Hugo chooses at the beginning of this chapter 3, when he expects that we’ve “guessed” that Madeleine is Jean Valjean, is correct. It is not hard to guess, to make connections to a character we got to know, then abruptly lost sight of a few pages ago. But enough questions remain that there is still a mystery surrounding the character of Madeleine. How did the gruff ex-con go from broken and weeping at the Bishop’s door to becoming an inventor, industrialist, and pillar of a community? It’s surprising enough to sow doubt, and the last thing I wanted to be was the person to spoil the mystery for anyone. But thank heavens that’s over now.

So what happened to Jean Valjean? 

In short, he did his best to follow the Bishop’s injunction to “become an honest man.” But wait, you might say, didn’t he immediately hide his identity, even though he was wanted for stealing from Petit-Gervais, and lie about who he was and where he was from? Yes, yes he did. This is where it’s important to note a slight weakness in the translation of this word “honest” from the French “honnête.” Both words have the same root--the English comes from Old French, where it was related to the idea of honor. But the connotations of the modern words in the two languages have diverged. In our modern usage in English, we think of the word “honest” primarily as telling the truth. If we say that someone is “honest,” without other context, we take that to mean that the person can be counted on to tell the truth; if we emphasize the fact -- “He’s very honest” -- there’s a chance we’re using it as a euphemism for TOO honest, or indiscreet. “Brutally honest,” a phrase that’s interesting when we think of Jean Valjean being “brutal,” when he came out of the bagne, is a cliché in English, a sort of mixed compliment for a teller of unpleasant truths. There may be more to English-language “honesty” than telling the truth, and certainly when we hear the Bishop tell Jean Valjean to become an honest man, we don’t think he means ONLY someone who tells the truth without fail. But we do, I think, assume that avoiding an entire life of lies would be part of following that command. The French understanding of the word, however, is just different enough to make Jean Valjean’s interpretation make more sense. It has remained more closely linked to a broader idea of honor, virtue, morality, and behavior that is correct for a given social situation. Truth telling may be part of it, but discretion and the complexities of refined social life may introduce factors that mitigate the call for, as it were, brutal truth. 

But there is a second issue in the translation of the French phrase “honnête homme,” that is even more complex than this, as the phrase taken together has another meaning with no real equivalent in English. It indicated a social type, a man who was intellectually and socially cultivated in the way that was considered correct for the society of the Neo-Classical era in France--that is, for the elite social world 100 to 150 years before the French Revolution--referring to a kind of cultural capital, of knowledge, behaviors, manners and assumptions that were valued, particularly at court. That is, it had nothing whatsoever to do with “honesty” as we mean the word in English; indeed, it often demanded just the opposite: reserve, discretion, well-placed flattery, and evasive wit. It was an ideal that would have been long out of date by the time the Bishop used the phrase, and even old fashioned at best by the time that either Jean Valjean or the Bishop was born, in the final decades of the Old Regime. In *post*-Revolutionary France, even with the Restoration trying to turn back the clock, this ideal would have been neither desirable nor attainable--the world had moved on – socially, intellectually, and economically. Besides which, it is unlikely that a relatively uneducated character like Jean Valjean would have a clear idea of that ideal as it had existed historically. But, the existence of the expression, even if one or both characters’ understanding of its real, historical meaning was vague, opens the door to a radically different interpretation of the Bishop’s command: from “use this silver to become morally good” we can see the path to “use this silver to become socially correct, upstanding, and acceptable.”

For a while, though, these ideas meant the same thing to Jean Valjean. We see the root of this in the division of himself in the vision at the end of book 2: the vision of the “hideous convict Jean Valjean” is outside himself, and he is both terrifying in appearance and morally decayed. The description of what he sees Jean Valjean to be in that vision combines the appearance of poverty and suffering, evidence of crime, and evil intentions as if they were all part of the same whole: “le bâton à la main, la blouse sur les reins, son sac rempli d’objets volés sur le dos, avec son visage résolu et morne, avec sa pensée pleine de projets abominables” (p. 120) -- “his stick in his hand, his poor shirt on his back, his bag full of stolen goods, with his gloomy and resolute expression, with his mind full of abominable thoughts.” At that time, this was all a single vision, all one problem named Jean Valjean, and the Bishop obscures the lot. He didn’t stop to consider whether the problem was his shocking appearance and manners or his dangerous and brutal criminality; he simply dispensed with it all and became Madeleine, the upstanding, respectable, generous, kind, morally unimpeachable pillar of the community. 

And in a sense, this newly created soul became an echo of the Bishop. Madeleine gives generously, and keeps as little as he can for himself. He donates beds to the hospital, improves the local schools and sees to the well-being of those who cannot work. Later he entrusts Fantine’s care to two women who remind us of the two women who accompanied the Bishop. One is earthy and practical, the other angelic. This angelic one, Sister Simplice is described as defying age, and he hesitates to call her a woman--she, like Mlle Baptistine, has transcended her human characteristics. It is said that when she first entered her religious order, she liked to get letters, reminding us of the letters that Baptistine wrote. And the narrator insists on a surprising detail about her, which is that she hates untruth more than any other sin. She has never told a lie, and considers lying the work of the devil. Madeleine also became more devout, and his new morality has religious overtones. But we saw a first flaw in this new morality in its effect on Fantine: he institutionalized strict standards of behavior in a way that was too legalistic. He imposed the conflation of moral goodness and correct appearances on his workers in much the same way that he had imposed it on himself – much as it was imposed on him when he arrived in Digne, when it wasn’t always clear if his appearance upset the townspeople because he looked like a criminal or just because he was extremely poor – and Fantine got caught in the same trap. More broadly, Madeleine’s main error in his moral standards for his workers and in his own transformation into an “honnête homme,” was to assume an exaggerated equivalence between outside and inside, to fail to separate the appearance of goodness from its reality. He begins to remedy this mistake when he tells Fantine, at the depth of her descent, that she has always been virtuous and holy before God, but the Champmathieu affair in particular, will bring this mistake to the fore.

At the same time, as we head into the character’s first great moral crisis, outside and and inside are separated by the same structure in the text as when Jean Valjean was first introduced: an external perspective on the character’s actions, followed by a dramatic entry into his mind during the quiet hours of the night. And just before, as we take the external view of him in the first two chapters here, we have subtle clues to his mind. At first, his actions are mysterious, but it becomes increasingly clear that Madeleine is preparing for a trip, and Scaufflaire, who rents him the horse and buggy that he will take, deduces from his planned distances that he is going to Arras, where Champmathieu is to be judged. Because this is revealed gradually, we are allowed to expect he might be going to Montfermeil to fetch Cosette for Fantine, but even given the urgency of that reunion according to Fantine’s doctor, the trip to Arras seems to take priority. We learn that there is determination and urgency about his trip--he will need to push the outer limits of his horse’s capacities, traveling 20 leagues, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 miles, as quickly as possible, and may need to repeat the same feat the following day. We’ll talk a bit more next time about some of the dynamics of travel by horse-drawn vehicle. But we also learn that there is uncertainty in his mind about the outcome of his trip, as he leaves the sum necessary to buy his rented horse and buggy, so as not to cheat Scaufflaire if he doesn’t return. And we see him almost consult his priest, but then decide against it, suggesting something complex weighing on him. We are once again limited to the point of view of passersby, but those who see him think he is behaving strangely.

So when the narrator tells us, “Nous avons déjà regardé dans les profondeurs de cette conscience; le moment est venu d’y regarder encore” (p. 229) -- “We have already looked into the depths of this conscience; the moment has come to look there again,” we recognize the rhythm of the deep breath followed by the plunge. 

After a break, we’ll look at that plunge. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can share your own thoughts about all this on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

When I was a sophomore in college, during my first read-through of Les Misérables, the first paper I ever wrote about the novel was about this chapter 3, “Une Tempête sous un crâne,” “A Tempest in a Skull.” It has now been more than two decades since I wrote that paper, and this chapter remains compelling. I would probably write a different paper now – I should hope so – but its pull is still the same. It feels both grand and intimate, logical and emotional, real and surreal. Jean Valjean’s dilemma is multi-layered and impossible to resolve through any of the approaches that he tries, and in the end, he hasn’t settled anything, the answer still lies elsewhere.

On a practical level, his dilemma is this: a man has been arrested in his place, and will serve his sentence, probably life in the bagne, for him unjustly. To allow this would be selfish, heartless, would allow another to suffer so that he can go free. But, to turn himself in would be to abandon Fantine and her child, to bring an end to all the good he has done in Montreuil-sur-mer, and to cast all those who depend on him back into poverty. Either choice he makes does harm, and either one does good. The ensuing deliberation reads like a piece of classical music, in multiple movements, with dramatic crescendos and decrescendos and changes in tempo that sweep us along for the emotional ride.

We have entered this conscience before, as he says here, but it’s this time that he prefaces it with images of a terra incognita of monsters. He even makes yet another reference to Dante’s entrance into hell; when we saw this before, it was at the entrance to the bagne. The surface of a person’s being – maybe the skull that appears in the chapter title – becomes another dividing line between worlds. The Styx separates the world from the underworld, the law separates society from the world of the misérables, and each of our skulls and skin separate our outward selves from our inward ones. 

And we are struck, as we delve into this inner self, that even with all the games of disguise and pseudonym and mistaken identity, the person within is coherent. While Jean Valjean can hide behind Madeleine or be mistaken for Champmathieu, the self beneath the surface is fixed. Late in the chapter, he describes the name of Jean Valjean as “un nom de fatalité qui flotte dans la nuit” (p. 243) -- “a name of fate that floats in the dark” and may land on anyone, as if randomly. But in the same passage he says of this name, “Ce n’est plus moi.” (p. 243) -- “It’s no longer me.” There is a moi, a me, a self, that remains through evolutions and name changes.

But he had feared that losing the name and persona of Madeleine might change what he had forged that self into, that outside and inside might be the same. He long feared that the name of Jean Valjean reappearing “ferait évanouir autour de lui sa vie nouvelle, et, qui sait même peut-être? au dedans de lui sa nouvelle âme” (p. 234) -- “would disintegrate his new life around him and, who knows? maybe even his new soul within him.” Until he heard the name of Jean Valjean again, part of him really believed what he saw in his vision back at the end of book 2, that the hideous convict Jean Valjean, with his criminal mind and his instinct only to survive, was someone else, someone outside himself, and that the Bishop had made that man disappear. At the end of Book 2, he was without definition; it was clear that he was “already no longer the same man” but we knew nothing about the man he had become. That man, it turns out, was Madeleine. 

And that man was unified. Early in the chapter, the narrator put it this way, that after he settled in Montreuil-sur-mer as Madeleine “il vécut paisible, rassuré et espérant, n’ayant plus que deux pensées: cacher son nom et sanctifier sa vie; échapper aux hommes et revenir à Dieu. / Ces pensées étaient si étroitement mêlées dans son esprit qu’elles n’en formaient qu’une seule” (p. 230) -- “he lived peaceful, reassured, and hopeful, with only two ideas remaining: hiding his name and sanctifying his life; escaping men and returning to God. / These ideas were so closely entwined in his mind that they became one.” That is, he had invested everything that was bad about himself in that name of Jean Valjean, and suppressing one, so far as he was concerned, meant suppressing the other. The exceptions to this, the moments when they came into conflict and he risked discovery in order to do good, were the moments that allowed us to recognize Jean Valjean in Madeleine before Chapter 3’s reveal. 

The central crisis in this chapter is that those two goals become radically separated. The neat halves he had divided himself into, one good, one evil, become scrambled. Now, both names can do good, and both names can do evil. He can no longer maintain the division in two that began in the field near Digne eight years ago. He has to find a new way to be an honest man, as the Bishop commanded. No matter what he chooses now, he has to inhabit an identity that contains both wrongdoing – either the name of the thief and convict Jean Valjean, or Madeleine, the lie that will have sent another man into an earthly hell – and generosity – either Jean Valjean who came out of hiding to save another man by accepting his punishment, or Madeleine, generous patron and benefactor of Fantine, Cosette, and the whole town of Montreuil-sur-mer. 

In this chapter we watch him vacillate. Readers familiar with the French literary canon, as Hugo’s original readers most certainly would have been, will recall a famous monologue in Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, from the first half of the 17th century. I will link to this play on the website, for those who might be interested. There, the play’s central character Rodrigue finds himself bound to defend his family honor in violent conflict with none other than the father of the woman he loves; he must choose either his father or his beloved, to betray one and honor the other. There, though, he finds his answer in the end; his well ordered monologue of reasoned deliberation gives him access to his way forward--he reasons his way to a choice of honor over emotion, to defend his family name at the price of love. 

For Jean Valjean, even as the dilemma bears comparison to Rodrigue’s, his path to a solution is quite different. The choice between honor and emotion is not difficult. What he wants, at the most basic emotional level, is obvious: he wants to remain free, happy, prosperous, and not to return to the bagne. But giving in to that emotion is never a serious consideration; he is firm in his resolve to choose the good of others over his own, to put aside what he wants in favor of something more honorable – more honnête. But he discovers, in the course of his deliberation, that honor has multiple interpretations. There is no longer just one path that can be called honorable, generous, honest. The meaning of what is honorable lies entirely in interpretation. This leaves him with a problem that reason alone can’t solve. He can make an argument for each course of action that sounds honorable. 

So, when reason fails, we see other modes of thought enter the scene. The first, vision or hallucination, we have seen before when he’s reached the limit of capacity to manage a situation intellectually. When he burns his old bag, walking stick, and clothes, the lighting effects from the fire and the appearance of the stolen coin border on surreal: “la chambre et le mur d’en face furent éclairés d’une grande réverbération rouge et tremblante. Tout brûlait. Le bâton d’épine pétillait et jetait des étincelles jusqu’au milieu de la chambre” (p. 244) -- “the room and the opposite wall were lit up with a great, red trembling reverberation. Everything was burning. The thorn wood stick crackled and tossed sparks out into the middle of the room.” Then, although he doesn’t see it, the piece of silver appears, as if supernaturally, in the ash, and we are reminded of when he discovered it in the dirt under his foot after he stole it, and it seemed to be an eye whose gaze he couldn’t avoid. But this time he doesn’t look back, and instead, with the fire now hot enough to soften silver, he reaches for the Bishop’s candlesticks.

With this action another non-rational factor enters the deliberation, and that’s emotion. Not the basic emotion that was rooted in his self preservation instinct, but instead emotion that Hugo has carefully cultivated in us, his readers, as well as in his character, for the Bishop. Our heart sinks as he brings them near the fire, and we are relieved to see the intervention by “une voix qui criait au dedans de lui” (p. 244) -- “a voice that cried within him.” This voice begins as a subaudible thought, but grows as it speaks until Jean Valjean finally has the impression that he’s hearing it in his ears. This mysterious voice makes clear once and for all that in order to truly become honest and honorable, to remain true to the Bishop’s command, to really be rid of the hideous convict Jean Valjean, he must accept his connection to the Jean Valjean that received the candlesticks. The candlesticks, in a sense, are where his two personae meet. The voice begins by calling this name twice, to get the attention of the man who has just said, “Malheur à celui qui est Jean Valjean! Ce n’est plus moi. Je ne connais pas cet homme, je ne sais plus ce que c’est” (p. 243) -- “Too bad for the one who is Jean Valjean! It’s no longer me. I don’t know that man, I don’t know what that means any more.” The man who was given the candlesticks was the origin of everything this new man has become, and that man was Jean Valjean. 

At the end of the chapter, he hasn’t made a decision. Morally, he can’t yet choose between types of good and types of harm that he might do. Intellectually, he can’t yet find his way clear to both being Jean Valjean, returned to the bagne, and yet being something other than a hideous convict, to being an honest man but no longer being Madeleine. 

But the final sentence revisits the comparison we saw a few weeks ago between Jean Valjean and Jesus, this time in the garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, praying just before his arrest and crucifixion that the cup might pass him by. In both cases, the comparison suggests, the anguish is in vain, and the sacrifice must, in the end, be made. Jean Valjean’s decision is made, even though it is a decision of which he is not yet quite capable.

As he is stuck in this state of indecision, he drifts off to sleep, and his deliberation continues in a third non-rational form, a dream. More on that dream in a moment.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Dreams and their interpretation have been a subject of fascination from time immemorial, and stories across time, from fiction, history, and myth have included dreams, along with attempts at interpretation. Dreams were considered messages from the divine or from departed loved ones, who might even appear to people in dreams. In the modern world, dream interpretation is thought of psychologically, and the psychological realism of the dream we see here is remarkable: the seemingly random associations, the unreal physicality, the appearance and disappearance of people and objects. Most people can relate to the experience of a dream like the one Jean Valjean has here.

And there is a good reason for this: this dream seems to be closely modeled on a dream that Hugo himself had. In the text here, it is presented in the form, again, of a document that the narrator claims to have in its original form, including in an envelope, in Jean Valjean’s handwriting. First of all, this has the effect that we’ve discussed before, that of adding credibility to a part of the story that a narrator could not possibly observe on his own. If this dream is recorded by Jean Valjean’s own hand, we can be assured that it is not the fantastic invention of an author/poet, but rather a real psychological artifact.

Part of the feeling of reality in this dream is also to be found in the way it resists easy interpretation. An author who imagined a dream for a character at this moment would be likely to embed features to connect it in some rational way to the rest of the novel. Based on what we know so far, we might expect the Bishop to appear, or some fantastical version of Javert or Fantine. We might expect images we’ve seen before, like the man overboard. But Hugo has done none of this. Instead, he has given us an artifact that is wide open to interpretation, and that leaves us, like Jean Valjean “pas plus avancé qu’au commencement” (p. 247)) -- “no more advanced than at the beginning” in understanding the situation or what to do next.

Because of this quality of the dream, I’ve decided to do something a bit different with our remaining time today. I will make just a few very brief comments about chapter 4, and then, a couple of my former students, both of whom studied this novel with me a few years ago as they worked toward Master’s degrees in French at the University of Kentucky, have generously agreed to contribute a few thoughts of their own. You will see how each of us will focus on different aspects of the chapter, circling around a few of the same themes, but coming to substantially different conclusions. There is no reason to think any one of us is more right than the others; it’s as if we’re all looking at clouds and seeing different animal shapes in them.

[Music]

What I notice most is that the dream leaves an unsettling impression; the narrator tells us that it is only connected to Jean Valjean’s real-life situation via “je ne sais quoi de funeste et de poignant” (p. 247-248) -- “a macabre and poignant quality,” and it is that quality that sticks with me. Relatedly, I think, there is a strange neutrality about it, a sense of both being and not being. The color palette is gray and brown, the colors of earth and ash. Everything, even the people, are in this color palette. The fields, streets, and houses are deserted, which is to say, inhabited but by people who seem not quite real--they stand stock still and don’t respond when Jean Valjean speaks to them, then they catch up with him and surround him effortlessly, then disappear. They tell him he’s been dead for a long time, which he doesn’t seem to know. It feels like a kind of limbo, a place of neither hope nor despair. 

The presence of Jean Valjean’s brother, who hadn’t been mentioned in the narrator’s account of his life story, makes  the second time that a long-forgotten childhood memory has returned to the character, unbidden. The first was just after he received the candlesticks from the Bishop, as he wandered in the fields outside of Digne in his initial confusion. Those were only unspecified memories, though, brought up by the smell of the flowers on the air. This dream is the first and only mention of his brother. But metaphorical brothers--visions of himself outside himself, like the one outside of Digne, or doppelgangers like Champmathieu--these sorts of brothers proliferate, and will continue to. This one seems like it may be a primordial version of the others, buried deep in Jean Valjean’s nearly-forgotten memories.

So now, without further ado, my guests. They will introduce themselves, and tell you what catches their attention about the chapter. 

[Music] 

Dezirae Shukla: Hello, my name is Dezirae Shukla. I have several years of experience teaching college level French language, literature, phonetics, and the like, and my relationship to Les Misérables was through a graduate course I took with Dr Lewis. It's been a few years since that course but after rereading and going back over some notes, I've made a couple of connections or interpretations of this section on M. Madeline's dream. 

The first thing that stands out to me about this dream is M. Madeleine’s question to each of the men he encounters: he asks “Where am I?” (Note: Original reads, “où suis-je?” (p. 248-249)) but he never gets a response, so he continues on looking throughout the buildings and streets. I don't think this question is directed at actually finding out which city he's in, or whose house he's in. I think he's asking “Where am I?” in a more literal sense: “I'm looking for myself,” not M. Madeline, but his true identity, which is that of Jean Valjean. 

The second thing that stands out to me is another question which all the men ask at the end of the dream: “Where are you going? Don't you know you've been dead for a long time?” (Note: Original reads, “Où allez-vous? Est-ce que vous ne savez pas que vous êtes mort depuis longtemps? (p. 249)) It's like they're saying, “You don't need to go anywhere. The old ‘you’ that you're looking for, the convict Jean Valjean, he's dead, and you don't need to dig him back up. You are no longer connected to that identity so you don't need to go looking for it.” Now, Hugo even says at the beginning of this chapter that, “This dream, like most dreams, bore no relation to the situation beyond its mournful, poignant character.” (Note: Original reads: “Ce rêve, comme la plupart des rêves, ne se rapportait à la situation que par je ne sais quoi de funeste et de poignant,” (p. 247-248).) So maybe he means that some of the details of the dream are just inexplicable dream weirdness, but I can't help but think that the man on horseback might represent Champmathieu, who's being wrongly identified as Jean Valjean. I think this because the man on horseback is carrying a stick that's described as being limber like a grapevine, but as heavy as iron, and the grapevine could be a metaphor for identity which he's being forced to carry. In this case the identity of Jean Valjean is a heavy burden to carry, like iron, because Champmathieu faces much harsher punishment for that identity than if he's tried as himself for his own crimes, and not for those of Jean Valjean. 

[Music]

Alana Minor: My name is Alana Minor, and I am a French teacher to high school and middle school students in a community outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. 

So, it had been a really long time, for me, since I had last read this portion, and I had to read it a few times, and these are some of the things that I noticed. That if one had to place Jean Valjean’s dream, purgatory or limbo would be an appropriate possibility. The vastness and the solitude, even the monochromatic surroundings, Jean Valjean appears to be stuck in a place where nothing grows, nothing changes, and there's no way out. Before the dream, we know that Jean Valjean is deliberating if he is going to reveal his true identity and save Champmathieu from imprisonment, which could explain some of the imagery in his dream. Throughout the second portion of the dream, Valjean sees men in doorways and in corners of rooms, behind trees, and he only sees them one at a time. He asks where he is of each man, but receives no answer. Indeed, he has no answer to his own self questioning about the morality of turning himself in: if he does turn himself in, he saves a man from life imprisonment, but he leaves Cosette behind and he breaks a deathbed promise to Fantine; if he doesn’t turn himself in, he continues to live with the constant paranoia of being caught, but he can continue to protect Cosette and to keep his promise to Fantine. 

When he does finally get a response, he is shocked to find out that he's been “dead this whole time,” which leads to a really important question: how long exactly is “this whole time?” Is it only the time of the dream, or does this revelation seep out into the waking world? Has Jean Valjean, who has tried so hard to hide his true identity and to protect himself and Cosette from suffering, actually so much stifled a part of himself, the version of himself who went through the years of imprisonment and pain? And is this part of him actually really dead? I'd say no, because it comes back to him so vividly in the dream, and in his feelings of uncertainty and anguish in regards to Champmathieu. 

Something else that I find meaningful in the dream is that it’s split into two parts. You've got the youth of Jean Valjean and his subsequent imprisonment. His life prior to his redemption by Bishop Myriel is presented in stark representation. He spends time with his forgotten brother in the village of his youth, and then this is cut short by the morbid representation of the carceral system, the half-man, half-skeleton, riding the horse. The guy is naked and he’s got this ridiculously large and heavy switch. So ultimately, after reading through this, I have to ask myself, who's been dead this whole time? We know that it’s Jean Valjean, but I think that something that we learned throughout the reading of Les Misérables is that Jean Valjean is no one man. He's actually several men rolled into one, and which Jean Valjean that you're going to be dealing with at any given time is really going to depend upon the circumstances. So again, who's been dead this whole time? Could it be the Jean Valjean of childhood? the Jean Valjean that was 24601? Or, and this to me is the most frightening part, could it really be that Jean Valjean is just dead inside? Could it be that “this whole time” that they speak of is his whole life? And if he has been dead for all of this time, how is he going to choose his next steps? How does a dead man make choices in his living day-to-day life? Of course we know, because we have the rest of the book, we see what happens, but I think it's really worth putting ourselves in Jean Valjean’s shoes at the moment that he wakes up. What would you do in his place? 

[Music]

Many, many thanks to both Dezirae and Alana for taking time out to contribute some ideas. We all developed our ideas independently from each other, and you can see that there is some overlap among our comments, but there are also places where we have different answers to the same questions, or even prioritize different questions to ask. All of this is what makes this chapter, and this whole novel, so interesting to revisit again and again.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll focus on our protagonist’s journey to Arras. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 1, Book 7, Chapters 5-8, “On a Horse, With No Name.”

[/Music]

Ok, so, my episode title this week is a bit silly, and it betrays, if not *my* age, then the age of a lot of the music I listen to. 

It’s also a bit inaccurate, because no one in this section is actually “on a horse.” But the section is strongly travel-themed – this section is dominated by the travel narrative, which brings it fairly close to realism in its focus on everyday realities. And as in most realism, from the perspective of 150 years later, it can be challenging to envision the realities in question – here, the vehicles that are mentioned and various situations in which we find ourselves on this 60-mile journey. For the simple, practical matter of helping you make a clear picture of this trip in your mind, I’ll link from the website to more information about horse-drawn vehicles, including pictures of the various kinds of vehicles that are mentioned here. Unless and until you go look at more details, though, the thing you absolutely must know about all that is that words like cabriolet and tilbury refer to different body styles, akin to words like coupe, sedan, or hatchback on modern cars. (As a matter of fact, coupes and sedans were both horse-drawn before they were automobiles.) 

Beyond this, I’d like to make a few comments to give us a clear sense--not only an intellectual knowledge, but a feeling--of the dynamics of long distance travel in the era of horse-drawn vehicles. Hugo hints that the experience of travel, narrated in mundane detail in this chapter, has a grander significance in a brief speculation about what our hero may be thinking as he travels, comparing the places and things he passes to moments of life that come only once, to people and things that are present only temporarily, that he tries in vain to hold on to. Then at the end of life’s twists and turns, it comes as a surprise to discover the horse has stopped, and the carriage is being unhitched. In a sense, this reflection is relatively pedestrian – even in everyday language today, we talk about life’s journey, the road of life, we say life is a journey not a destination; this metaphor feels obvious, at least to cultures with a linear, western concept of time, and it is extremely common. In other words, Hugo’s use of the end of a journey to signal death, and travel to think about the twists and turns of life, is not exactly innovative. And for a character who may be about to give up much that he treasures and allow his life to be subjected to dramatic change, the thought seems almost automatic. But for us as modern readers, this image can be enriched by a deeper understanding of the vicissitudes of travel in a time when it depended more on physical conditions – of the travelers, of their horses, and of the land – than it does in our modern age. Today, finely engineered, climate controlled machines and paved highways literally smooth over most – but not all – of the journey’s complexities. One of the delights of stories that take us to different times and places is the opportunity to see how small, practical, even obvious differences in lifestyle can be related to profound differences in things like assumptions and mentalities. And in this case, understanding the experience of the past more deeply can reconnect us with this tired old metaphor in a new and richer way by helping us recognize our vulnerability to the physical world and its arbitrary harshness, which travel in any form accentuates. 

So in that light, there are a couple of obvious, practical points I’d like to make about horse-drawn travel that, for me, enrich this metaphor. First of all, what I have just called “long-distance” is much shorter than anything we’d call long-distance travel in the age of cars and interstate highways. The trip in this section of the book, as we’ve said, is about 60 miles, and that is at the high end of what can be expected in a day. It is also, of course, slower. At the beginning of chapter 5, we learn that the spry little white horse our hero has rented is clocking about 2 ½ leagues, or 7 ½ miles per hour – a respectable, but not extraordinary, pace for a human to run a 5-k road race. Travel in a larger vehicle would have been even slower; we’ll remember that Madeleine consulted with the owner and chose this horse and this vehicle to go as far and as fast as possible. On a practical level, this reduced mobility should increase the significance we perceive in trips that characters do take – this trip to Arras is, simply put, a fairly big deal, and we’ll discuss more about what that says about the character and his present situation in a few minutes. We can also think back to other travel we’ve already seen, in particular with the help of the map I’ve linked to on the website: Madame Victurnien going all the way to Montfermeil to see Fantine’s child in person showed considerable dedication to the cause of smoking out so-called immorality. Jean Valjean’s trip from Toulon and Digne in the southeast to Montreuil-sur-mer in the northwest may as well have been to the other end of the globe.

Secondly, horses, unlike cars, have physiological needs. Assuming good long-term maintenance, to keep a car going on a long trip, all it needs you to do is keep the gas tank from running dry. But horses need food, water, and rest, and they are able to have ideas and desires of their own, all making the trip less predictable – less, shall we say, mechanical. This was mitigated somewhat by a system of what were called in French relais de poste, which were originally facilities where fresh horses were kept available so that mail wagons could simply switch horses and continue long trips without the breaks that the animals needed to eat and rest – the ones they left behind would be fed and cared for, and would soon be fresh and ready for another assignment. The system was also made available to the public, and in many places relais de poste expanded to include inns and eating establishments in the same locations – much like a modern rest area or roadside town, with hotels, restaurants, and gas stations all within sight of the highway. In planning his trip, Madeleine considered the distances between relais de poste, and his notations about these distances, we’ll recall, allowed Scaufflaire to make a guess at his destination. However, because he wanted to prioritize speed, he did not plan to switch his horse for a fresh one that might nonetheless be slower – as we learn in Hesdin, horses he might pick up at the relais de poste would be strong, capable of pulling much heavier vehicles, but slow; he preferred to select a horse that could manage the roundtrip to Arras at a predictably quick pace. But even with the relais de poste, a trip like this would not only be difficult, long, and slow, but as we saw here, much of the difficulty would be beyond a traveler’s control – more, I think we can argue, than in modern travel. 

But for readers in 1862 in particular, and especially those who might be on the older side, these questions of speed and ease of travel would have complicated their way of conceiving of this timeless travel-as-life metaphor in a way that may be instructive for us as well. Between the time of Jean Valjean’s fictional 60-mile journey in 1823 and the publication of Les Misérables, the railroad had come to France and revolutionized the movement of people and goods. In 1837, Hugo took his first ride on a train, and wrote to his wife describing the experience. He marveled at the visions and sensations of traveling at the unthinkable 35 miles an hour, watching the plants and flowers outside the window go blurry with speed and become streaks of color, and the people appear ghost-like. His description of what he saw at that speed anticipates impressionist painting, which wouldn’t rise to prominence for thirty more years, in the late 1860s and 1870s. He considered the feat that the “iron horse,” as the locomotive was called in both French and English, could accomplish, and we recognize the terms of his wonder from the calculations in Scaufflaire’s office – it could transport 1000 to 1500 people at 12 leagues per hour, tacitly compared to an excellent horse like Scaufflaire’s best, which can transport one man, in a light buggy with no baggage, at 2 ½ leagues per hour. He imagined, in his letter, what such a powerful beast would have looked like if it had been invented in the Middle Ages – like a dragon, with scales on its body and huge open mouth that breathed smoke and steam – and he lamented his own utilitarian, rationalist, unimaginative age and the arrogance with which it dismisses as useless the art, nature, intelligence, fantasy, and beauty that it doesn’t understand. So we might say that with the advent of fast, easy travel, even as Hugo’s 1862 readers would have seen it, the metaphor of life-as-journey is both intensified and impoverished. On one hand, the objects that seem to amble by from a horse-drawn carriage, as the traveler reflects on life’s changeability and impermanence, these speed by from the vantage point of modern transport, at once making them more impermanent and leaving less time for reflection. And the traveler’s own vulnerability appears, at least, to be overcome – the 60-mile journey we see in this section would be accomplished in an easy morning’s train ride in the age of railroad – an hour of driving on today’s interstates – and significant deviations from the planned schedule would be unlikely. Ease, comfort, and safety have come at the cost of the richness of adversity and sensitivity to the hidden beauties of slower, more natural experiences. Where we were once bound to earth, but  more open to spiritual insight, we are now safer from the challenges of physicality, but at the same time risk being mechanized ourselves.

When we return, we’ll look more at the importance of this journey to its traveler. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file, extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

At the end of his long meditation on his present moral dilemma, which we looked at closely in the last episode, we’ll remember that no decision had yet coalesced in our hero’s tortured mind. You may have noticed that our narrator, throughout this journey, remains faithful to that prevailing indecision, and no character name is mentioned. As the character struggles to decide whether he will be Jean Valjean or Madeleine, the narrator calls him neither: he is called “le malheureux homme dont nous racontons les souffrances” (p. 231) -- “the unfortunate man whose sufferings we are recounting,” “celui que nous venons de voir se débattre dans des convulsions dignes à coup sûr de pitié”(p. 252) -- “the one that we have just seen deliberate in convulsions that certainly deserve pity,” “l’homme que nous avons suivi jusqu’à ce moment” (p. 269) -- “the man that we have followed until this moment,” “le voyageur” -- “the traveler” in both the text (p. 257) and the chapter 7 title, and as often as possible, the narrator simply uses pronouns, “he” or “him.” The first time we see a name, it is when he can go no further without giving one. In order not to be forced to turn back, in order to continue to delay his decision, he must, ironically, declare himself Monsieur Madeleine, maire de Montreuil-sur-mer.

But in another way of looking at it, this moment when he must pronounce himself Madeleine is merely the culmination of what he has needed to do throughout this journey. In order to make it this far, he has had to draw on resources that were unavailable to Jean Valjean when last he used that name. This is true in a practical since, by the mere fact of the financial cost of the trip, and in the respect he is given by appearing to be a gentleman of means. We can compare his arrival in these small towns to his arrival in Digne to get a sense of the value of that appearance. But it is also true from a moral and emotional standpoint. Way back in the field outside of Digne, we remember that he understood, or perhaps misunderstood, the Bishop’s work on his soul not as an effort to save Jean Valjean, to redeem him from his hatred and brutality, but to defeat him, to eliminate him, and to establish something new in his place. We referred to the final lines of an epic poem by Hugo called “La Fin de Satan,” “The End of Satan,” in which the title event is not Satan’s defeat, as we might expect, but the redemption of the fallen angel Lucifer that he once was. Jean Valjean did not, or, at least, has not yet, come to this same ending. He was left to remain the brutish convict who was only interested in his own survival, a person that our main character saw as separate from himself. The “honest man” that the Bishop had commanded him to become, we saw then, was someone new, as yet undefined, and we finally learned last time that that person became Madeleine. Even though, in the “Tempest in a Skull” chapter that we discussed last week, it became clear that good and evil could not be so neatly divided, the moral resources of generosity and sacrifice, of thinking of others before himself, still belong to the character of Madeleine, because the work of redemption has never been applied to Jean Valjean; he has only ever been locked away, like Satan in his hell. When Jean Valjean has acted, it has only ever been on an instinct of self-preservation--and that instinct would have prevented him from making the trip to Arras at all. So in a sense, even though he has not been named, it has been Madeleine traveling to Arras all along. But, on the other hand, the purpose of the trip is beyond Madeleine’s capacities as well--we’ll recall that keeping Jean Valjean hidden away, in both name and character, was also a basic tenet of Madeleine’s life. Even as he must travel as Madeleine – because he must travel as Madeleine – he cannot yet contemplate re-inhabiting Jean Valjean. But that is precisely the sacrificial act that he will need to draw on Madeleine’s capacity for sacrifice to make. 

Nothing of this paradox enters his consciousness on the road. He travels to Arras, for now, only so that he can delay his decision, remain nameless and avoid the burdens that both of his personas now carry.  It is a decision that will change the course of many lives, including his own, and it does not escape the character’s awareness that the burden of that decision lies entirely with him. And yet, even when given every excuse to turn back, as the journey that he hoped (perhaps unreasonably) to finish in six hours stretches to fourteen, he persists. He forges ahead decisively, not because he has decided what he should do, but to delay a decision.  Turning back, of course, would seal the matter as well, and the only way to delay it is to arrive in Arras, to see for himself and hope for some further clarity there, or to hope circumstances intervene when it becomes truly impossible to arrive in time to do anything for Champmathieu, taking it all out of his hands. 

Because of his apparent decisiveness, as he travels to Arras, it’s easy to imagine that he knows what he plans to do. The two possible courses of action that initially present themselves are to simply let things be or “d’aller, de courir, de se dénoncer, de tirer ce Champmathieu de prison et de s’y mettre” (p. 231) -- “to go, to run, to turn himself in, to pull this Champmathieu out of prison and put himself there” and in these chapters, what he is doing seems much more like the latter, even as we’re explicitly told that he has decided no such thing. 

Just as, when Jean Valjean stole the coin from Petit-Gervais, he did a thing of which he was already no longer capable, here, we see him do a thing of which he is not yet capable. He is making his way at great speed and personal cost to Arras, and he is not simply letting it be, but he is not sure why, or even of fully sure his final destination. “Il allait au hasard devant lui. Où? A Arras, sans doute; mais il allait peut-être ailleurs aussi. Par moments, il le sentait, et il tressaillait.” (p. 252) -- “He was moving forward haphazardly. To where? To Arras, certainly; but he may possibly have been going elsewhere as well. At times, he felt it, and he shuddered.” Where is this elsewhere? Back to the bagne after turning himself in? To Montfermeil to fetch Cosette after letting another man be sent to serve his sentence? It seems as though neither thought is quite thinkable; he cannot yet think past his arrival in Arras. And even at that, the narrator tells us, “pour tout dire, il eût mieux aimé ne point aller à Arras. / Cependant il y allait. / [...] / A mesure que le cabriolet avançait, il sentait quelque chose en lui qui reculait.” (p. 253) -- “to tell the whole truth, he would have preferred not to go to Arras. And yet, he went. As the buggy advanced, he felt something within him pull back.” His rational mind knows that he remains in complete control of what happens in Arras, and that there is nothing pressing him to continue, and yet, when it appears that a broken wheel will prevent him from arriving in time, he feels a shock of joy. Even he does not understand this, “Il examina cette joie avec une sorte de colère et la trouva absurde. Pourquoi de la joie à revenir en arrière?” (p. 258) -- “He examined this joy with a kind of anger and found it absurd. Why joy at going backward?” We as readers know the answer to this question; we sense what he cannot. His mind continues to deliberate, as we are clearly told just before he enters the courtroom, but somehow he has also made the decision so inexorably, in a way of which he is not yet aware, that nothing short of the total, practical impossibility of continuing can change his course. Some part of him – something we might call an instinct, or his conscience, or the supernatural voice that saved the candlesticks from the fire, something that his rational mind can’t quite grasp – something knows the right answer, the one that awaits him in Arras. Even still, on a conscious level, he can only continue to press forward because no decision is made, he can choose at each step not to turn back because he can tell himself that he’ll have another chance to change his mind later. This allows him to once again act out of phase with himself. 

And so perhaps this is another way of understanding his anonymity in this chapter. No conscious self available to him is quite capable of the act that this trip begins – Jean Valjean cannot imagine the selfless sacrifice, and Madeleine cannot admit that he is Jean Valjean. The traveler, the unfortunate man whose sufferings we are recounting, is only so because he is now compelled to something more than either Jean Valjean or Madeleine had been able to do. Like the honest man that the Bishop spoke into being, this new man, at first, has no name.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

To finish up today, I’d like to make a few brief comments about chapter 8, when our protagonist finally finds himself with the moment of truth, so to speak, before him. 

First, even though he has been identified to the the presiding judge as Madeleine, he is once again for the reader, “l’homme malheureux dont nous racontons l’histoire” (p. 274) -- “the unfortunate man whose story we are recounting.” In the context of Madeleine’s fame and superlative reputation, this anonymity also underlines the distinction between this public persona, the one that the presiding judge in this court can venerate without even having met him, and the newly-tainted purpose that the persona of Madeleine serves for the character himself. Because of this discrepancy, the tremendous respect that everyone has for Madeleine now has “un arrière-goût étrange et amer” (p. 274) -- “a strange and bitter aftertaste.” The new person that he is beginning to become, the one who does not yet have a name, is also beginning to recognize that this respect is for someone that is no longer him. 

Second, we notice the intensity of the psychological narration in this chapter, which is reminiscent of the later chapters of The Last Day of a Condemned Man, when the title character – also, as it happens, anonymous – knows that his execution is imminent. In both pieces, we see a surprisingly real-feeling portrait of extreme anxiety, of which a couple of features stand out. One is the incoherence of his thoughts. Crucially, we do not see a mini-reprise of the “Tempest in a Skull” chapter--although, even there we saw the beginnings of the apparently random associations that intensify here. But ordered, rational deliberation is impossible for a mind in this kind of final moment of intense stress. His only thoughts that are quoted to us are, before his panicked impulse to run away down the corridor, “Pardieu! Qui est-ce qui m’y force?” (p. 276) -- “By God! Who’s forcing me to do this?” and after he suddenly stops running, “Il avait songé toute la nuit, il avait songé toute la journée; il n’entendait plus en lui qu’une voix qui disait: hélas!” (p. 276) -- “He had thought all day, he had thought all night; now all he heard was a voice inside that said: Alas!” Thought has exhausted him, and he has no strength left for it. Thought is, perhaps, an intellectual form of the flight he began to undertake physically, and he seems to recognize all at once that it must now come to an end.

The psychological realism of this scene can also be seen in the apparently meaningless details that hold the character’s focus. For him, they are a function of the intense awareness of the immediate present brought on by stress. For us, though, the narrator invests them with greater meaning. 

The first of these is the letter on the wall. Even though the character’s stare at it is vacant, and we’re told that his mind is elsewhere, the narrator provides us with details about it. It is a leftover artifact from the Revolutionary Era, almost certainly forgotten if it remains in a deliberation room during the Restoration, probably seen every day without really being seen, just as it is here by our protagonist. Specifically, it is a letter from Jean Nicolas Pache, mayor of Paris during the Terror, on the typically Revolutionary matter of deputies and ministers under house arrest. The presence of this letter, out of place in its new environment, as well as the error in its date, the 9th of June year II, of combining the traditional calendar with the Revolutionary one, feels oddly similar to the situation of our protagonist’s newfound hybridity and dislocation from himself and his world. It is both arbitrary and somehow fitting in the scene.

The other object that attracts his sustained focus is the door handle that will allow him to enter the courtroom. As he stares at it, we think of how he couldn’t look away from that other shining metal object, the coin he stole from Petit-Gervais, as it sat in the dirt back in Book 2, where it felt like an eye fixed on him in a way that we interpreted as guilt. In this scene, before that brief flight down the corridor, it had been looking at that doorknob that provoked his acute anxiety. Then, after he returns, the narrator changes the word he uses for this object in French, although translations vary here. Before, the doorknob had been an innocuous word that can also mean “button,” but after he returns, it is a “gâchette” (p. 275-276) -- a trigger, as on a gun. In English, we have given an extremely 21st-century metaphorical meaning to the word “trigger,” related to setting off an anxiety response, especially in those who live with post-traumatic stress disorder. That meaning would be surprisingly appropriate here, but the word “gâchette” does not carry that same meaning in French even today, and attributing such a modern psychological meaning to a word in a 19th-century novel is also anachronistic – the word would not have been used that way in either language in 1862. But I do think it is reasonable to say that, in using this word, Hugo zeroes in on a fact that is both psychological for the character and very real in the situation: after all his preparations, his long, arduous voyage, his weighty deliberations, and his indecision, it is this small metal mechanism that will truly set something off. 

The doorknob is so important that it takes on a second layer of meaning as well, as he stares at it “comme une brebis regarderait l’oeil d’un tigre” (p. 276) -- “as a ewe would look at the eye of a tiger.” This striking image is also much more evocative than the earlier small metallic eye that transfixed him, and it has more layers. The most obvious is the terror he feels – behind that door is clear danger, and his fear of it is the same as an animal’s fear of its predator. But the choice of a ewe in particular makes the image all the more striking – if vulnerability were all Hugo wanted to convey, he might have made a more typical comparison to a lamb instead. But here, he chooses the word that is specific to an adult female sheep. We’re reminded of the prominence of the word “mère” in his name, in the form of two different homonyms for the French word for “mother.” A ewe staring into the eye of a tiger would be terrified, certainly, would be in grave danger of becoming prey, but would also have a strong instinct to protect her young, and this could make her fierce.

This protective instinct in our hero is chiefly for Fantine and Cosette, and we see thoughts of them creep in as part of his hesitation. This helps the reader share his deep conflict about what he should do next, and all the more so because we as readers have just looked back in on Fantine--we’ll discuss that chapter in more detail in two weeks. And for the moment, we will also leave our nameless hero in suspended animation, having “sans qu’il sût lui-même comment,” (p. 276) -- “without knowing how himself,” stepped into the courtroom.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll see what happens in that courtroom. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part I, book 7, chapter 9-11, “Forming Convictions.”

[/Music]

The section for today began by stepping into the courtroom, and Hugo titles chapter 9 with something of a pun, calling the courtroom a place where “convictions” are formed – both in the legal sense, of convicting criminals, and in the moral sense, as our hero has to decide once and for all who he is, and what he believes. Fortunately for translators, this pun works in both English and French. The emphasis in chapter 9 is on what our protagonist sees in this place, and I’d like to emphasize a few of the things he shows us.

First, he shows us details. He describes the courtroom quite deliberately, and as he shows us this place where convictions are formed, he draws on a convention of literary realism, which was very much in vogue in novels in 1862, that shows details, without regard for their beauty or ugliness. This is worth distinguishing from Romanticism, which, as we’ve mentioned before, self-consciously combined beauty with characteristics of the grotesque, which it often even exaggerated. But in realism, being true-to life is the top priority, and that is what we see here. The room is mundane, worn down, elevated neither in its beauty nor in its ugliness, and the people are remarked to be “en chair et en os” (p. 278) -- “in flesh and bone.”  

But for Hugo, these details are not present for their own sake, and he puts them to higher effect, as he shows us another detail that accentuates the irony of this place where we are supposed to find “cette grande chose humaine qu’on appelle la loi et cette grande chose divine qu’on appelle la justice” (p. 277) -- “that great human thing called the law, and that great divine thing called justice.” These are two different things, it seems, and are executed to different degrees of success, a fact that is exemplified by Bamatabois’s presence on the jury. This is of course the man who saw fit to harass Fantine and drive her to the lowest point in her descent, who was considered to be without guilt in that incident, even though Madeleine had asserted his guilt when he had ordered Fantine freed. His social position protects him, despite his character flaws, and gives him authority over Champmathieu, even to the point of assigning him an identity and ordering his life or death.

Individually, too, this mundane reality is a surreal spectacle for our hero. We see the courtroom from his point of view, as it takes him back nearly three decades to his own trial and conviction. It’s as if he’s watching a biopic with an actor, albeit one a bit too old, chosen to play the role of Jean Valjean, and he gets to watch one of the nodal moments in his own life as an outsider. We’re reminded of the scene outside of Digne, where he saw himself standing before him in a vision. Here that vision becomes real, and he even remarks upon the resemblance between Champmathieu and the person in that vision. Back then, we’ll remember, instead of redeeming the man in the vision, as the Bishop perhaps hoped he would do, he hid him away and became someone else. But, the moment that the courtroom transports him back to is not that moment, but one even earlier than that. He now finds himself looking not at the hideous convict Jean Valjean, but the poor, desperate, starving man Jean Valjean, who has not yet been made dangerous by his time in prison. This is, in a sense, an opportunity to go back to that moment and redeem that Jean Valjean by becoming him again, to return to the person he was before 19 years in prison, before he was filled with hatred. 

When our hero sees Champmathieu, the narrator intervenes in a single-line paragraph: “Cet homme, c’était l’homme” (p. 277) -- “That man was the man.” We’ve seen this weighty use of the word “man” before, when Jean Valjean was searching for lodging in Digne, and the owner of a home where he hoped to find refuge asked, “Est-ce que vous seriez l’homme….?” (p. 71) -- “Could you be the man….?” Then we connected this to the phrase that Pontius Pilate uses in the gospels to present Jesus to the crowd, “Ecce homo” in Latin, “Behold the man.” That comparison is at least as apt here, perhaps even more so. Until Jean Valjean’s intervention, Champmathieu is poised to be sacrificed in the protagonist’s place, and seeing him, recognizing this fact while looking upon the unlucky man standing before him, is a powerful experience indeed.

In just about every way we have discussed so far, Champmathieu has the characteristics of the prototypical misérable, and as we watch him, we see the repercussions of that state in the disadvantages he has at trial. His most practical disadvantage is that he has no education, and so doesn’t understand his situation, and can’t defend himself effectively. Also a characteristic of a misérable, in a way that we have seen as also connected to education, is his near-absence of self: like Fantine, he doesn’t know his birthplace, is named by the anonymous populace, and has no baptismal name. This works against him in a practical way as well, as he cannot offer any evidence of his identity that satisfies official standards; the only documented evidence of his identity is the story provided by the court, and that one claims he is Jean Valjean. We see that he is aging quickly because of hard work; like the other misérables, his age is relative, not connected to linear time or to any knowledge of his date of birth. He is unmoored from anything that would give him an identity in the social world, and in this trial in particular, identity is the one thing he needs.

Finally, in surveying the courtroom, the narrator also notes the crucifix on the wall, and that it hadn’t been present at Jean Valjean’s trial, during the officially atheistic Revolutionary period. After mentioning this detail, the narrator adds, interpretively, “Quand on l’avait jugé, Dieu était absent.” (p. 278) -- “When they had judged him, God had been absent.” This comment offers a couple of different possibilities in interpretation. The first question we can ask is, is this in free indirect discourse? Is it a pure intervention of the narrator, offering his own commentary, or is the narrator expressing our main character’s thought upon noticing this difference in the courtroom? The context still has us very much in Jean Valjean’s point of view, and a few lines earlier, we have a clear example of free indirect discourse used in the same way: “c’était un autre lui-même qui était là! Cet homme qu’on jugeait, tous l’appelaient Jean Valjean!” (p. 278) -- “It was another version of himself who was there! That man that they were judging, everyone was calling him Jean Valjean!” The protagonist whose thoughts these sentences express is still referred to in the third person –  “another version of himself” – but the tone, the exclamation points in the text, the general strangeness of the sensation he’s experiencing, all belong to the character, not the narrator. In the declaration that God had been absent 27 years earlier, however, it’s less clear who is commenting. If it’s the character’s bitter reflection, it is easier to chalk the comment up to a reaction to the painful memory made present again before his eyes, but if it’s the narrator, we are tempted to take it as a critique of the atheistic Revolutionary government, as an assertion that it would take a secular justice system to inflict the cruel penalty that Jean Valjean had suffered. 

But, the rest of the chapter undermines any such assertion. The judgment that we see underway for Champmathieu is not less harsh or inexorable, and no less cruel to the poor in particular, with the crucifix on the wall. If God was absent when Jean Valjean was condemned, is he present now? Does claiming God’s presence in this institution change it in any way that matters? The clear answer, in what follows, is no. Even with a crucifix on the wall, the court that tries Champmathieu seems prepared to condemn a man who may or may not have stolen some apples, believed to be someone who once, long ago, stole some bread, to a life of forced hard labor, or even, possibly, to death. 

And yet, we know that Champmathieu’s trial ends differently than Jean Valjean’s had. The difference, though, is not anything the court did, not any renewed morality for which we can thank the official presence of religion. The difference is the presence of our protagonist, answering the call issued to him by a Bishop who, we’ll remember, had transcended the divisions between religion and revolution, who had made personal generosity and kindness to the poor the central tenets of his faith put into action. If God is present in this scene where He was absent before, it is not in any institutional or governmental affiliation, but in one man’s answer to that call, in his continued quest to become what the Bishop commanded him to be.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

For all the discussion of crime and punishment in this novel, this is the first and only time that we’ll see not only the inside of a courtroom, but also the criminal justice system from this close of a vantage point on its functioning.

It is portrayed, in short, as futile, self-congratulatory, and ineffective at revealing truth. The proceedings are comprised of speeches that, on the page, look like the long monologues we’ve seen before, signaling a disconnect between a character and narrative, and these do, to some extent, serve that purpose – for all their talking, these proceedings fail the story they are trying to tell. Three people speak at length in chapters 9 and 10, but none of them knows the full story of the matter at hand, and each tries unsuccessfully to reconstruct something that can only ever be incoherent. 

But these speeches are different from the others in that they are given by lawyers, and are highly stylized. They are also not reported in their entirety in direct discourse, as Fantine’s or Tholomyès’s were – that is, they are not given to us word-for-word. The narrator switches between direct and indirect discourse, and the indirect discourse, which seems to be more in the narrator’s voice and point of view than the character’s, is flavored with irony and disdain for their self-important affectations. 

An important part of this disdain is found in the narrator’s references to French neoclassical theater, which may benefit from a bit of explanation. This tradition saw its highest point in the late 17th century, under Louis XIV, with the comedies of Molière and the tragedies of Jean Racine, among others. But it remained the esthetic ideal until the advent of Romanticism, and is still to some extent today taught as a golden age, if not the golden age, of the national literature. Hugo was, to put it briefly, no fan of this ideal. We’ll recall that he was a leader of the Romantic movement in French literature in his 20s and 30s; for him, Romanticism was a departure from the French literary canon in the neoclassical tradition, and he framed his work, including in the Preface to Cromwell, which I linked to back in the episode 2 extras on the website, as an intentional departure from that tradition. He saw neoclassicism as stagnant, stiff, and, based as it was on the imitation of styles from Antiquity, unsuited to creativity and innovation. He rejected, most of all, neoclassicism’s insistence, as he saw it, that beauty be separated from ugliness, that tragedy be separated from comedy, and so forth on down the metaphorical relationships – sublime from grotesque, spirit from body, divine from animalistic. Had he written Les Misérables before the Preface to Cromwell, rather than 35 years later, he might have added Madeleine and Jean Valjean to this list, for these two personae represent the same sort of division – as we saw two weeks ago, he invested everything good that the Bishop charged him with becoming in Madeleine, and locked Jean Valjean away like a demon in hell. For the last two episodes, we’ve been discussing how that separation must come to an end, and now, at the culminating moment of that process, it is only fitting that we see references to one of Hugo’s long-held objections to that sort of separation.

So each of the lawyers in this trial is charged, as it were, with a reference to this literature. For the defense lawyer, it is a style of language that Hugo connects here to a long-standing tradition in legal oratory, saying that the lawyers enjoy “sa sonorité grave et son allure majestueuse” (p. 280) -- “its serious sonority and its majestic gait.” But, his description of this style echoes neoclassicism’s ideal of avoiding mundane language in favor of words considered to be more elegant, more beautiful. This ideal is seen particularly in tragedies, or in portrayals of characters of high social standing; one of the criticisms of Hugo’s breakout Romantic play Hernani was the vulgarity he showed in having a king pronounce a line so mundane as “Est-il minuit?” (Act II, scene 1) -- “Is it midnight?” often rendered in the critique with even more banality “Quelle heure est-il?” -- “What time is it?” This was a feature of the neoclassical esthetic that could be taken to extremes that were even subject to satire in their own time. The way the defense lawyer is presented also has overtones that remind us of Molière’s comedy Les Précieuses Ridicules, a send-up of a particular social type of the period, women who were inclined to exaggerated affectations of elegance and idealized courtship. The lawyer’s style is associated with the provinces, it has an absurd self-importance, and it insists on awkwardly substituting supposedly elegant terms for mundane words in everyday life – all these are elements of Molière’s satire. The complexity of his language, including the difficulty he has discussing the facts of a case involving something so simple as apples, recalls Molière’s précieuses’ saying “les commodités de la conversation” -- “the conveniences of conversation” in place of the mundane word “chairs.” But here, rather than an idealized notion of love and courtship, this language is in service of political orthodoxy, of displaying royalism. This includes, of course, an air of nostalgia for the height of absolute monarchy--also in the late 17th century, under Louis XIV. 

The prosecuting lawyer suffers from even harsher comparisons to this period. First, he insults Romanticism gratuitously, claiming it is the source of all crimes. We have mentioned before that Romanticism was a cultural novelty as well as a literary one, so a claim like this might not be an entirely outlandish one for someone in this situation to make; it would be similar to blaming general delinquency on “kids today, with their loud music, and their video games” or similar laments that every generation has made about the next one. But, more than that, it signals that this lawyer, like the last one, is not on Hugo’s “side.” Then, the lawyer’s description of the notorious Jean Valjean is compared to that most neoclassical of playwrights, Jean Racine, specifically to the long description of the monster that kills the young hero in Act V, scene 6 of Racine’s best-known play Phèdre. I will link to that play from the website, if you’d like to have a look at that scene. In that scene, a terrifying monster emerges from the sea and frightens the man’s horses, which drag him to his death. Limited to some extent by special effects technologies for the stage, but to a much greater extent by the neoclassical esthetic’s rejection of anything that might shock the eye, a scene of fantastic and graphic violence such as this one had to be rendered in a descriptive monologue delivered by a character who witnessed and reported it. These monologues were thought, by the Romantics, to be dull and artificial, and to interfere with the scene’s believability and emotional impact. The air of untruth that Hugo saw in the theatrical model underlies its use here as well – unable to show us evidence of any sort of monster in the person of Jean Valjean, the lawyer describes him in the most extreme terms available, but the rhetoric is hollow.

While we are discussing Hugo’s use of the French neoclassical literary canon in this section, we should mention that the third name that often appears in its pantheon, Pierre Corneille, was an exception to Hugo’s disdain. He wrote a bit earlier in the 17th century than the other two, and his work bore closer resemblances to Shakespeare’s, whom Hugo admired tremendously. We referenced Corneille two weeks ago, in our discussion of the “Tempest in a Skull” chapter, where Jean Valjean’s deliberations on his dilemma both echoed and transcended a similar scene in his play Le Cid. That Hugo would draw upon, but at the same time seek to modernize and surpass Corneille fits his opinion of him just about as well as his ridicule here fits his opinion of Molière and particularly Racine. 

Each of these references to the core canon of the French theater places literature at the center of social life and culture. For Hugo, questions that seemed to be esoteric matters – esthetics, literary styles, definitions of beauty and the purpose of literature – were one part of the web of which all mentalities were composed. It is not just to renew 30-year-old battles long after the fact that Hugo pits the neoclassical focus on beauty against the Romantics’ embrace of the esthetic qualities of the grotesque. This difference between the two esthetics was, in his mind, not isolated from a willingness to acknowledge complexity in other matters, including ones whose importance we have already seen in this book – in understanding politics and history, in distinguishing appearances from reality, in recognizing possibilities for redemption. By finally acknowledging that correct appearances do not necessarily mean goodness, Madeleine has, in a sense, discovered Romanticism.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

When our protagonist-to-be-named later manages to hide, to sit in a discreet spot in the courtroom and watch these proceedings without being seen, he disappears from the narration too. We are left with only what he sees. From the time he sits down, we no longer read his thoughts, including the final moment before he stands to interrupt the proceedings. We only have the surreal detail of his hair turning entirely white in the time that he’s been sitting there, obscured. This can be read to signal stress, of course, but it might also remind us of transfiguration, as if a supernatural light has fallen upon him. 

This religious significance is hinted at later in the chapter in describing the crowd’s astonishment at what they’ve seen. He is described as an “apparition,” and then we’re told that “toute cette foule, comme par une sorte de révélation électrique, comprit tout de suite et d’un seul coup d’œil cette simple et magnifique histoire d’un homme qui se livrait pour qu’un autre homme ne fût pas condamné à sa place” (p. 293) -- “that whole crowd, as if by a sort of electric revelation, understood all at once and in a single glance that simple and magnificent story of a man turning himself in so that another man would not be condemned in his place.” The substitutive self-sacrifice that is described as “simple and magnificent” must once again remind us of another similar sacrifice, once again connecting Jean Valjean to the central story of the Christian faith, the crucifixion. At the same time, this is the point when he is given the name Jean Valjean with the force of both narrative authority and the belief of the crowd. “Il était évident qu’on avait sous les yeux Jean Valjean. Cela rayonnait” (p. 293) -- “It was obvious that Jean Valjean was before their eyes. That fact glowed.” I found the final phrase there difficult to translate well; it suggests not that the person of Jean Valjean was in any way glowing, but that something shone, glowed, or radiated about the fact that the crowd was certain they had Jean Valjean before them. The religious experience that the crowd is having here is an apparition of a transfigured Jean Valjean, at last on a path to redemption. 

Before they come to this certainty, though, while all present still think Madeleine has lost his mind, and before he proves his identity by displaying his convict’s knowledge, Jean Valjean speaks for a page or so in a way that is more personal, and more reflective. It seems, to the crowd, like the other monologues we’ve seen, like incoherent ravings, and they do indeed resist narrative, and jump from one topic to the next. But the way they appear to the other characters and the way they appear to the reader could not be more different; this contrast is the starkest here that it has ever been to this point in the novel. Perhaps this is why the narrator insists that they are his exact words, written down immediately after the event – so that we can rely on our understanding of them, even though no one else who heard them would have seen their coherence. Jean Valjean refuses to narrate his tale, saying, “Je ne vais pas vous raconter ma vie, un jour on saura” (p. 292) -- “I’m not going to tell you my life story; one day it will be known” But for us, what he says here can be seen as the essence of the rest of the book – where his story is known--the clearest and most concise truth we have yet seen about the plight of the misérable.

Three moments from his speech distill this plight best. First, he says “J’avais pourtant fait de mon mieux [...] j’ai voulu rentrer parmi les honnêtes gens. Il paraît que cela ne se peut pas.” (p. 292) -- “But I had done my best [...] I tried to return among honest folk. It seems that can’t be done.” This, we’ll remember, is the same observation Javert made early on, and it is another way of describing what we, following the Preface’s lead, have come to call social damnation, the inexorable that we saw Hugo think of this novel as protesting. The suffering we see in this scene, as sublime as it is, is brought on by this same profound social ill that is at the center of the novel’s project.

Second, he talks about his punishment specifically. He conspicuously avoids the word misérable as he concedes that “On a eu raison de vous dire que Jean Valjean était un malheureux très méchant.” (p. 292) -- “They were right to tell you that Jean Valjean was a very evil and unhappy man.” Then he continues, “Toute la faute n’est peut-être pas à lui. [...] l’infamie d’où j’avais essayé de sortir est une chose nuisible. Les galères font le galérien.” (p. 292) -- “It may not be entirely his fault. [...] the infamy from which I had tried to escape is a destructive thing. The prison creates the prisoner.” In a sense, this is a more urgent problem than the first. We saw in book two how a man whose only crime was borne of desperation to survive was transformed into what the narrator tells us his yellow passport was right to call a “very dangerous man.” That is, so long as prisons are creating dangerous men in this way, then the public distrust of released convicts that we’ve been calling social damnation might just be warranted. This new Jean Valjean wouldn’t have trusted the old Jean Valjean either. Perhaps this is why he draws attention to this sentence in particular, following it with “Recueillez cela, si vous voulez.” (p. 292) -- “Remember that, if you want.” This is an imperative, grammatically, a suggestion made to someone, but it is unclear to whom. The court? The witness who will write this down? Hugo himself, who is now recounting this story for him? In any case, if there is one takeaway from Jean Valjean’s story as he sees it, it’s that the justice system must stop transforming minor criminals into “very dangerous men” with its harshness and cruelty.

This is the best lesson he can offer those assembled before him because they are incapable of understanding the higher lessons that Jean Valjean has learned. He begins to explain that “l’indulgence et la bonté m’ont sauvé, comme la sévérité m’avait perdu,” (p. 292) -- “clemency and kindness saved me, just as harshness had destroyed me,” but then, with no hope that his audience will understand or believe the story of his encounter with the Bishop and its effects, he concludes that portion of the story abruptly, “Mais, pardon, vous ne pouvez pas comprendre ce que je dis là.” (p. 292) -- “But I’m sorry, you can’t understand what I’m saying here.” The possibility of this sort of redemption is, of course, another argument, perhaps the book’s chief argument, against the social damnation he faced. But in a place that exists for the purpose of judgment and condemnation, in the presence of those who think the way these lawyers and jurists, including Bamatabois, do, such a message is bound to fall upon deaf ears. So, it is truer than anyone realizes when he says “Je suis le seul qui voie clair ici” (p. 291) -- “I am the only one who can see clearly here.”

As he says all this, because the assembled crowd, including the court officials, think the mayor of Montreuil-sur-mer has just gone mad, he needs to give proof of what he’s saying, and this is a point at which the stage musical, and some other adaptations, have created something of a problem for themselves. There, the number 24601 that identified him in prison is tattooed or branded on him, and in most staging, he reveals it dramatically to prove his identity. For those who aren’t swept away in the musical’s emotion, this poses a logical problem for the idea of mistaken identity – if the real Jean Valjean had been marked, it would presumably have been simple enough to check Champmathieu for such a mark in order to confirm his identity. The 2012 movie musical, to its credit, solved this problem, but didn’t replace it with another solution to Jean Valjean’s problem of proof in this scene. Here, he solves the problem by drawing upon what did leave a permanent mark on him from his time in prison – the experience itself, and his memories of it. 

One of these is a brand, on the shoulder of Chenildieu, the letters TFP. This stood for travaux forcés à perpétuité, perpetual (that is, a lifetime sentence of) forced labor. This brand was a historical reality, and appears as a revelatory plot device in other novels of the period as well. It is not far removed from the mark that the musical chose to press into dramatic service, but there is one crucial difference: only those convicts who were given life sentences would have been branded, so Jean Valjean, with his initial sentence of five years, and even after his sentence was extended to 19 years, would not have been marked. This is, on the one hand reasonable, the justice system at least appearing to allow for the possibility of normal life after a convict’s proverbial debt to society has been paid. But at the same time, the absence of a mark on Jean Valjean has a certain sad irony, because in every sense but the physical, as we saw in book two and as we will see again, he will be forever marked by his time in the bagne. Chenildieu, we’ll note, wanted so desperately to be rid of his permanent mark that he tried in vain to remove it by intentionally re-burning himself. 

Jean Valjean’s final comment to the court implies a resolution of the crisis that began in chapter 2: “vous me trouvez digne de pitié, n’est-ce pas? Mon Dieu! Quand je pense à ce que j’ai été sur le point de faire, je me trouve digne d’envie.” (p. 294)) -- “You find me worthy of pity, don’t you? My God! When I think of what I almost did, I think I’m worthy of envy.” He has decided, once and for all, which fate is preferable, and he is grateful to have found this path. Although, then, he adds “Cependant j’aurais mieux aimé que tout ceci n’arrivât pas” (p. 294) -- “Still, I would have preferred that all of this not happen.” The emotional impact of this final sentence is clearer than its meaning. There is much to regret here, and we are left without any further clarity about what Jean Valjean might have preferred. 

But it is clear throughout this last chapter that Jean Valjean is learning the painful lesson of this novel from the inside, and it continues to form his life’s convictions. That it is indeed impossible to re-enter the respectable world. That he must take on the burden of the Bishop’s charge with that new knowledge, and that, understood in that way, it is a more complex commandment than he had first thought. And, that he is alone in understanding this, that his perspective is so unique that he is the only one who sees the full picture clearly.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll finish Part 1 and discuss the fates of Fantine, Jean Valjean, and others. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 1, book 8, chapters 1-5, “Meeting God.”

[/Music]

In the last two weeks, we’ve seen our protagonist’s harrowing journey to Arras for the trial of Champmathieu, and his dramatic revelation that he is the wanted convict Jean Valjean. We begin today with a typically 19th-century chapter title, “Dans quel miroir M. Madeleine regarde ses cheveux,” -- “In What Mirror M. Madeleine Looks at his Hair.” The mirror he uses, of course, is the mirror that doctors, in the era before sophisticated monitoring of vital signs, would hold under the nose of a gravely ill patient to detect any faint trace of breath. That trace, if the patient was still breathing, would fog the mirror--the appearance of white indicated that the person was still alive, if barely. Here, it is Madeleine who sees the trace of white, as his hair has changed overnight, and it is he who is at the bare edge of existing; he only exists in the belief of Sister Simplice, Fantine, and the people of Montreuil-sur-mer. 

But at the same time, Fantine is the one whose breath is labored. Their two fates are finally, clearly linked, as Madeleine, maire de Montreuil-sur-mer, depends for his existence on the belief of the mother and redeemed prostitute, mère in the image of that Biblical Madeleine. And, as we’ll see in the third part of today’s episode, her existence depends on him as well. 

His final visit to her sick bed is a religious experience--as the people in the courtroom marveled at his sacrifice, he, in turn, marvels at hers, and his contemplation of her angelic image is part of Jean Valjean’s developing, and extremely personal and idiosyncratic, relationship with the divine. We saw hints of this before his departure for Arras. When she’s first brought to the infirmary, she wakes to find him at her bedside, and he explains, “‘Je priais le martyr qui est là-haut’ / Et il ajouta dans sa pensée: - Pour la martyre qui est ici-bas.” (p. 209) -- “‘I was praying to the martyr above’ / And he added in his mind: ‘For the martyr here below’.” The word “martyr” in the second sentence is feminine in French, which not only identifies the person in question as Fantine--that is not hard to do even without such a clue--but also emphasizes the unique femininity of her martyrdom. We’ll recall seeing in the Preface that one of the century’s problems was “the degeneration of women by hunger.” Fantine has shown us that problem with excruciating clarity, but at the same time, it has taken on the spiritual qualities of sacrifice and holiness. He encourages her in that same passage to see her suffering as a first step in her purification, saying “C’est de cette façon que les hommes font des anges” (p. 210) -- “This is how men make angels.” As different as her story and Jean Valjean’s appear on the surface, he recognizes in her a familiar path from abjection to purification. 

When Javert arrives, Fantine is terrified, believing that he has come for her. But in a scene that echoes the sacrifice he has just made for Champmathieu, Jean Valjean reassures her, and is seized by Javert instead. Of course, Javert had never intended to arrest Fantine in her hospital bed, but this scene from her point of view must have resembled the scene in the courtroom from Champmathieu’s, as Madeleine appears to accept punishment for them both by becoming Jean 

Valjean. Together, these two scenes suggest a curious development in the relationship between this story and the references it has repeatedly made to Jesus’s sacrifice and crucifixion. With both Champmathieu and Fantine, even as suggestions of sacrifice and substitution continue to be made – even as we see equivalencies between their names and our protagonist’s, confusion among them, and a yawning abyss below them that seems impossible to satisfy without a sacrifice – until the final moments of the story, we cannot be sure who will be sacrificed in whose place. And here, of course, at the same time as Fantine believes she sees Madeleine take her place in Javert’s custody, she is the one who dies, and Jean Valjean doesn’t save her at all. 

Then, after she dies, he enters into a kind of contemplation or prayer at her bedside, speaks into her unhearing ear, and arranges her body in a way that restores her beauty and dignity. There is a supernatural glow in the tone of the narration, as she seems to smile when he speaks to her, and her face seems somehow illuminated when her body is arranged. The narrator comments, “La mort, c’est l’entrée dans la grande lueur.” (p. 308) -- “Death is the entryway into great light.”

But, this tender moment exists side by side with a threat of violence. It was after all the violence, in word if not in action, of Javert’s treatment of both him and Fantine that was taken to be the emotional blow that she simply couldn’t absorb, and Jean Valjean tells him directly, “Vous avez tué cette femme.” (p. 307) -- “You killed this woman.” Javert, having no interest in a convict and parole breaker’s desire to pay respects to a consumptive prostitute, intends to take Jean Valjean into custody immediately, but Jean Valjean’s sheer physical strength allows him to release Javert’s grasp and intimidate him by taking hold of an iron bar from a broken bed nearby.

This threat of violence combined with tender contemplation creates an echo of the scene at the Bishop’s bedside, the one that the novel considered in a long, slow moment in Book 2, chapter 11. Here and there, he stands with an iron bar in his hand, contemplating figures that seem holy and strangely illuminated, crucifixes above them. But the mix of violence and holy awe has now changed. Then, deeply conflicted and acting on instinct alone, he had seemed “prêt à briser ce crâne ou à baiser cette main” (p. 109) -- “Ready to crush that skull or to kiss that hand,” but ultimately did neither, instead, stealing the Bishop’s silver. Here, he goes through with the reverential act of kissing Fantine’s hand. This new Jean Valjean is no longer torn as that one was. While he is still prepared to use violence if he must, to defend what he now knows to be good, he has found his moral north star, and he understands his impulses toward violence and reverence and knows how to control and direct each. His character is decided, and Fantine’s memory will now be added to the Bishop’s in his pantheon of holy encounters.

But just as decided is the law that pursues him, in the person of Javert, and the social force that supports it in the opinion of the townspeople. The story of Madeleine ends as it began: suspicious gossips who were at first skeptical of his goodness now feel confirmed in their suspicion, and his kindness and humility are even taken as evidence of his criminality. The forces of prejudice and social damnation supersede even people’s own experience; and no goodness is enough to restore their opinion of a convict. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So far, we’ve seen this section through the lens of Jean Valjean’s role in it; now, I would like to consider Javert’s and Sister Simplice’s all-important parts to play.

Javert is never more a villain than in this scene, but he remains a complex one. We’ll recall that when he was first introduced, he was characterized by a contradiction, “Cet homme était composé de deux sentiments très simples et relativement bons, mais qu’il faisait presque mauvais à force de les exagérer, le respect de l’autorité, la haine de la rébellion” (p. 179) -- “This man was composed of two very simple and relatively good sentiments, but that he made almost bad by exaggerating them, respect for authority and hatred of rebellion.” A similar idea is repeated as he enters here, with a list of positive qualities “qui, en se trompant, peuvent devenir hideuses, mais qui, même hideuses, restent grandes” (p. 304) -- “that, when they err, can become hideous, but that, even hideous, remain grand.” Despite what we see in the scene of Jean Valjean’s arrest, Javert is not pure malevolence, and Hugo goes to great lengths to prevent us from seeing him as simply a villain. The result is a description full of stunning and mind-twisting contradictions that nonetheless feel applicable such as “la difformité du triomphe” (p. 304)  -- “the deformity of triumph,” or, “la bestialité surhumaine d’un archange féroce” (p. 304) -- “the superhuman bestiality of a ferocious Archangel.” He represents “tout le mauvais du bon” (p. 304) -- “All the bad of goodness.” 

The image of the Archangel, in particular, reinforces another element of this description of Javert’s triumphant moment, and that is the enormity of what Javert believes he is doing in arresting Jean Valjean. We have seen a hint of this before, in his arrest of Fantine, when he saw himself not as an officer breaking up a street skirmish but as a defender of society, order, property, and authority, returning forces of rebellion and crime to their proper, submissive place. But with the greater significance of the criminal being seized, come even grander images in Javert’s mind of what it means to seize him. What the narrator describes externally as “le visage d’un démon qui vient de retrouver son damné” (p. 303) -- “the face of a demon who has just found his damned,” masks a drastically different internal image of himself. In his own mind, “il personnifiait, lui Javert, la justice, la lumière et la vérité dans leur fonction céleste d’écrasement du mal [...] il protégeait l’ordre, il faisait sortir de la loi la foudre, il vengeait la société, il prêtait main-forte à l’absolu; il se dressait dans une gloire….” (p. 304) -- “he personified, he, Javert, justice, light, and truth in their celestial function of crushing evil [...] he protected order, he brought forth lightning from the law, he avenged society, he supported the absolute; he rose up in glory….” and so forth. He becomes no less than the Archangel Michael, traditionally portrayed as the protector of God’s people, the leader of the armies of heaven in combat against the armies of evil.

Imagining himself in the image of the Archangel is part of Javert’s very selective religious life, of which we see another hint later in this section, when Jean Valjean has escaped from jail and Javert has come to Madeleine’s room looking for him. Jean Valjean has hidden in the corner behind the open door, and Sister Simplice, who had come to discuss some practical matters with him, has dropped to her knees to pretend to pray. The sight of her religious devotion sets Javert back on his heels; as significant as he sees his official duties to be, the importance of his respect for religion rivals it. But the distinction between his religious devotion and Jean Valjean’s could not be more important. For Jean Valjean, the kindness he received from the Bishop, and set about imitating, has become the antidote to society’s cruelty. It was the source of mercy, of gentleness, of care for human stories before law, prestige, power, and prejudice. It was what made his own life, and later Fantine’s, worth more than their wealth and property. And, it was what made his own suffering, and Fantine’s, purifying forces. For Javert, though, none of this is true. His respect for religion is a part of his respect for authority, as it is described here, “Il était tout d’une pièce et n’admettait ni objection, ni restriction. Pour lui, bien entendu, l’autorité ecclésiastique était la première de toutes, il était religieux, superficiel, et correct sur ce point comme sur tous” (p. 312) -- “He was all of a piece and allowed for neither objections, nor qualifications. For him, of course, ecclesiastical authority was the highest of all, he was religious, superficial, and right-thinking on this point as on everything.” His respect is not for any of the generous and merciful values of religious faith that have been important to the Bishop and to Jean Valjean, but rather, for its authority -- for “l’autorité ecclésiastique” -- “ecclesiastical authority,” literally, the authority of the church, of the institution -- not spiritual authority. Or, put another way, his respect is for the Church whose pursuit of power the Bishop rejected, and who, in pursuing that power, committed the atrocities that the Conventionist held against it. For Javert, that power is a sign that the Church is part of the society he is charged with guarding, and the suffering of Jean Valjean or Fantine is a sign that they are the forces he must guard against.

Of course, it is this very categorical thinking that leads him astray in this scene, because the simplicity of his mind cannot conceive of Sister Simplice lying as she does here for the first time in her life. 

When we met Sister Simplice, just after Javert first mentioned the arrest of Champmatheu to Madeleine, but before the explicit revelation of Madeleine’s true identity, her honesty, this time in the sense of telling the truth, was her most significant personality trait. She was said not only never to have lied, but to consider lying to be “l’absolu du mal” (p. 223) -- “the absolute form of evil.” Those of you who already knew as you read this that Madeleine was Jean Valjean, that he was, in a sense, built of lies, you may have seen this moment of truth, so to speak, on the horizon. Throughout the passages where she has appeared, her unwillingness to lie – even, for example, to avoid upsetting a gravely ill Fantine – is accentuated. It all finally leads to this moment where Sister Simplice lies, just as the full truth about Madeleine gets out. We don’t see the consequences of these lies for her conscience, but we do know what the narrator would like us to think of them, as he apostrophizes, “O sainte fille! [...] que ce mensonge vous soit compté dans le paradis!” (p. 313) -- “O Blessed woman! [...] may this lie be counted in your favor in Paradise!”

Whether it is long-term or only short-term, though, in the moment when she lies, Sister Simplice loses her simplicity. Just as Jean Valjean comes to understand that being an “honnête homme” is more complicated than appearing respectable, Sister Simplice’s moral code is complicated by this moment. For him, this new moral complexity demanded he finally tell the truth, whereas for her, it demanded lying, but both found themselves acting in service of a higher good that they had only just discovered. As we saw with “passive obedience” in the case of Mlle Baptistine and Mme Magloire, it turns out not to be the lie itself that is evil, but the thing it serves. Sister Simplice comes to understand that just as Jean Valjean does.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Before we finish up, we owe some more in-depth discussion to the most significant event in this section, Fantine’s death. First, I’d like to jump back to a chapter that was part of the section we read for two weeks ago, book 7, chapter 6. I postponed discussion of it until now in the interest of our time in this podcast, but the position of the chapter that shows Fantine waiting for Madeleine is not to be ignored. Most of Book 7 is composed of suspense, and no one is in more suspense than Fantine. In the face of a ticking clock – she hauntingly says herself, “je m’en vais demain” (p. 264) -- “I’m leaving tomorrow,” – her chance of seeing the daughter for whom she has sacrificed everything, and of assuring the child’s future, depends on Madeleine. Meanwhile, we know that Madeleine’s very existence is threatened.

This waiting is, astoundingly, filled with happiness. Book 7 chapter 6 begins by telling us that “Fantine était dans la joie” (p. 262) -- “Fantine was in joy,” and in Book 8 chapter 2, when she begins to think that Madeleine has brought her child to her, this same description is taken a step further, “elle était la joie même” -- “she was joy itself” (p. 297). We recall a description of her that was part of her first introduction in the novel, but that has very much disappeared since – back in book 3, chapter 3, before Tholomyès left her, she was described in the same way, “c’était la joie” -- “she was joy” (p. 133). There, this statement was followed by a description of the beautiful teeth revealed by her laughter which, of course, she no longer has here. But restoring Cosette to her would, it seems, once again make that first description appropriate. 

But hers is a joy rooted in denial of reality, just as any happiness Fantine has felt has been from the beginning has been. In what will be the last hours of her life, she keeps repeating “je suis guérie” (p. 298ff)-- “I am cured”-- and continues to deliver the disconnected monologues we have seen so frequently representing this separation from truth. We saw one such monologue, in Book 7 chapter 6, where Fantine joyfully anticipates Madeleine’s return with her daughter, and in Book 8 chapter 2, we see one addressed to the doctor regarding her health, and one addressed to Madeleine about Cosette. Pessimistic as it may sound, the fact that she can only find joy in this kind of denial, both early in her story and at its end, is another message underlying her story about the state of life for the poor, especially, perhaps, for women.

At the same time, even in Book 7, the imminence of her death breaks through as an inevitable truth. The song she sings, which Hugo provides for us in its entirety, corresponds closely to her story: The singer buys cloth to make clothes for the arrival of a child promised to her by the Virgin Mary, but then, the child is gone, and the preparations serve instead to make a burial shroud – even as the song, ending on an optimistic tone, seems as unaware of its own tragic ending as Fantine is. And, of course, Fantine’s description even in that earlier chapter suggests her proximity to death. Fantine is described as the ghost of herself, and her physical appearance is that of someone two or three times her age, “le front ridé, les joues flasques, les narines pincées, les dents déchaussées, le teint plombé, le cou osseux, les clavicules saillantes, les membres chétifs, la peau terreuse, et ses cheveux blonds poussaient mêlés de cheveux gris. Hélas! Comme la maladie improvise la vieillesse!” (p. 263) -- “her forehead wrinkled, her cheeks sagging, her nostrils pinched, her teeth loose, her complexion ashen, her neck boney, her collar bones protruding, her limbs thin, her skin sallow, and her blonde hair was growing back in mixed with gray. Alas, how illness mimics old age!” Like Champmathieu, who claimed that his life of poverty aged him quickly, Fantine’s appearance has been changed by proximity to death, even in youth.  

Just as her happiness in this state depended on illusions, Fantine dies when Javert puts an end to her illusions. First, he tells her that Cosette is not waiting outside to see her when she is well enough, as the others had led her to believe. Second, and perhaps more importantly, he tells her what was revealed in Arras – that there is no Madeleine, that her benefactor, who had believed that she was she was virtuous before God when no one else did, who was her hope of seeing her child again and living happily, whose very name had made him the image of herself and had bound their existences together, never existed at all. Early in book 7, she said, “Je ne vis que lorsque monsieur Madeleine est là” (314) -- “I only live when Monsieur Madeleine is here,” and this interdependence finds its fullest and most tragic expression in this moment.

The moment of her death does not shy away from its grotesque reality. “Elle ouvra la bouche comme pour parler, un râle sortit du fond de sa gorge, ses dents claquèrent, elle étendit les bras avec angoisse, ouvrant convulsivement les mains, et cherchant autour d’elle comme quelqu’un qui se noie, puis elle s’affaissa subitement sur l’oreiller. Sa tête heurta le chevet du lit et vint retomber sur sa poitrine, la bouche béante, les yeux ouverts et éteints. // Elle était morte.” (p. 307) -- “She opened her mouth as if to speak, a wheeze came out of the back of her throat, her teeth chattered, she extended her arms in anguish, opening her hands convulsively, groping around like someone who is drowning, then she suddenly slumped onto the pillow. Her head hit the headboard and fell back onto her chest, her mouth gaping, her eyes open and vacant. // She was dead.” The comparison to drowning, particularly in the death of a young woman, reminds us of Hugo’s oldest daughter Léopoldine, who died in a boating accident at 19 years old, in 1843, a tragedy which would haunt her father for the rest of his life, and which we will have occasion to discuss further in another episode. Drowning has also been associated with Jean Valjean in his comparison to the man overboard, being left behind by the ship of society he has fallen from, struggling against the waves even as he awaits his inevitable end. 

At the same time, this description of her death also brings us back to our discussion of the novel’s Preface, where we puzzled over the phrase “social asphyxia.” We have seen her tuberculosis associated with an excess of love, with being consumed, with the historical reality of epidemic tuberculosis in poverty, and now death of it presented in this way connects it powerfully to that strange formulation from the preface. Here, literal asphyxia, her death from a disease that impedes breathing, mirrors the final step in her social exclusion. Her only connection to respectable life, the care and protection of Madeleine, has evaporated, and taken with it her best hope of renewing her other social connection, to her daughter. This extreme disconnection from social life corresponds to our guess about the meaning of the phrase social asphyxia, and offers a first piece of evidence of how we might interpret that phrase.

Hugo’s final words here regarding Fantine are heartbreaking. “Nous avons tous une mère, la terre. On rendit Fantine à cette mère. [. . .]. Fantine fut donc enterrée dans ce coin gratis du cimetière qui est à tous et à personne, et où l’on perd les pauvres. Heureusement Dieu sait où trouver l’âme. On coucha Fantine dans les ténèbres parmi les premiers os venus; elle subit la promiscuité des cendres. Elle fut jetée à la fosse publique. Sa tombe ressembla à son lit.” (p. 313-314) -- “We all have a mother, the earth. Fantine was returned to that mother. [...] So Fantine was buried in that free corner of the cemetery that belongs to everyone and no one, and where the poor are lost. Fortunately, God knows where to find the soul. Fantine was laid in the dark among whatever bones were there; she was subject to the promiscuity of ashes. She was tossed into a common grave. Her tomb resembled her bed.” Hugo draws here on the similarity, which doesn’t really exist in English, between the French expressions “fosse publique” -- “common grave” or literally “public pit” -- and “fille publique” -- the expression that we’ve seen before referring to a prostitute, literally “public girl.” The closeness of these expressions makes this resemblance even more striking in French than in English – because she was poor, both her grave and her bed were public. 

But the message of this final reflection on Fantine is even broader than that. Her suffering in life overall is compounded for the reader by its echo in death, and her burial resembles not only her prostitution, but the totality of her life as an orphaned girl and poor woman. Even when her soul has returned to God, her body remains indistinguishable from the masses of the poor and consigned to anonymity, lost “among whatever bones were there,” “where the poor are lost.” This happens for the sake of a financial expedient, highlighting what has always been true: that Fantine has been, for the society she lives in, a commodity whose value begins and ends in its cost and its earning potential. Hugo acknowledges that the priest may have done the right thing, in the case of her burial, to consider costs and do his best to provide for the poor who are still living. But at the same time, we don’t miss the poignancy of her being reduced, this final time, to a matter of money. So this is a second, broader way in which her tomb resembles her bed: both Fantine’s tomb and her bed are social symptoms, a critique of a society that values money over human dignity.

This “resemblance” between the tomb and bed, also emphasizes the corporeal--for her, both burial and sex happen primarily to the body. Fantine’s death scene emphasized the soul’s passage to the afterlife, calling death an entryway to great light, and making burial even more explicitly focused on the body only – if the soul has moved on, all that remains is, well, remains. But then, for her, this has been true for some time; the sale of her sexuality, like death, involved a separation between body and spirit. Back in the chapter entitled “Christus nos liberavit,” or “Christ has freed us,” where prostitution was compared to slavery, we were told, “il ne reste plus rien à Fantine de ce qu’elle a été autrefois. [. . .]. Elle est résignée de cette résignation qui ressemble à l’indifférence comme la mort ressemble au sommeil,” (p. 196) -- “There is nothing left of what Fantine used to be. [...] She is resigned with that resignation that resembles indifference the way death resembles sleep” This is thanks to the “marché douloureux” -- “the painful exchange” that society has offered her: “Une âme pour un morceau de pain” (p. 196) -- “a soul for a piece of bread.” Fantine’s tomb and her bed resemble each other in that they are both places where society lays her body without regard for her soul. 

Also in the Chapter “Christus nos liberavit,” just after the sentence we just saw, there is an image that brings these two ideas together in a way that has renewed poignancy now that we have seen her final moments. “Tombe sur elle toute la nuée et passe sur elle tout l’océan! Que lui importe! C’est une éponge imbibée.” (p. 196) -- “Let all the clouds fall on her and the whole ocean pass over her! What does it matter to her! She is a saturated sponge.” The image of the ocean should remind us of the man overboard, only here, its effect is quite different. Once a sponge is saturated, even the whole ocean can have little effect; unlike the man overboard, she feels that she has already drowned, already met this inevitable end. Once she has been driven to prostitution, in other words, her bed may as well be her tomb. But just after he makes this comparison to the saturated sponge, the narrator is quick to correct it. “Elle le croit du moins, mais c’est une erreur de s’imaginer qu’on épuise le sort et qu’on touche le fond de quoi que ce soit.” (p. 196) -- “At least, that’s what she believes, but it is a mistake to imagine that one can exhaust fate and reach the bottom of anything.” Her final inevitability is, at that point, still to come, and we see it fulfilled in an image of the desperate and painful death that had been prefigured all along. 

At the end of this section, the end of Part 1, having seen to Fantine and the people of Montreuil-sur-mer as best he can, Jean Valjean seems to have gotten away. Before we see what becomes of him, and of Cosette, we have a little bit of a change of pace--next week’s section to read will be quite a bit longer than usual, as we’ll dedicate the whole episode to the long digression about the battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon met his final defeat at the end of the Hundred Days in June 1815. This part can be one of the, shall we say, challenges of this novel, but I hope to guide you toward at least an appreciation for it…. Do try to be patient with Hugo as you read.  

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you on the other side of the Battle; in the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 2, book 1, “Waterloo.”

[/Music]

So by now, if you’ve finished the Waterloo section, you may be asking yourself -- WHY?? In my edition it’s just over 60 pages where no characters from the main story appear, followed by about 7 pages that end up, finally, pertaining to someone we’ve met – Thénardier – and an action that he takes that will become important later. So in order to understand this section, the first thing we need to do is to understand why it’s here at all, and then consider what additional meaning and synchronicity it might add to the whole. So that will be our task today.

First, we can think about the novel’s digressions generally. This is the longest, and probably the first one we’ve come across to really take us out of the action in any extended way. There’s also one coming on monasticism, one on slang, and one on the Parisian sewers, to count only the major ones, although you may be glad to know that they’re all much shorter than this one. Some people count all of Part *1* Book 1, about the Bishop, as a digression, and either hail Hugo’s boldness or curse him for beginning his novel with a digression. But it differs from the others in that it’s an extended portrait of a minor character – or, perhaps it’s better to say a character who appears relatively briefly. And it’s also different from this in that everything in it is of Hugo’s own invention, whereas these other four notable digressions are about something that existed outside the novel, that Hugo sought to connect in some way to his work. So, how is this digression connected to his work?

A first place we can look is to things he wrote himself on the matter. Excerpts from two of his letters might begin to shed some light. For starters, the connection between the novel and the battle of Waterloo was personal. On the day he declared the novel finished, June 30, 1861, he wrote a letter to Auguste Vacquerie, family friend and brother of his oldest daughter’s husband, who had perished in a boating accident along with her in 1843. He wrote, “Cher Auguste, ce matin 30 juin à huit heures et demie, avec un beau soleil dans mes fenêtres, j’ai fini Les Misérables. [...] Je vous écris ces quelques lignes avec la dernière goutte d’encre du livre. [...] Et ce livre, savez-vous où le hasard m’a amené pour le finir ? dans le champ de Waterloo. [...] Je m’y suis fait un antre à côté du lion, et j’y ai écrit le dénouement de mon drame. C’est dans la plaine de Waterloo et dans le mois de Waterloo que j’ai livré ma bataille. J’espère ne l’avoir point perdue.” (Correspondence, 1861) -- “Dear Auguste, this morning, the 30th of June at half past eight, with a beautiful sun in my windows, I finished Les Misérables. [...] I write these few lines to you with the last drop of ink of that book. [...] And that book, do you know where chance has led me to finish it? To the field of Waterloo. I made myself a den next to the lion, and there, I wrote the end of my drama. It is in the plain of Waterloo and in the month of Waterloo that I waged my battle. I hope I haven’t lost it.” The earliest ideas for this novel had bubbled up in Hugo’s mind in the 1830s, and he worked on it in earnest for a while in the 1840s before setting it aside until the late 1850s. Finishing it was monumental, not only because of its length, but because of the importance he attached to it. This was the grandest single gesture in his lifelong work in service of the social issues it addresses, and a comparison to this great battle, particularly in the way he construes it, says a great deal about the complex mixed emotions involved in finishing it. This may be why, in the early chapters here, we see a personal connection to the battle’s geography emphasized at Hougomont. 

The second statement from his correspondence that we can consider is from a letter to his son François-Victor, a little over a month before he finished the novel: “Je suis ici près de Waterloo. Je n’aurai qu’un mot à en dire dans mon livre, mais je veux que ce mot soit juste. Je suis donc venu étudier cette aventure sur le terrain, et confronter la légende avec la réalité. Ce que je dirai sera vrai. Ce ne sera sans doute que mon vrai à moi. Mais chacun ne peut donner que la réalité qu’il a.” (Correspondence, 1861) -- “I am here near Waterloo. I will only have a word to say about it in my book, but I want that word to be right. So I have come to study the event on site, and confront legend with reality. What I will say will be true. It will undoubtedly only be my truth. But each of us can only present the reality he has.” It turned out that he had a bit more than a word to say, but the rest of this excerpt gives us an idea of what was on his mind. Something about his book when it was nearly finished suggested a connection to Waterloo, and while he wanted to get his facts straight, he always intended to press historical events into a shape that fit his purposes. I imagine you noticed that what we have just read is not a bare telling of the events; he has overlaid an interpretation of them that serves as part of their connection to the rest of the novel; we will have a closer look at that later in this episode.

But, more obviously than any of this, the discussion of Waterloo is connected to the plot by Thénardier’s appearance at the end, in what Hugo calls here a “scène génératrice” -- a “generative scene” of the story, a scene that will serve as the beginning of others. So before I get to the subtler connections, let’s look at that chapter and think more about what we learn about Thénardier here. We’ll also return to this scene in future episodes, as its full significance comes to fruition.  

Some aspects of Thénardier that we’ve already seen are recognizable in this section. He’s as greedy and opportunistic here as he was in his dealings with Fantine. And like in his exploitation and extortion of her, theft and death combine indirectly. Thénardier’s selfish greed is not directly murderous, exactly, but he shows an indifference to harm and death here that we nonetheless recognize. With Fantine, he showed indifference to mother and child alike, was willing to lie about life and death peril to the child in order to squeeze money from the mother, without regard for sacrifices she might make under the circumstances that he fabricated. His role in Fantine’s death is debatable, but his lack of concern for it is clear. Here, that same lack of concern for death is just as clear as he crawls over the unimaginably horrific spectacle of the battlefield, among dead and dying men and horses, at moments even laughing, and rummaging through their pockets for valuables. Thénardier is not hostile to life, he does not want to kill, but he is indifferent to others’ life and pain.

When he is described here, he is defined by negatives: “ni anglais, ni français, ni paysan, ni soldat, moins homme que goule” (p. 369) -- “neither English nor French, neither peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul,” just as, earlier, he had been described as neither of the middle class nor of the lower class, but as a strange hybrid of the two, combining all the worst of each. Back in Part I, book 4, chapter 2, when he was first described to us briefly, it was the unknown about him that was worrisome. He was an example of a type of person described thus: “Il y a en eux de l’inconnu. On ne peut pas plus répondre de ce qu’ils ont fait que de ce qu’ils feront. L’ombre qu’ils ont dans le regard les dénonce.” (p. 161) -- “There is unknown in them. One can no more answer for what they have done than for what they will do. The shadow that they have in their eyes betrays them.” At the time, we simply said he seemed untrustworthy, but as he’s defined by more negatives here, it is worth making this more precise – he seems untrustworthy precisely because he seems unknowable. He is like looking into a dark abyss that is all the more terrifying because the monsters inside are invisible.

We’ll also remember from that first introduction of him that Thénardier claimed to have been a sergeant at Waterloo; there was a badly painted sign outside his inn depicting him saving the life of a general. At that earlier point, Hugo cast a great deal of doubt on this claim, saying “Ce Thénardier, s’il fallait l’en croire, avait été soldat; sergent, disait-il; il avait fait probablement la campagne de 1815, et s’était même comporté assez bravement, à ce qu’il paraît” (p. 161) -- “This Thénardier, if he is to be believed, had been a soldier; sergeant, he said; he had probably been in the 1815 campaign, and had even acted rather bravely, it seemed.” Even this early on, this story is full of qualifiers -- “if he is to be believed” or “probably” or “it seemed.” Here, we see the truth of his participation in the 1815 campaign, and we see that very little, if anything, remains true about his story. Hugo acknowledges that some have said thieves of this sort were soldiers – if that were true, then perhaps Thénardier could have been, technically, a soldier before he turned thief. But Hugo doesn’t believe it. And we see for ourselves here that the heroic act he depicts was nothing more than a side-effect of his thievery; just as he was indifferent to death, he is indifferent to saving a life. 

This observation brings us to a new element in his ongoing characterization: his action here has a moral consequence that he does not intend. Where he means only to enrich himself, without regard for the well-being of others, this basest moral turpitude is turned into good in spite of him, and Pontmercy, in gratitude for being saved, turns Thénardier’s theft into a gift by adding his intent to give. We can’t help but hear a faint echo of the Bishop’s action, similarly transforming Jean Valjean’s theft of his silverware. But here, the conditions are quite different – in place of forgiveness, there is deception, and in place of Jean Valjean’s heart, which opened to such kindness, there is Thénardier’s, which seems impervious to it. So the result is different as well: Thénardier adopts Pontmercy’s misunderstanding of the event, and tries to use it to literally paint himself in a heroic light. But as we saw back in episode 8, this may not go as he plans either, as portraying oneself as a Bonapartist in the early years of the Restoration tended not to find popular favor.

So this further characterization of Thénardier and his interaction with Pontmercy are the digression’s explicit connection to the rest of the novel, but it is difficult to see these 7 pages justifying all 70. So when we return, we’ll puzzle through how the rest of the digression fits in, and what it tells us about les misérables.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So far, we’ve seen the point of contact between Waterloo and the plot of Les Misérables, that Thénardier was present at the battle, probably not to fight, but to pillage the dead and dying. We can now turn to the rest of Hugo’s picture of this battle, and make a few observations about the other purposes this section might serve. 

In the rest of the section, as he wrote in the letter that we cited earlier, Hugo seeks to “confront legend with reality.” This legend was a powerful one for Hugo; as we have mentioned, his father had been a general in Napoleon’s army, and the military glory that Napoleon projected on his own behalf and on behalf of France nourished the boy Hugo’s fantasies – Hugo was born in 1802, when Napoleon was already in power, and he was thirteen as the battle of Waterloo happened. So his first impressions of Napoleon were not those of an adult with complex views of power and democracy, but of a child who admired heroes, and saw his own father among them. His image of his father, and Napoleon with it, would sour in adolescence, but begin to be rehabilitated in his late twenties, a process that would continue until finally, at the dawn of the Second Empire in 1852, Hugo would express his fierce opposition to it by calling its emperor “Napoleon-le-petit” -- “Napoleon the Little,” in contrast to this original emperor Napoleon, “Napoleon-le grand” -- “Napoleon the Great.” But he seems to know that this glorification does not reflect reality, and what he says of the battlefield at Waterloo is also true for the Emperor, “Pour le glorifier, on l’a défiguré” (p. 337) -- “To glorify it, we have disfigured it.”

At the same time, he is aware that he is not presenting bare truth either, but rather crafting a story, as he also said, presenting “his own truth.” We once again see the role of narrative brought to the fore by passing use of the same technique that we have so far understood to underscore the absence of a crafted story, of presenting the bare sequence of events. As Napoleon sees the early stages of the battle, we find a similar list: “...la résistance d’Hougomont, la ténacité de la Haie-Sainte, Bauduin tué, Foy mis hors de combat, la muraille inattendue où s’était brisée la brigade Soye, l’étourderie fatale de Guilleminot n’ayant ni pétards ni sacs à poudre…” et ainsi de suite. (p. 338-339) -- “...the resistance at Hougomont, the tenacity at La Haie-Sainte, Bauduin killed, Foy out of action, the unexpected wall that broke the Soye brigade, the fatal forgetfulness of Guilleminot having neither explosives nor powder-sacks….” and so forth. This list goes on for a full page before the long sentence’s verb appears: “...tous ces incidents orageux, passant comme les nuées de la bataille devant Napoléon, avaient à peine troublé son regard et n’avaient point assombri cette face impériale de la certitude.” (p. 339) -- “... all these stormy events, passing like the smoke-clouds of the battle before Napoleon, had barely troubled his gaze, and had not at all darkened that imperial face of certitude.” Just as, adopting the point of view of the residents of Paris, Hugo presented 1817 as an undifferentiated string of events, here, Napoleon’s point of view makes the battle appear similarly. The difference between these two sections, though, is what the people in question do see, in place of a narrative informed by hindsight. In 1817, Parisian culture skipped across the surface of its moment-to-moment sensations, believing that their ease in peace and prosperity was the full and permanent truth. But here, rather than failing to see the forest for the trees, if you will, Napoleon fails to see the forest for the imagined horizon beyond it. His confidence is total, and the ups and downs of battle have no bearing on what he sees as his inevitable victory. This approach only occupies about a page of this story, but its presence makes the presence of intentional storytelling in the rest of the passage that much more apparent. We can see the work of a narrator to supply a more deliberate point of view than Napoleon’s, in the occasional adoption of recognizable tones and conventions such as the epic at the moment of the cavalry charge or the tragic in their collapse into the sunken road, and in the narrator’s interpretive interventions.

So, Hugo seems to have set out here to avoid telling the same old Napoleonic story of military glory and tragedy, but instead, to tell a new story of Waterloo. He writes of Napoleon, “Cette figure a été longtemps toute dans la lumière; cela tenait à un certain obscurcissement légendaire que la plupart des héros dégagent et qui voile plus ou moins longtemps la vérité.” (p. 327) -- “This figure has long been entirely in light; that was due to a certain legendary obscuring that most heroes produce, and that veils the truth for some time.” This is already a strange idea, when the metaphor of light and clear vision is applied to it – Napoleon is seen as a unified figure of brilliance and glory, as “all in light,” because of an obscuring – I might as easily have translated this as “clouding” or “darkening” – that prevents us from seeing heroes clearly. But, a clouding that makes us see light? This seems paradoxical. But the next phrase opens that troubled metaphor to a deeper logic: history is portrayed as direct sunlight, and “elle a cela d’étrange et de divin que, toute lumière qu’elle est et précisément parce qu’elle est lumière, elle met souvent de l’ombre là où l’on voyait des rayons” (p. 327) -- “what is strange and divine about it is that, even though it is light, and precisely because it is light, it casts shadows where before we saw rays of light.” Now, the image pops into focus, as it were: the difference is between the light on a cloudy or foggy day and a sunny day, that is familiar to any photographer. When great heroes are clouded by their own glory, the light is diffused, and shadows are less deep, but as soon as they are exposed to direct light, “du même homme elle fait deux fantômes différents, et l’un attaque l’autre, et en fait justice, et les ténèbres du despote luttent avec l’éblouissement du capitaine” (p. 327) -- “of one man it makes two different phantoms, and one attacks the other, and does justice to him, and the darkness of the despot wrestles with the brilliance of the captain.” From his childlike admiration of Napoleon to the young adolescent royalist’s (vaguely Oedipal) revulsion for him, the adult Hugo, with a bit of time and distance, now wants to see both sides of this historical giant at once.

But, this splitting in two, this sudden visibility of a dark side and a light side, and this effort to make them coexist – if these ideas sound familiar, that is a good sign, because this is where we arrive at a second, subtler connection between this section and the rest of the novel so far: as Napoleon, and the battle itself, take on elements of the other misérables under Hugo’s pen. Like Jean Valjean, he is divided in two, and his heroism and the harm he causes are both indelible parts of his legacy. When Napoleon is captured, the image reminds us once again of Jean Valjean. “Bernard et Bertrand saisirent par un pan de sa redingote et arrêtèrent un homme hagard, pensif, sinistre, qui [...] l’œil égaré, s’en retournait seul vers Waterloo. C’était Napoléon essayant encore d’aller en avant, immense somnambule de ce rêve écroulé” (p. 354) -- “Bernard and Bertrand seized by the coat and arrested a haggard, pensive, sinister-looking man who, [...] wild-eyed, was returning alone to Waterloo. It was Napoleon, still trying to advance, immense sleepwalker of this collapsed dream.” Arrested and seized by his coat, Napoleon’s capture reminds us of Javert’s identical gesture in arresting Jean Valjean at Fantine’s bedside. But the haggard, wild-eyed, sinister look, takes us back even further, to the field outside of Digne. At the end of this catastrophe, this sleepwalker is still acting out his dream, one of which he is already no longer capable. Both of Jean Valjean’s major moments of transition so far are reflected in this other turning point – for Napoleon and for France. 

But his joy at the outset of the battle, which gives chapter 7 of this book its title, echoes another that we’ve seen: that of Fantine. In her blindness that we saw parallel that of Parisian culture in 1817, she too experienced a joy that seemed unfounded to us, and that we have just seen end in a destruction as total as that of Napoleon’s army, with the grim image of the soldiers and horses in the sunken road of Ohain echoing Fantine’s final resting place in the common grave. The sunken road also connects Waterloo to another, more abstract image of the misérable: the man overboard that we saw in Part 1, book 2, chapter 8. We’ll recall that Hugo interrupted his recounting of Jean Valjean’s backstory at that point to offer us an image of a man who had fallen unnoticed from a ship, who had not yet drowned, but who was abandoned alone in the ocean, still able to think, feel, and struggle as he contemplated his inevitable fate. In chapter 19 here, he describes the horror of falling into the sunken road in a similar way, being slowly crushed but continuing to struggle. The two passages are a bit too long for me to cite here in their entirety to compare, but if you’re interested, you might go back and read them side by side; their resemblance is remarkable, as is the final sentence of the passage in chapter 19 here “tout à l’heure, j’étais un vivant!” (p. 371) -- “a moment ago, I was alive!” to a sentence early in that chapter, as the man overboard watches the ship sail away, “Il était là tout à l’heure [...] il avait sa part de respiration et de soleil, il était un vivant.” (p. 101) -- “He was there a moment ago [...] he had his portion of air and sunshine, he was alive.” So these soldiers, with their glorious charge described in epic language, careening into this unimaginable and, for them, unavoidable disaster, became another image of the misérable: living dead, people who cannot participate in life, condemned to die, but first, condemned to live with the knowledge of their state.

But one of the misérables at Waterloo defies this fate, and that’s Cambronne. Pierre Cambronne was a general under Napoleon, and the story of his deeds at Waterloo speak for themselves here. He was wounded and taken prisoner, and after the defeat, was tried for treason against the legitimate king by virtue of his loyalty to Napoleon and acquitted in 1816. He didn’t remain anything like a misérable after the Restoration – he went on to serve in the Royal army and to be given a noble title by Louis XVIII, and died in 1842 at the age of 71. But he was best known throughout the 19th century for this word uttered on the battlefield, which came to be called euphemistically le mot de Cambronne -- the word of Cambronne. Hugo came under quite a bit of criticism for including this word in his novel; surprising as it sounds, in a book of over half a million words and full of subversive ideas and challenges to the social order, the word “merde” got an outsized amount of attention. Literally – and I do what I can to keep this podcast family-friendly, but in this instance, be warned, I can’t – it means “shit,” but in its usage here it means something more like, “Go to hell!” and seeing such things in print caused a great deal of 19th-century pearl-clutching. A year or two after the novel was completed, and criticism had surfaced about his use of the “word of Cambronne,” the following fragment appears in Hugo’s papers: “Cambronne -- pourquoi j’ai mis son mot? Il entrait de droit dans mon livre. C’est le misérable des mots. / A un moment donné, il se dresse sur le champ de bataille, et devient un héros. / Le misérable du langage fait une action d’éclat. / Je l’enregistre.” (Hugo, Victor., Oeuvres Complètes: Chantiers. Éditions Bouquins, 2002. p. 750) -- “Cambronne -- why did I use his word? It fit into my book by rights. It is the misérable of words. / At a particular moment, it stands up on the battlefield and becomes a hero. / The misérable of language takes courageous action. / I record it.” This word fits into this book precisely because proper 19th-century readers didn’t think it belonged there; that rejection, that relegation to indecency, is as much a part of being a misérable as the sleepwalking we see in Napoleon, or the living dead in the sunken road. Only this misérable of language refused to be defeated, and its presence in the book echoes that refusal. Hugo writes the unwriteable, just as he tells the story of those who are otherwise ignored.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Finally, to conclude, I would like to say just a few words about how Hugo leads us to understand the significance of Waterloo beyond his novel in these chapters. 

First, he portrays battles generally as complicated, in the sense of resisting clear portrayals--this is what makes them subject to the kind of narrative interpretation that we already saw Hugo indulge in regarding Napoleon. Smaller stories nest in larger stories until they are more biography than history, and the result is so complex that any understanding can only be partial. This, too, speaks to the limit of narrative. Even if facts are correct, to try to tell the story of the whole battle is to be selective, to create contours and storylines out of the chaos. (p. 329-330)

The story that Hugo creates here of the Battle of Waterloo is one of heroism for France, but also of defeat borne of chance. One small change--different information from a peasant here, less rain there--and the battle, and the history of Europe, would have been different. 

But he sees in that chance something greater at work. Just as a narrator can create a story out of chaos, so a higher intelligence can create destiny out of random chance. This analogy, between author and deity, is closely associated in this period with Gustave Flaubert, the figurehead of French literary realism, who said that “L’artiste doit être dans son œuvre comme Dieu dans la création, invisible et tout-puissant; qu’on le sente partout, mais qu’on ne le voie pas.” (Correspondance, 1857) -- “The artist must be in his work the way God is in Creation, invisible and all-powerful; we should feel him everywhere, but we should not see him.” Hugo, of course, did not subscribe to this idea of the invisible author – in fact, Hugo, with his extensive personal interventions, was among the authors that Flaubert was almost certainly thinking of when he wrote this. But these two contemporaries share an intuition about the author’s role in shaping a story out of something much larger and harder to grasp. 

For Hugo, as much as Napoleon may have been admirable, especially in comparison to his nephew “Napoleon the Little,” his defeat at Waterloo was a result of divine intervention. “Était-il possible que Napoléon gagnât cette bataille? Nous répondons non. Pourquoi? À cause de Wellington? À cause de Blücher? Non. À cause de Dieu.” (p. 344) -- “Was it possible for Napoleon to win that battle? We answer no. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God.” A Napoleonic victory “n’était plus dans la loi du dix-neuvième siècle” (p. 344) -- “was no longer within the law of the 19th century.” And the loss of the battle and the fall of the man go hand in hand, as just before the capture of the solitary, sleepwalking Napoleon that we saw earlier, this same sentiment is reiterated. “La disparition du grand homme était nécessaire à l’avènement du grand siècle. Quelqu’un à qui on ne réplique pas s’en est chargé.” (p. 354) -- “The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Someone to whom there is no response took over.”

But we already know enough about Hugo and France as he wrote this novel to wonder: how, in 1862, does he see the 19th century as “the great century?” What is the “law of the nineteenth century” that a French victory at Waterloo would have violated? After all, Waterloo was the definitive victory of monarchy, at least in the short term, and from Hugo’s perspective in 1862, even the long term wasn’t encouraging: the return of the pre-revolutionary dynasty was followed by the July monarchy – a different dynasty, but not much more democratic – and that was succeeded by a brief three years of Republic before that regime was usurped by the authoritarian Second Empire. If God intervened at Waterloo, given all this, we have to ask: to what end? 

The answer, broadly speaking, is nonetheless progress, and progress toward liberty, toward more democratic government. But seeing that progress requires a broader perspective, one that sees change, even regressive change, as movement, and Hugo believes that movement must become progress. 

Hugo was not alone in this idea; in fact, in 19th-century philosophy, it is perhaps most closely associated with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher about a generation older than Hugo. His body of thought is extensive and complex, too much so to do justice to here. But the idea of his that is significant here is a picture of society evolving through conflict, tension, and opposing forces, of destruction leading to progress. This idea has been associated with the experience of witnessing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, and it is not difficult to see how such times would point to these sorts of conclusions. For Hegel, the many opposing forces and ideas that dominated this period – Monarchy and Revolution, Rationalism and Romanticism, Enlightenment and Religion, Freedom and Authority – were working together as part of a rational, evolving whole to bring about progress. What seemed like chaos actually had a goal in mind, and the logic of its progress toward that goal was dialectical, with the push-pull of opposites driving society and culture forward. 

Chapter 17, “Faut-il trouver bon Waterloo?” -- “Should Waterloo be considered good?” reflects this way of thinking. Hugo tells us that even as it was, from the point of view of the victors’ intention, a counter-revolutionary victory, the Revolution found its way into the results of it. It was easy to believe that the Empire was the heir of Revolutionary ideals, and the Restoration, their counterpoint – this is the simple narrative that had already tended to take hold by Hugo’s time. But Hugo complicates this. Napoleon rose during the Revolution and brought great military glory to France, but the ever-expanding empire came at a cost that the people – the mothers who lost sons, the soldiers killed in battle, the misérables who are, according to this book, the strength and source of the future – could no longer support. Napoleon had become despotic as the cost of his glory no longer considered the good of the people. And this despotism, “par la réaction naturelle des choses” (p. 363) -- “by the natural reaction of things,” forced the Restoration to compromise its absolutism, to instead be constitutional. He writes, “C’est que la révolution ne peut être vraiment vaincue, et qu’étant providentielle et absolument fatale, elle reparaît toujours, avant Waterloo, dans Bonaparte jetant bas les vieux trônes, après Waterloo, dans Louis XVIII octroyant et subissant la charte.” (p. 363-364) -- “For the revolution cannot really be vanquished, and being providential and absolutely fated, it always reappears, before Waterloo, in Bonaparte casting down the old thrones, after Waterloo, in Louis XVIII granting and submitting to the Charter.”

So this change, this turbulence itself, is the Law of the 19th century that Napoleon violated. Napoleon was no longer moving toward the Revolution, but away from it. Defeating Napoleon made way for a more democratic glory, and even if it did so by way of an apparent reversal of revolutionary progress. He calls the 19th century “the great century” here because of its predilection for change, upheaval, and even destruction – a predilection that had been amply proven by 1862, even as its resulting republic had not been.

And this is the final way in which the battle of Waterloo can be seen as ranking among the novel’s misérables. In the plot of our story, we have just read a devastating series of events, in which heroes charged headlong into catastrophe, in which hopes were dashed, in which joy only foretold defeat. It seems as though things are doomed to end as they did for Napoleon: in capture and exile, social damnation and early death. But just as there are smaller stories nested within the larger story, there is a larger story still that makes this moment of defeat seem small, and that is the story that Hugo must now bring into being.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll return to our characters, but won’t really leave the battle of Waterloo behind. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part II, book 2 chapter 1 through book 3 chapter 3, “Fate, Hope, and Spiders.”

[/Music]

After the long digression about the Battle of Waterloo, as we continue to think about the heroism in that defeat, about how forward progress might be snatched from its jaws, and, in the background, about the fate of Fantine’s poor child, now effectively orphaned and indentured to the heartless monster we saw at the end of the battle, the first line of the next section is, “Jean Valjean avait été repris” (p. 374) -- “Jean Valjean had been recaptured.” It is tempting, of course, to see the Waterloo digression simply as an interruption from which we’re now returning, to pay attention to it and file away its ideas and conclusions, certainly, but ultimately, to see the beginning of Book 2 as “getting back to the story.” From that point of view, the last thing we saw was Jean Valjean leaving Montreuil-sur-mer, carrying a package, and Fantine’s anonymous burial. We hoped that Jean Valjean might intend to rescue Cosette, but seeing him recaptured here seems, for the moment, to extinguish that hope.

But I think we would make a mistake if we limited ourselves to that way of thinking about the juxtaposition between the end of Waterloo and this return to our character. Hugo did not write a 70-page digression on Waterloo by mistake, or for lack of self-control, and he did not place it where he did arbitrarily either. So we would do well, before we continue, to consider how it fits into the larger story at this point. 

The most important connection, I think, is the parallel between Jean Valjean’s trajectory and Napoleon’s. We have already seen this hinted at, beginning with Jean Valjean’s first appearance in the novel. We saw how the year 1815 and the recent backdrop of the early part of Napoleon’s Hundred Days were emphasized as Jean Valjean arrived in Digne, but soon saw Jean Valjean’s fortunes take a downward turn and depart from the path that had led Napoleon to retake power briefly before his defeat at Waterloo. Here, another parallel is taking shape: our protagonist, after the end of his time in power and respect as the mayor Madeleine, was captured and briefly imprisoned, just as Napoleon was exiled temporarily on Elba before the Hundred Days. Jean Valjean then escaped from the town jail, and we might consider the way we left him – on the loose, escaped from captivity, and nourishing hopes that he will stay that way – as corresponding to Napoleon’s Hundred Days. From that point of view, one way to read the Waterloo digression is as a substitute, in the form of a metaphor, for a full recounting of Jean Valjean’s defeat and recapture. 

These events in the novel’s plot are after all given to us in a rather unsatisfying form. In place of a clear narration, the narrator resorts to a technique we have seen before – he provides us two newspaper reports, both dated July 25, 1823, about 4 months after Fantine’s death, announcing that his trial had concluded, and he had been transferred to the bagne in Toulon, where he had spent his previous 19-year sentence. We learn that he had managed to withdraw his considerable savings, over half a million francs, before he was arrested, and that the authorities do not know where that fortune ended up. Beyond these basic facts, though, these documents serve much the same purpose that we have seen documents serve in the past: they both provide a feeling of truth to the events of the story and, paradoxically, introduce an element of doubt. Here, that doubt is of the facts themselves, thanks to inaccuracies in the second article in particular, which credits the “zèle infatigable du ministère public” (p. 375)-- “the tireless zeal of the public ministry” for his unmasking and calls Fantine his “concubine.” Referring to the theft of Petit-Gervais’s coin eight years earlier, this article claims that “le vol avait été commis de complicité, et que Jean Valjean faisait partie d’une bande de voleurs dans le midi” (p. 375) -- “the theft had been committed with conspiracy, and that Jean Valjean was a member of a gang of thieves in the south,” and that as a result he only avoided the death penalty thanks to the King’s clemency. Never mind that a criminal gang conspiring to steal 40 sous from a child is a bit absurd, we also know all of these statements about Jean Valjean to be untrue, and this casts doubt on the rest of what is reported in the article. So, while we understand that Jean Valjean was recaptured and sent back to the bagne, the details of his recapture remain somewhat unclear.

These documents are introduced by the suggestion that “On nous saura gré de passer rapidement sur des détails douloureux.” (p. 374) -- “You will be grateful to us for passing quickly over painful details.” If you are like me, though, you disagree: I know I, on a first reading, might have been grateful to have more details about Jean Valjean, and fewer, perhaps, about Waterloo. But his imbalance only reinforces the suspicion that the Waterloo section somehow substitutes for what’s missing in Jean Valjean’s story. So, how might that be?

In order to answer that question, I’m inclined to think about the larger narrative that we saw Hugo impose on Waterloo: that the devastation of Napoleon’s defeat, and even the regression to monarchy that it ushered in, was, paradoxically, a victory for progress toward democracy, that Napoleon – even in his glory, especially in his glory--stood in the way of the people’s forward movement. The same might be said of Madeleine – that his version of goodness, that his way of being an “honest man,” only allowed for limited progress. The events at the end of part 1 were devastating in all the ways that Jean Valjean predicted in his long reflection before he turned himself in – Fantine is dead, her daughter’s future is uncertain, and, as we learn here, without Madeleine as the soul of the industry he created, his factory succumbs to the weaknesses of laissez-faire capitalism, and the town’s prosperity fades. But, this devastation makes way for a hope of something greater still in the future, and even as he exhausts some of us a bit at Waterloo, Hugo asks us to hold onto that hope.

Unless we already know what’s to come in this story, we don’t know what that future will look like, and the passage we read today makes such hope difficult at best. But remember that in 1862, Hugo’s reflection on Waterloo might have led to the same conclusion. A reader who was sympathetic to the cause of democracy, living in the French Second Empire in 1862, under a leader who claimed his legitimacy via Napoleon but was even more of a despot than his uncle, might balk at the idea that Waterloo was “l’avènement du grand siècle” (p. 354) -- “the advent of the great century.” Had the intervening time really been a time of progress? Did the future really offer hope of progress? Through the Waterloo digression, Hugo replies, insistently, yes. 

But how can we believe in this hope, either for Jean Valjean, sentenced to life in the bagne, or for France, mired in despotism? The answer for both comes in Book 2, chapter 3, with the appearance of the Orion, which gives Book 2 its title. The Orion was a warship, commissioned in 1813. This was the era of large sailing warships with multiple cannon; imagine multiple tall masts with perpendicular yardarms, two or three per mast, high above the water’s surface. The presence of a warship in port is given as exceptional, and offers the narrator the opportunity to give a mini-digression on France’s 1823 intervention in Spain, a mission to reinforce the absolute power of Spain’s King Ferdinand VII, who had been forced to accept constitutional limits to his power three years earlier. First, Hugo criticizes the cost of cannon fire “wasted” even in peacetime, which he estimates at 900,000 francs per day, while the poor go hungry. Then, he argues at some length that that war in particular was unjust, as it was fought against freedom, against the legacy of the French Revolution, and against the Spanish people in favor of their absolute monarch. He once again connects it to the French Second Empire by using the phrase we saw early in the novel, “obéissance passive” (p. 383) -- “passive obedience,” which, we recall, had referred to the total submission that Napoleon III had required of his soldiers during the coup d’état in 1851. 

But this connection to the Second Empire takes on another meaning in the next paragraph.  We hear the logic of Waterloo echoed once again when he suggests that the 1823 war was the tipping point toward France’s next movement against the monarchy, the Revolution of 1830: “Quant aux Bourbons, la guerre de 1823 leur fut fatale. Ils la prirent pour un succès. Ils ne virent point quel danger il y a à faire tuer une idée par une consigne. [...]. 1830 germa dans 1823. [...]. Ils tombèrent dans cette redoutable erreur de prendre l’obéissance du soldat pour le consentement de la nation.” (p. 383-384) -- “As for the Bourbons, the 1823 war was fatal to them. They mistook it for a success. They did not see the danger there is in ordering the killing of an idea. [...]. 1830 germinated in 1823. [...]. They fell into that formidable error of mistaking the soldier’s obedience for the nation’s consent.” In other words, the Bourbon kings in France allowed themselves to be encouraged by the situation in Spain to believe that their own absolute power might too be restored, or, at least, that powerful monarchies were not fatally doomed. But Hugo sees the French Revolution not as a past event, consigned to the few tricky years before the Bourbons took their power back, but an unstoppable idea that will continue to return until it is brought to full realization – even after the 1815 Restoration, and even after the 1851 coup d’état. Here, that idea also provides the mechanism for the hope he manifested after Waterloo: a power that is oppressive will, eventually, push the people to Revolution.

When we return, we will see the reason that this scene gives us to believe in renewed hope for a future for Jean Valjean as well.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Before the break, we saw how parallels between Napoleon’s fall and Jean Valjean’s return to prison serve as a way of filling in gaps in Jean Valjean’s story, and point toward a reason to hope his recent catastrophes might pave the way for a future ascension.

This round-about way of narrating the time between Jean Valjean’s escape from the jail in Montreuil-sur-mer and his recapture takes on another layer in book 2 chapter 2, where we see a mysterious stranger’s nocturnal activities in the forest near Montfermeil through the eyes of the townsfolk there, in particular, a shady local character named Boulatruelle. This story, too, is full of uncertainty, but the strong suggestion is that Jean Valjean has buried his fortune in the forest. The narrator’s choice to tell us this only obliquely is an interesting one, particularly since the veil behind which he places it is very nearly transparent. On the surface, it seems we are supposed to question whether this might be an appearance of the devil in accordance with local legend, or part of some suspicious and possibly illegal activity of Boulatruelle. But the uncertainty doesn’t extend past the surface and Jean Valjean is quite easy to recognize. We have seen this device before, when the narration hid, intentionally rather badly, the fact that Madeleine was Jean Valjean, and we will see it again before the novel is over. I played along with it for Madeleine, but from now on, I won’t continue to. First of all, it would make commentary nearly impossible; but secondly, I think it would get a little too coy. He is more recognizable each time, by his activities and his shock of white hair, the mark of suffering and sacrifice that he took on during the Champmathieu affair. So from now on, I will assume you recognize him by the ample clues. Furthermore, his disguises and anonymity are not as deep as they were when he was Madeleine. Then, we’ll remember from the scene in the field outside of Digne, he truly intended to be a new man, to put away the hideous convict Jean Valjean, and he lived for eight years in fear of that identity returning. But now, since the Champmathieu affair, he has taken on the identity of Jean Valjean in all its new complexity in his mind. He will still mostly need to be disguised, but his disguises are pragmatic and external, and don’t penetrate into his own self-identity. Hugo will continue to use anonymity in his narration for dramatic purposes and to signal these sorts of disguises; he will show us the character to us through the point of view of other characters to let us know that they don’t recognize him, but seeing through his disguises is our privilege as readers, and Hugo does not seem to believe in any serious way that we will be fooled.

The first of the many times this anonymity will recur happens immediately, as Jean Valjean is only named at the end of the incident that takes place on the Orion as it sits in port. But in a perfect example of the kinds of clues that will always be present from now on, we are told that the rescuer is a convict condemned for life to the bagne in Toulon just after we are told that that’s where we would henceforth find Jean Valjean, and we see his white hair, so we suspect that this is our guy, even before we’re told. 

The dramatic scene begins when one of the crewmembers working high up in the ship’s rigging loses his balance and falls. He catches himself in the lines, but unless someone risks their life to rescue him, there is no way for him to return to safety himself; he will eventually tire and fall to his death. 

This man’s situation resembles others that we have seen. The most obvious is Fauchelevent, the man caught under his cart that Madeleine rescued back in Montreuil-sur-mer, in Part I, Book 5, chapter 6, if you want to look back at it. He is in mortal danger that came upon him by accident, simply in the course of his work. Neither man would survive without rescue, and the rescue is so dangerous that no one in the assembled crowd dares attempt it. This slim hope of rescue makes both men’s situation similar to another one we’ve seen – the man overboard to whom we so often have occasion to refer, who was used early in the novel as a metaphor for someone caught in the clutches of the criminal justice system. All of these men know of their danger and despair of the possibility of rescue; they have every reason to believe that their death is imminent. 

But, Fauchelevent and this crew member have an advantage that the man overboard did not have: Jean Valjean is there with his extraordinary strength and agility to rescue them, at his own peril. In the case of Fauchelevent, Madeleine risked not only being crushed himself, but being recognized for his strength by the ever-watchful Javert. And indeed, that incident did contribute to Javert’s ability to recognize him, even if the path from that moment to the final revelation of his identity was more complex. 

Here, though, the consequences for Jean Valjean are worth some discussion. While both rescues involve taking on the straightforward physical danger of the man he is rescuing, the dangers are quite different – instead of being crushed, he risks falling from a great height – and require a different sort of physical prowess – there, strength, here, agility. But the developing symbolic systems of the novel bring these dangers back into alignment. In rescuing Fauchelevent, he risked being crushed, as he had been beneath the weight of society in the pyramid image in Part I, book 2, chapter 7. Here, he risks a life-threatening fall into the sea, like the man overboard in the following chapter, Part I, book 2, chapter 8. We discussed both of those in episode 5, if you want to look back, and both were ways of thinking about social damnation, about the predicament of someone like Jean Valjean, who had been condemned and forever labeled a criminal by a merciless system.

With Fauchelevent, he avoided both the physical danger, and, at least in the short term, the danger of discovery. But here, we see him rescue the man, then, as he climbs back down, fall from a lower yardarm into the water. 

This turn of events opens up a few different layers of meaning.

First, during the rescue, as Jean Valjean descends the line toward the man in distress, the narrator describes Jean Valjean thus: “On eût dit une araignée venant saisir une mouche; seulement ici l’araignée apportait la vie et non la mort.” (p. 387) -- “It looked like a spider coming to catch a fly, only here the spider brought life, not death.” This mention of a spider plays on a long-standing trope in Hugo’s writing, and it’s worth taking a moment to understand it here, because this is not the last time we will see it in Les Misérables, even today. But it originated back in his 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In that novel, the mad archdeacon Claude Frollo contemplates a spider and a fly in web on his window. Another character sees the fly caught, about to be eaten, and moves to try to save it. But Frollo stops him, saying, “Laissez faire la fatalité” (Notre-Dame de Paris VII,5) -- “Let fate be.” The word fatalité that we see here is the same one that we saw in the Preface, which I translated as “inevitability” there – human inevitability that complicated divine destiny. The connection between the spider and fate or inevitability is at the foundation of a system of symbols in Notre-Dame de Paris; its preface begins with an anecdote in which the author discovers the Greek word anankè, meaning fatalité or fate, etched into the stone wall in one of the towers of Notre Dame. Then, in the preface to his 1866 novel Les Travailleurs de la mer, The Toilers of the Sea, Hugo declares that that novel, along with Les Misérables and Notre Dame, to have been a three-part study on anankè, for which he continues to use the Greek word – Notre-Dame de Paris studied the anankè of dogma, Les Misérables the anankè of law, and The Toilers of the Sea the anankè of things, of the physical world. Each of these phenomena – dogma, law, and the physical – creates inevitability, controls human fate, through a kind of irresistible inescapable force, like the spider web for the fly. The word he comes to use for this fatalité, this inevitability, that Greek word anankè, resembles the French word, araignée, or spider, no doubt contributing to the tenacity of this particular image in Hugo’s mind. But it has a great deal in common with other images we have seen, including the man overboard who is echoed so strongly in this scene: it is another representation of being not yet dead, but utterly without hope, of some kind of inevitable doom that cannot be avoided. 

But Jean Valjean, in this scene, does avoid it. As we saw a moment ago, he is like a spider, but one that brings life to the doomed crewman, not death. We have seen that Hugo once called Les Misérables a protest against the inexorable; from that point of view, this action, like so many others we see in this novel where hope is brought where there was none, is a part of that protest. We will see many more images of spiders in this novel, and when we do, we should consider what they might signal in the context of this long-standing meaning they have in Hugo’s work. 

Next, unlike with Fauchelevent, in this rescue, Jean Valjean takes the place of the man he rescues in what appears, at least, to be death. We are reminded of comparisons that have already been made between Jean Valjean and Christ, and note, although the text does not emphasize this, that this all seems to take place on the horizontal yardarm of a square-rigged vessel, which would have made a cross-shape with the mast. As Jean Valjean climbs onto a cross to give his life for another man, this rescue is brought into much closer comparison with Champmathieu than Fauchelevent, since Champmathieu’s was the rescue that required real sacrifice. It also recalls Fantine’s sacrifice for her daughter, also called a martyrdom, and also compared to this Christian image of sacrifice. And, of course, we’ll remember that her final moments also resembled a drowning. 

So the result is that this scene ties together a constellation of images that sum up much of the story so far. When Jean Valjean is presumed drowned, we think of Fantine and the metaphorical man overboard, abandoned to social damnation. When he puts himself in danger for another, we think of Fauchelevent and the Bishop, and when he sacrifices himself for another, we think of Champmathieu, and once again of Fantine. And the fall itself recalls other falls we have seen: Fantine’s descent into prostitution; Jean Valjean’s fall into despair during his 19 years in prison; his fall from consideration as Madeleine; the precipitous downward trajectory of his time in Digne, where he began by simply looking for lodging and ended up stealing from the one person to offer him kindness, then from an innocent child; even perhaps, the fall of Napoleon. But none of those falls, we’ll remember, marked the end of the story.

In a moment, we will finish up with a few words about the Thénardiers, as their initial portraits are completed.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

To finish up today, a few brief words about the Thénardiers.

The Thénardiers are, in many ways, the most difficult characters in the novel to make concrete. Hugo is not interested in sketching easy, transparent villains, but instead, as we have already seen, he makes them monstrous in part by making them mysterious. 

The other element of these characters that makes them challenging is that they have a remarkable amount in common with our more sympathetic misérables. They are not wealthy, and financial concerns are always at the forefront of their minds. They are both hybrid and contradictory, a characteristic that we have seen in others, and in Jean Valjean in particular. But they are hybrid in ways that create monstrosities and deceptions, rather than productive and profound paradoxes. 

She is gigantic, reminiscent of ogres or giants of myth, but apart from being cruel to all children, aside from her two daughters, she is entirely submissive to her smaller, weaker husband. She appears to be the danger of the pair, but even the sense of threat they project is deceptive, as he is the real danger. He appears, at least, to be ill, as Fantine was, but the narrator is careful to let us know that this is only an appearance, and that this is the beginning of his deceitfulness. He acts strategically, and so appears reflective, but unlike Jean Valjean as he developed his mind, Thénardier is more dangerous for this fact, not less. The hatred he harbors against all of mankind reminds us of the principal danger that constant rejection and cruelty had posed to Jean Valjean’s soul as he nursed the anger provoked by 19 years in the bagne. We have by now come to expect that this book will exhort us to treat this sort of erosion of a soul with sympathy, to look for the injustice that caused it. But with Thénardier the novel gives us no clues for starting such a search. He has some education, although it is not particularly refined – he makes errors when he writes, and we’ve seen that he is also something of a hack as a painter – but information about his past is otherwise available only through rumor. Other characters’ pasts have been presented this way as well, but for Thénardier, this lack of information leaves us with a character who is hateful and harmful with no good reason; “il était de ces gens qui se vengent perpétuellement” (p. 394) -- “he was one of those people who are perpetually taking revenge” but his revenge appears to be for nothing remarkable, for the normal travails and bad luck of life, for not having been born richer. 

Thénardier is also mysterious to his wife, we’re told, and this mystery, this bit of him that she doesn’t understand, is the reason for both the admiration and fear of him that make her so utterly obedient. Even as he is, from the point of view that the narrator expresses quite freely, unsophisticated and brutish, he is just a step or two ahead of her, just intelligent enough to make her believe that his genius deserves respect. Even if he is not a particularly impressive one, in their household, he is spirit, and she is matter. They are “ruse et rage mariés ensemble” (p. 396) -- “ruse and rage wedded together;” she leaving her anger and hatred unbridled, he, storing it to apply to schemes and trickery.

This mystery and this penchant for trickery are why we will continue to see invisibility be an important part of Thénardier’s modus operandi; much of the time when we have seen him so far, we have not, in fact, been able to see him. His extortion of Fantine happened at a distance, through letters, and we’ll recall that back in Part 1 book 4, when Fantine was at their inn making her initial deal with him, Thénardier was shouting demands from inside the house, while Fantine stood outside with his wife. As we continue to follow these characters, we will continue to watch when he, in particular, does and does not show himself, and what effects these tactics will have. 

In the meantime, though, their result is predation, as Thénardier’s main approach at the moment is to wait for travelers to stop in his inn, so he can “faire tout payer au voyageur, jusqu’au mouches que son chien mange” (p. 396) -- “make the traveler pay for everything, down to the flies that his dog eats.” And he may want the traveler to pay for these flies because otherwise, he might have eaten them himself. As they sit and wait for victims to fall into their trap, they, too, are described as spiders. Two of the juiciest flies ever to have landed in their web are Fantine and Cosette, but now that Fantine no longer provides suitable quarry, all that is left of that catch is the daughter: “La gargote Thénardier était comme une toile où Cosette était prise et tremblait. L’idéal de l’oppression était réalisé par cette domesticité sinistre. C’était quelque chose comme la mouche servante des araignées.” (p. 397) -- “The Thénardiers’ place was like a web where Cosette was caught, trembling. Oppression itself was made real by her sinister servitude. It was like the fly, servant to spiders.” 

So even though the Thénardiers bear some resemblances to our other misérables, their key difference is that where Jean Valjean, for example, thwarts the work of anankè, of the terrible fate that hangs over so many of our characters, the Thénardiers are agents of it. This deceptive predation masked by an appearance of innocent misère and of the heroic struggle against it is summed up, now that we have eyes clear enough to see it, in Thénardier’s appearance at Waterloo. He allowed himself to be taken for a soldier heroically pulling another back from the grave, when in fact, his only interest was in profit taken at the expense of those who were already desperate. His relative poverty makes confusion with the other misérables an easy and convenient disguise for him, but the difference between Jean Valjean and Thénardier as we see them in these pages is the first sketch of an important distinction that we will see develop as the novel goes on, between self-interest and selfless striving toward a promised and hopeful future. Thénardier is, at the level of intention, a paradigm of the self-interested misérable, of the untrustworthy, dangerous misérable. But we learned at Waterloo – both on the personal scale, in Thénardier’s participation, and on the world-historical scale – that intention will not always have the final word. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll see another iconic moment from the novel, known maybe even to people who don’t know much else about the story, and again, try to see it with fresh eyes. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part II, book 3, chapters 4-8, “People You Might Meet in the Woods.”

[/Music]

At the heart of the section we read for today is another of the novel’s most famous scenes, recognizable even to many who might not quite know how it fits into the story. The resonance that Hugo found in Cosette’s scene of rescue, the way he portrayed her terror, her struggle and the apparent miracle of Jean Valjean’s arrival recreates a universal childhood experience of fear, and then consoles it in a way that the adult reader has been prepared for for 500 pages. The image of Cosette and her pail of water has entered the cultural consciousness, perhaps second only to the one of her and her broom that became the logo for the musical. I will put a few artists’ representations of this scene on the website.

Now, I’ve just said it if not, but I do hope you recognized the man in the yellow coat as Jean Valjean. We will see in the section for next time how he got from the harbor at Toulon to Paris. But when we pick up his story in Paris in chapter 6 here, it is once again his white hair that identifies him most clearly. I’m going to start today with a few words about how he is presented in these chapters, then consider Cosette’s situation just before this pivotal moment in her life, and then finally, we will look at the scene of their meeting in greater detail. 

When Jean Valjean appears here, he is described as a “mendiant de bonne compagnie, l’extrême misère combinée avec l’extrême propreté” (p. 406) -- “refined beggar, extreme misère combined with extreme propriety,” someone you might mistake, the narrator says, for the private tutor of a noble family who had been an émigré during the Revolution, and was now condemned to poverty despite his cultivation. The difference in his appearance here from that of the Jean Valjean who arrived in Digne in October of 1815 bears the mark of his encounter with the Bishop and his years of ease and comfort as Madeleine – he seems poor and weary, but gentle and refined, not brutal and bestial as he was then. Having developed his mind, he moves through the world with intention instead of by instinct. Of particular note in his appearance is his yellow overcoat, which the narrator notes was not such an unusual color in the fashions of the day, but which recalls the yellow passport that marked him as a convict when he arrived in Digne. This coat is threadbare, and signals to others, not that he is a convict, but that he is poor, which leads to nearly as much suspicion. Both the driver that takes him to the area near Montfermeil and the Thénardiers make him pay in advance for their services when they get a good look at his clothing. 

The difference between this distrust then and now, though, is significant, largely because now, Jean Valjean can afford to meet that distrust with its best antidote: cash. He can continue to behave as Madeleine did, and prioritize other goals above financial considerations. We have enough clues by now to assume that the fortune he had amassed as Madeleine is buried in the spot in the woods that we saw him examine in chapter 6, just before meeting Cosette. For the rest of the book, we will see him save money where he can so that these savings will last – hence his poor appearance here – but recognize where it is important to spend generously.

And in this section we do see him spend generously, in ever-increasing amounts: first, Thénardier’s up-charge from one franc to two (20 sous to 40) for the room, because of the stranger’s poor appearance, then another franc to cover for Cosette’s lost coin, followed by 5 francs for her time so that she can play, then 40 francs (the others in the inn estimate) for her doll and another 20 francs – the coin called a Louis d’or or a golden “Louis,” – in the shoe she had left out for Christmas. This brings him quite close to the sum, which was 80 francs, that forced Fantine to sell her teeth, and contrasts like this make a tacit accusation against society: that fates and lives are determined by the ability to meet its financial demands, that something as base as money impacts human souls, that the forces that erode people on the most profound levels hinge on their ability to pay.

The difference this makes is perhaps best expressed in another detail of chapter 8 that creates a parallel with Jean Valjean as we saw him back in 1815. When he gives Madame Thénardier the 20 sous coin to cover for the 15 sous coin that Cosette lost, he feigns having seen it fall from the pocket of her apron onto the floor. The lie is transparent, because the coin is not even of the correct denomination, but Madame Thénardier is unconcerned, so long as she comes out ahead. But she says to herself afterward, “Il est bien heureux tout de même qu’il n’ait pas eu l’idée de voler l’argent qui était à terre.” (p. 418) -- “It’s a good thing he didn’t decide to steal the money that was on the ground.” This idea, fictitious as it is in this situation, of Jean Valjean stealing money that a child drops on the ground, takes us back to that seminal moment with Petit-Gervais. Then, Jean Valjean’s instinct to steal, borne of chronic deprivation and misère, caused him to commit that crime, even though, as we discussed at length then, he was already no longer capable of it. Here, even as he is treated similarly, we can see that he has changed, as the bare economics of that moment are reversed along with its spiritual significance. The change that began just before that moment is now complete, and he is both emotionally and financially capable of rescuing a child, instead of victimizing one.

He was already hybrid then, inhabiting the paradox where he could do a thing of which he was no longer capable, but now, his hybridity is different. As Madame Thénardier continues to wonder just what to think of this stranger, after he buys the extravagantly beautiful doll for Cosette, she says to herself, “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ce vieux? Est-ce un pauvre? Est-ce un millionnaire? C’est peut-être les deux, c’est-à-dire un voleur.” (p. 425) -- “What is this old man? Is he poor? Is he a millionaire? Maybe he’s both, that is, a thief.” In a sense, her conclusion here is correct; Jean Valjean is, from the point of view of the state, a convicted thief. But the strange combination of clues she notices here is not connected, at least directly, to his crimes. Instead, he appears poor while spending generously because of the priorities he took on as Madeleine – charity and altruism. Like the Bishop’s, his own poverty creates more opportunities for charity, for generosity toward others. He is both poor and rich, and he is both a thief and a benefactor – both the convict Jean Valjean and the honest man that the converted Jean Valjean became.

He is also hybrid in a way that many of our misérables have been up to now, that is, he is both living and dead, hovering symbolically in a state between the two. Up to now this state has been figured as imminent death, as a sort of state of pre-death, like the man overboard, or the soldiers in the sunken road at Waterloo – an astute listener on Facebook reminded me to mention, which I failed to do in episode 15, that the cavalry charge’s plunge into the sunken road at Waterloo was an invention of Hugo’s, not an historical event, and we have to wonder if the potential to create another image of this not-yet-dead and no-longer-living state was part of the impetus for that creation. Among our main characters, we see it in the state of permanent social damnation of Jean Valjean as he was released at the end of his first sentence, or Fantine after she became a prostitute, and believed that there was nothing left in this world that could hurt her, that she was a saturated sponge. In this context, the moment in chapter 6 where he hides from the King’s cortège as it passes is a complex one. On the one hand, it makes sense practically: the King is surrounded by security and law enforcement, and they do, in fact, find him suspicious and try in vain to catch up with him to learn more. However, that moment also comes in the context of a long-standing tradition whereby a condemned man who crossed paths with the king by chance would be pardoned. On the symbolic plane, then, avoiding the King as he passes saves Jean Valjean from detection, but, in doing so, it makes any escape from his in-between, condemned state impossible, the state that, for the man overboard or the soldiers in the sunken road, was perhaps worse than death itself. He must endure this purgatorial existence.

But for Jean Valjean, his living death is now also figured as sort of a resurrected state, as if he has come back from a kind of symbolic death. We saw his sacrifice in Champmathieu’s trial as akin to a sacrifice of his life, and read his white hair, when he looked at it in the mirror intended to detect life in a patient on the brink of death, as a sign that he was still living, if barely. Then, his fall from the Orion, where he took the place of another man who seemed likely to die, represented yet another death, both figuratively, and literally, as he was presumed dead by the authorities. We will soon see this last fact provide a kind of reassurance for him when he reads it in the newspaper, and will see him “presque en paix comme s’il était réellement mort” (p. 444) -- “almost at peace as if he was really dead.” At the same time as his need to avoid detection prevents him from returning to a fuller form of life, the fact that Jean Valjean is officially considered dead provides another kind of protection from pursuit, and ensures that he will be able to continue to exist in this half-living way.

Now, after a break, we’ll turn to Cosette.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

A great deal of what we read in this section is focused on Cosette, either told from her point of view, or focused on her external conditions from Jean Valjean’s point of view. It is a study in childhood misère, and the sad discovery that we make is that it is not all that different from adult misère. We saw back in episode 8 that the life of the children in the Thénardier house became a sort of miniature version of society, as Cosette was deprived of the luxuries that the Thénardier girls were given, and was abused and made to work for her meager keep. Madame Thénardier reiterates this in this section, “Il faut qu’elle travaille, puisqu’elle mange” (p. 419) -- “She has to work, because she eats,” even though she is fed little more than scraps. We compared her lot to Jean Valjean’s in the bagne, even though her innocence was more complete. Also like the other misérables, she was associated with animals, made less than human when the townspeople gave her the nickname “l’Alouette” -- “the lark.” This aspect of her misère is also reinforced here in book 3, when Madame Thénardier calls her “Mamselle Crapaud” and “Chien-faute-de-nom,”  -- “Miss Toad” and “Dog-for-lack-of-a-name.” This last name in particular is a poignant reminder that she is now an orphan, and that her lack of attachment to a family, a name, is a determining factor in her social vulnerability and misère – a vulnerability that is especially intense when we learn near the end of chapter 8 that Madame Thénardier intends to send Cosette away the next day.

The effects of this condition on Cosette are recognizable to us as well. Like her mother as her illness worsened, Cosette is compared at the beginning of chapter 3 to an old woman, even as malnourishment simultaneously stunts her growth, and makes her appear younger than her eight years. She shows physical signs of undernourishment, abuse, and neglect--her alarming thinness, chilblains and bruises – and then Madame Thénardier insults her for showing the signs of the pain she herself has caused, “Est-elle laide avec son pochon sur l’oeil!” (p. 397) -- “Isn’t she ugly with that black eye!” So much of her life is spent shivering from cold and cowering in fear that this has become her habitual posture, and we saw in episode 8 that this posture was often seen suspiciously. Worse, though, we see this suffering begin to affect her psychologically as it has others, making her “devenir une idiote ou un démon” (p. 416) -- “become an idiot or a demon.” It has started to take her over: “Toute la personne de cette enfant, son allure, son attitude, le son de sa voix, ses intervalles entre un mot et l’autre, son regard, son silence, son moindre geste, exprimaient et traduisaient une seule idée, la crainte.” (p. 416) -- “This child’s whole person, her gait, her demeanor, the sound of her voice, the intervals between her words, her gaze, her silence, her smallest gestures, expressed and conveyed one idea: fear.” And this fear has begun to lead to reproachable behavior, as we see the ease with which she lies and deceives here, first in chapter 3, in an attempt to avoid going into the woods for water, and then in chapter 8, when she returns without the bread that Madame Thénardier had asked her to buy. 

Each of these effects of her childhood misère – on her physical appearance, on her psychology and posture, and on her honesty – conforms to the same pattern, and it is one that we have seen before. In each case, Madame Thénardier has produced the effect on her: she has underfed her, given her bruises, terrorized her, and created conditions that encourage her to lie out of self-preservation. But in each case, the result is then held against Cosette, as an excuse for further mistreatment. By doing this, Madame Thénardier embodies the society that drove Fantine to sell her teeth and become a prostitute to support her child, only to have Bamatabois call her ugly and Javert jump to the conclusion of her guilt; the society that imprisoned a starving man who stole bread to feed his family. Back in episode two, we recall a declaration made by the Bishop, “Cette âme est pleine d’ombre, le péché s’y commet. Le coupable n’est pas celui qui fait le péché, mais celui qui fait l’ombre.” (p. 16) -- “A soul is full of darkness, and sin is committed there. The guilty party is not the one who sins, but the one who creates the darkness.” Once again, by making this condition child-sized, Hugo illustrates it as clearly as he has yet, and by making the guilty party a single person who has total control over the good and bad that befall that child, he insists on the question of responsibility for it. Our horror at the abstract social forces that allowed for the actions of Tholomyès and Bamatabois should be no less than our horror at the Thénardiers, as their roles in the downward spiral of suffering are the same. 

While this portrait of Cosette in the Thénardiers’ clutches is a study of childhood misère, it is also a study in childhood, and specifically, in female childhood. And female childhood, it seems, revolves around dolls, just as womanhood for Hugo revolves around children. Now, this is one of those moments when we really notice that Hugo was a 19th-century writer; by our modern standards of representation of women, much of what he says on this topic is likely to be considered a bit sexist and essentializing. For example, “Soigner, vêtir, parer, habiller, déshabiller, rhabiller, enseigner, un peu gronder, bercer, dorloter, endormir, se figurer que quelque chose est quelqu’un, tout l’avenir de la femme est là.” (p. 421) -- “Caring for something, clothing it, accessorizing it, dressing it up, undressing it, re-dressing it, teaching it, scolding it a little, rocking it, pampering it, putting it to sleep, imagining that something is someone, woman’s whole future is there.” As a female reader, my first reaction to a sentence like this is visceral – I certainly consider my “whole future” to involve more possibilities than that, besides which, saying that motherhood is “imagining that something is someone” seems like it kinda diminishes the importance of children and infantilizes motherhood, the one thing that he’s letting women have, and it’s a good thing he’s not here, because boy would I give him a piece of my mind about all this. 

But then, I stop and put it in context. The immediate context is Cosette’s intense desire to play with a doll – so intense that she has a small toy sword that she has swaddled and is cradling. A moment after this discussion of girls and dolls, she will be overcome by temptation, and will take the Thénardier girls’ doll without permission. The fact that not every little girl shares that desire is beside the point for her, and for Jean Valjean as he watches her with pity. The far more salient point for him is that she, like her mother, is deprived by unjust circumstance of a much-desired maternity. A squabble among little girls over a doll becomes a painful re-enactment of Fantine’s emotional turmoil for the five years she spent separated from her daughter. As she was thinking only of providing for her child, wishing only to fulfill her duties as mother, the Thénardiers cared as much for her as Éponine and Azelma care for their doll here, as they have cast her aside, only interested in possessing her so that Cosette cannot. A few lines later, he writes, “Une petite fille sans poupée est à peu près aussi malheureuse et tout à fait aussi impossible qu’une femme sans enfants.” (p. 421) -- “A little girl without a doll is about as unhappy and every bit as impossible as a woman without children.” We are not wrong, in part, to object with the wisdom of our modern world that champions the ability of all children, regardless of gender, to follow their passions and choose their own path in life. But here, this little girl without a doll is every bit as unhappy as her mother had been without a child, and both have social injustice, albeit at different scales, to blame for their unhappiness. 

So when Jean Valjean sees Cosette’s devastation when the Thénardiers’ doll is taken from her, perhaps thinking quite consciously of Fantine, he does for the child what he could not do for the mother: he satisfies the need by purchasing the most beautiful doll any child in Montfermeil has ever seen for Cosette. This doll is so resplendent that it has its own chapter. It is two feet tall, luxuriously dressed, and is the dream of every child in town. As Cosette contemplates it, “Plus elle regardait, plus elle s’éblouissait. Elle croyait voir le paradis. Il y avait d’autres poupées derrière la grande qui lui paraissaient des fées et des génies. Le marchand qui allait et venait au fond de sa baraque lui faisait un peu l’effet d’être le Père éternel” (p. 400) -- “The more she looked at it, the more dazzled she was. She thought she was seeing heaven. There were other dolls behind the big one that looked to her like fairies and genies. The merchant wandering around in the back of his stall seemed a little like the eternal Father.” But at the same time, she is aware of the gulf between her and this paradise, that is, of her status on the other side of the dividing line between heaven and the social hell in which she lives. 

And there are details about this doll that add another layer of significance to it. First, it has “de vrais cheveux” (p. 400) -- “real hair” -- that is, human hair, that would have to have been purchased from someone like Fantine. This was a luxurious feature of the doll, but a luxury, that comes, as we have so often seen luxuries do, at hidden cost. Then, a few lines later, we find in the description the same phrase that was used to describe Fantine before her descent into poverty: “C’étai[en]t la joie” (p. 400) -- “It” or “She was joy.” The doll, here, is invested with what Fantine gradually had to sacrifice.

So, in giving her this doll, Jean Valjean gives her more than just a spectacular present. He gives her a spiritual gift, plucked, to her mind, from heaven itself. He gives her the belief that she too can access something this beautiful and luxurious, that she is not irrevocably separated from all that is good. He gives her the hope that her life will not repeat the deprivation of her mother’s, even though it seems already to have begun to. And, in a way, he gives her an image of her mother as she should have been, restored to her original glory. 

This is all, certainly, more poignant to Jean Valjean than to Cosette, who, mercifully, has no way to see the parallels and connections between herself, her doll, and her mother. But what Jean Valjean himself may not yet see is the depth of the budding relationship that this purchase of this doll signals. We’ll begin to explore that relationship after a break.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

The relationship between Jean Valjean and Cosette, one of the most iconic in literature, begins here. The story is told twice: once, from Cosette’s point of view, and once in much more abbreviated form, from Jean Valjean’s. His story is one of pity and mercy: he happens upon a child alone in the woods at night, struggling to carry an enormous heavy pail full of water, and he assumes her burden for her. We hear a faint echo of the Bishop as he recognizes that the burden is heavy indeed, and the gesture of recognizing this, and then relieving her of it, seems to be a metaphor for much that is to come.

Cosette’s version of their meeting, though, has another tone entirely. Cosette is, in a word, terrorized by the prospect of going into the woods at night to get water. The title of the first chapter of book 3 is, in French “La Question de l’eau à Montfermeil.” It may be translated as something like “The Issue of Water in Montfermeil,” as it discusses in fairly practical terms what the locals have to do to get water. But in French, the phrase “la question de l’eau,” literally the water question, can also refer to questioning, that is, to water torture. The phrase is actually used in that way a few pages earlier, when Thénardier and some others are trying to extract secrets from Boulatruelle about what he’s up to in the woods at night. They finally settle, comically, on “la question du vin” (p. 380) -- “wine questioning,” or getting him drunk in the hopes that his lips loosen. But we might say that Cosette here is subject to “la question de l’eau,” “water torture,” that is, she is tortured by this need for water. 

And her fear is thick with the odor of fairy tales. The image of a child alone in the woods conjures up stories of big bad wolves and all sorts of other mythical dangers. Even before she reaches the woods, the streets of Montfermeil are described using the mythological image of the labyrinth, and a woman in the street, before recognizing her as “l’Alouette” -- “the lark” -- wonders if she is “un enfant-garou” (p. 401) -- “a were-child,” like a werewolf, half human, half creature of legend. As she reaches the edge of the town, she sees hostility behind her and before her, just as Jean Valjean did at the edge of Digne, only for Cosette, this hostility takes on the form of childhood fantasy. “Elle regarda avec désespoir cette obscurité où il y avait peut-être des revenants. Elle regarda bien, et elle entendit les bêtes qui marchaient dans l’herbe, et elle vit distinctement les revenants qui remuaient les arbres.” (p. 402) -- “She looked with despair at this darkness where there may have been ghosts. She looked closely, and she heard the beasts in the grass, and she saw distinctly the ghosts rustling the trees.” But when she considers returning without the water, she sees a fantastical version of her usual fear “la Thénardier hideuse avec sa bouche d’hyène et la colère flamboyante dans les yeux” (p. 402) -- “Madame Thénardier, hideous with her hyena’s mouth and flaming rage in her eyes.” She is caught between “Devant elle le spectre de la Thénardier; derrière elle tous les fantômes de la nuit et des bois.” (p. 402) -- “Before her, the specter of Madame Thénardier, and behind her, all the phantoms of the night and the woods,” a terror fit for legend in each direction. 

But the terror is also extended beyond the scope of childhood stories, as the cold, dark starless night is given as universally terrifying in the description that follows her filling the bucket. It is familiar to every child, but somehow not childish, to feel uneasy in the dark; as the narrator says, “Quiconque s’enfonce dans le contraire du jour se sent le coeur serré. Quand l’oeil voit noir, l’esprit voit trouble.” (p. 404) -- “Whoever enters into the opposite of day feels a lump in the throat. When the eye sees darkness, the mind sees trouble.” Once again, Cosette’s experience is not unique to childhood, but is a childhood version of a universal experience.

When she reaches the spring, then, it is perhaps a childhood version of hope in spite of herself when the coin falls without her knowledge into the water, as into a wishing well. And, it may be through this lens of a childhood point of view that we can best understand Jean Valjean’s arrival in this scene. He arrives, of course, just as Cosette’s tremendous struggle wrests the words “O mon Dieu!” (p. 406) -- “Oh, my God!” from her, and it is tempting to see this arrival as a bit on the nose, a bit too direct an image of divine intervention. But I think it is more complex than that. Her cry of “Oh my God!” is not really a fully intentional prayer; the narrator is careful to let us know on a couple of occasions that she has never gone to church or been educated in religion. This is simply a cry of extreme distress, perhaps even imitating the way she has heard others, in the insalubrious environment of Thénardier’s inn, take the Lord’s name in vain, or, at most, it may be based in a sort of innate spiritual instinct. 

And while it is one of those moments, like when the Bishop gives Jean Valjean the candlesticks, that is so well known that it is difficult for us to see it with fresh eyes, the response she receives is just as ambiguous, if we imagine not knowing what will happen next. Jean Valjean appears first as an enormous hand that takes hold of the handle of her pail in the darkness, and then, when she turns to look at him, she sees that “Une grande forme noire, droite et debout, marchait auprès d’elle dans l’obscurité. C’était un homme qui était arrivé derrière elle et qu’elle n’avait pas entendu venir.” (p. 406) -- “A large black shape, standing up tall, was walking next to her in the darkness. It was a man who had arrived behind her and that she had not heard approach.” This description, on its own, is not reassuring in the least. We have been prepared up to this point, by the descriptions of Cosette’s fears of the dark and the echoes they create in our own anxieties, for something dreadful to appear out of the shadows, and at first glance, a tall black form sneaking up behind a child should appear to be it. We’re also put in mind of the local folk tales of the devil wandering in this forest, and of Boulatruelle’s possible criminal associations wandering around in there. But it’s through a narrative trick that Hugo aligns our own instinct with Cosette’s, against all reason, and leads even the most skeptical reader to her intuitive faith. He places this somewhat menacing description of Jean Valjean in between the two reasons she has to trust him: first, that he relieved her immediate suffering by taking the bucket, and second, that her instincts simply didn’t react with fear. Because his entry into her life begins and ends in this way, we find that the danger that we might quite reasonably fear from this stranger is de-emphasized, and we trust him as Cosette does. 

Of course, unlike Cosette, we then go on to read chapter 6, which gives us ample opportunity to guess, if we haven’t already, that this is Jean Valjean. But by the time we hear the first conversation that they have as they walk back to the inn, we are charmed by it. Also unlike Cosette, we know that the stranger’s nonchalant questions mask deep emotion, as he recognizes the child that he has found as Fantine’s. And this conversation will be the beginning of a relationship that will define the rest of the story.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll watch as the relationship between Jean Valjean and Cosette develop. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 2, book 3 chapter 9 through book 4 chapter 4, “The Two Forçats.”

[/Music]

Today’s section featured the formation of a new family, made up of Jean Valjean and Cosette. It is an odd little household, made up of a 55-year-old ex-con on the run and an 8-year-old orphan. We have, however, already hinted at the affinities between these two characters, and today, I would like to flesh out that new relationship, as well as consider the location Jean Valjean chooses for their first home, the first foothold our story will have in Paris. But before we do any of that, I would like to take a closer look at the negotiation between Thénardier and Jean Valjean, at how Cosette finds freedom.

Jean Valjean, as he seeks to free Cosette from the Thénardiers’ clutches, seems to have the immediate upper hand. When he announces his plan to take Cosette with him when he leaves, and Thénardier undertakes to get the best deal he can for the child, Jean Valjean immediately sees through his talk of love for Cosette, of duty, and Christian charity. This is of course not hard for us to see through, but even for Jean Valjean, with just one evening’s worth of information, his ruse is transparent, and when Thénardier claims to adore her, he responds, according to the evidence he has, by clarifying that they are talking about the same beaten, neglected child. Madame Thénardier greatly overestimates her husband when, at the beginning of their negotiation, she sees his intervention as if “le grand acteur entrait en scène” (p. 434) -- “the great actor was taking the stage.” His work is in fact quite ineffective, and Jean Valjean immediately recognizes that for Thénardier, Cosette, like her mother before her and like Jean Valjean in forced labor, has been reduced to a commodity.

That being the case, it is tempting to think that, having already hinted at his deep pockets with the previous evening’s purchases, and making a request that Thénardier could quite reasonably refuse outright, Jean Valjean would be in an unfavorable negotiating position. But that doesn’t end up being the case. And the reason, beyond their vastly mismatched wits, has to do with a characteristic of Thénardier that is worth a bit more discussion. 

Two episodes ago, when we last discussed Thénardier, we observed that his greatest strength lay in the unknown, in mystery, and in being invisible. This was the source of much of his wife’s admiration for him, we saw. And we observed, thinking back to his other actions so far in the novel, that he had virtually always acted from a position of invisibility – during his initial negotiations with Fantine, he shouted from inside the house, and throughout her descent, they communicated by letter. This latter position in particular was crucial to his strategy, because it allowed him to lie about Cosette’s condition and fabricate a story of disease requiring expensive medicine. Even here, when he intends to charge Jean Valjean 23 francs for his room and board for the night – easily 5, if not 10 times what it should have cost – he writes the bill and intends to leave it with his wife, once again, operating from an unseen position. The bill, we should say parenthetically, reproduced directly on the page here in chapter 9, visually recalls the Bishop’s budgets back in part 1, book 1, but any visual resemblance only serves to highlight how this is exactly opposite sort of document, from the exact opposite sort of man.

But when Jean Valjean begins talking about taking Cosette, Thénardier finds himself in an unexpected face-to-face negotiation, and he is instantly out of his depth. The comparison to an actor, while it may have revealed how his wife overestimates his abilities, did not misconstrue his approach. We see him deliver a long monologue, but it is not disjointed as others we’ve seen have been. It has a carefully chosen emotional tone, and it progresses in stages that Thénardier hopes will lead Jean Valjean to compliance. And Jean Valjean’s response is the one an actor would be expected to prefer – he watches him perform – but the effect is not the one he intends. Instead of being swept up in the performance and giving Thénardier what he wants, Jean Valjean shifts the negotiation back to his own terms the moment he chooses to speak. During Thénardier’s monologue, we are told repeatedly that “l’étranger le regardait [...] fixement” (p. 435) -- “the stranger watched him fixedly.” When he speaks, he does so “sans cesser de le regarder de ce regard qui va, pour ainsi dire, jusqu’au fond de la conscience” (p. 435) -- “without ceasing to watch him with that gaze that reaches, so to speak, to the bottom of the conscience.” Jean Valjean can not only see him, but can see through him to his conscience, and this is not to Thénardier’s advantage. He had discerned – quite correctly – that Jean Valjean had an interest in remaining incognito, and thought he might press that to his advantage; his initial request in exchange for Cosette is for information – in the hope, we presume, of using that information to run a longer-term and more profitable blackmail scheme. But the mystery that is Jean Valjean is more impenetrable than Thénardier’s, and when this becomes apparent, he settles for short-term gain. Even in his specialty areas of deceit and dissimulation, Thénardier has met his better.

But Thénardier’s perception did penetrate Jean Valjean’s exterior correctly on one point: he observed early on that Jean Valjean’s intent to take Cosette away came with no legitimate claim, and as he observes, “Quand on a un droit, on le montre.” (p. 436) -- “When you have a right, you show it.” Of course, Jean Valjean does have a written letter signed by Fantine authorizing the Thénardiers to turn Cosette over to “la personne” (p. 212) -- literally, simply “the person,” striking in its anonymity, although understood by all within the story to mean something like, “the bearer.” Despite this anonymity, though, the note paradoxically serves to identify him in linking him to Fantine who has otherwise, we are heartbreakingly aware, been mostly forgotten. Even though it does not name him – as either Madeleine or as Jean Valjean – his possession of it, to the wrong set of eyes, would expose him. 

But Thénardier is not the wrong set of eyes, and in the pursuit across the fields near Montfermeil, it is once again the failure of Thénardier’s vision that compromises his pursuit. Both before and after he catches up to them and Jean Valjean shows him the note from Fantine, they duck in and out of view, and Thénardier’s eagerness to keep his eye on them is both symbolic and practical – he wants to see through Jean Valjean as Jean Valjean saw through him, to find out his secrets in the hope of exploiting them.

Jean Valjean’s avoidance of Thénardier’s pursuit also has two layers of meaning. The first is practical: as incompetent as he knows Thénardier to be, in his current circumstances, any sustained attention is a danger. This is particularly true after Thénardier has the letter from Fantine; a person who has that information absolutely must not have any more. But perhaps more significantly, cutting all ties with Thénardier is essential to truly liberating Cosette. We have seen, at great length, that release from forced labor did not mean freedom from Jean Valjean; he was pursued by the Law, by continued designation as a “very dangerous man,” and normal life for such a man would always be unattainable. Cosette, instead of being pursued by an enduring stigma, is being pursued by Thénardier, by the danger of further exploitation and commodification. Jean Valjean seems to understand that that is the real danger that must be thwarted for a misérable: he must first escape Thénardier’s pursuit, and then, he must dedicate his life to protecting her. 

The first step in that effort is finding her safe shelter, and it is the first shelter he finds her that we will examine when we return.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.”

Once Jean Valjean escapes Thénardier’s clutches, once he definitively, it seems, breaks Cosette’s bonds, he takes her to the Maison Gorbeau, the Gorbeau house, on the edge of Paris. This will be our definitive entry into Paris, with one or two brief exceptions. We’ve been to the city once before, with Fantine and Tholomyès, but that moment was ever so brief; in fact, much of the time we spent with those Parisians was on an outing to the country. And when we were in Paris, Hugo cleverly placed us on the Champs-Élysées – still perhaps one of the best known locales in the city, but the name literally means the Elysian Fields, which were a sort of heaven in Greek mythology; they were the final resting place for heroes and other deserving souls. The Champs-Élysées, in other words, are a real place in Paris, but with a name that evokes un-reality, a sense of bliss in the afterlife. 

That suited that particular moment of Fantine’s life, but the Paris we will enter now, as you have almost certainly already noticed, is somewhat different. The suffering and poverty, the misère, that have permeated much of the story so far, are also to be found here. But the first thing I would like to do in discussing that is distinguish it, once again, from the Realism we see in the representations of Paris to be found in the work of other authors around this time. They showed the grittier sides of life too, but their goal was to represent the world as they knew it as exactly as possible. Hugo seeks to craft a world to suit his purposes based in a reality that he knows. The difference between those two goals has already been, and will continue to be, important in understanding Les Misérables in all its richness, and the Gorbeau house will offer us an excellent example of the way this works in the story. 

But first, I want to look at a slightly more mundane way that Hugo separates his Paris from the real one – through time. Even when he published Les Misérables in 1862, the Paris he describes in the book existed mostly in memory. Hugo gestures at the end of book 4 chapter 1 to modernity having arrived to the neighborhood around his fictional Gorbeau house, but the issue of modernity in Paris is a much more significant one than he elaborates here – he will say more about it at the beginning of book 5, but that will be easier to understand if you have a bit of detail in advance. Beginning early in the Second Empire, in 1853, Napoleon III, charged Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine, with renovating and modernizing the city. This project would become a gigantic overhaul of the city’s streets, sewers and other public works, involved the annexation of what had previously been suburbs, and is responsible for much that is distinctive about Paris today. Notably, the wide, straight boulevards that connect the neighborhoods are for the most part the work of Haussmann, and building them meant the demolition of some streets and buildings that dated to the Middle Ages. This destruction met with a great deal of disapproval, even though it was meant to, and did, improve health and safety in the overcrowded city. It is also worth noting that the wide boulevards allowed for easy movement of National Guard troops within the city, making political uprisings more difficult. Needless to say, for those of us who have seen an adaptation, the present story arc is not the last occasion we will have to talk about the importance of the old Paris to the plot of Les Misérables.

For our present practical purposes as we enter into Paris, this change in the city complicates a geographic understanding of our story. Paris will become virtually its whole world, but because of these changes, modern maps of Paris present challenges to those who might like to understand that world. I will link on the website to an 1823 map of Paris from our website. It lacks the ease of the Google map in marking locations mentioned in the book, so I will continue to approximate the locations he mentions on the Google map, with guidance from the older one. If the details of geography interest you, it should be possible to look at the two together and, using landmarks that do still exist, get a sense of where the locations marked on the modern map would have been on the historical one. 

The first such location for us will, of course, be the Gorbeau house. This is a place that first appears to be something out of Realism: rich with details about its dilapidation and worn appearance. But as with the novel’s human characters, this building is slightly surreal, with characteristics amplified to suit other purposes. 

The characteristics that he emphasizes about the Gorbeau house are, interestingly, those of the misérable. This is not the first building that has become like a character in Hugo’s work; in Notre-Dame de Paris, the cathedral is often said to be the novel’s central character. We will see that this house, while it will play a more minor role than Notre-Dame cathedral did in its eponymous novel, will function in a similar way to the central edifice in that book, not only providing the scenery for some significant events, but also taking on their tone and bearing a resemblance to the characters it houses.

First, it is in a part of town that is associated with all the dangerous fates that might befall the misérable. Being a poor, run-down area, it is not hard to find crime and poverty, from the commonplace sight of old women begging to high-profile murders that had entered into collective memory. But at the same time – some, although not Hugo, might say paradoxically – it is an area where the penal system looms large. This area contains both Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière. Bicêtre was the men’s prison where we saw Jean Valjean chained for his trip south to the bagne, and the Salpêtrière, a hospital today, was, at the time, a sort of hybrid hospital-prison, housing mostly mentally ill women, and some women arrested for violating the regulations on prostitution. Nearby, as Hugo explains here, was also the site, near the walls that still surrounded Paris at the time, to which the guillotine was moved in 1832, when it was no longer seen as desirable in the center of town. The vulnerability to crime and exposure to punishment that were inherent in this area were, as we’ve already seen, also part and parcel to the life of the misérable.

More subtly, though, we notice that the Gorbeau house is located on the edge of town, and by this fact alone, takes on elements of our characters. It won’t look to be on the edge of town if you only look at the modern map of Paris, because Paris has expanded since this time, including during Haussmann’s renovations. But on the 1823 map, the directions Hugo gives to this neighborhood make it possible to get a good sense of the house’s location, and it is at the very edge of the map, near the wall. What is interesting, since we are approaching Paris with our characters from the outside, is that Hugo brings his readers there as if they were Parisians, encouraging them to venture out of the well-known and well-explored center of town into these borderlands, as if they are the wilds. While fields and forests have occasionally been hostile to our characters – most recently to Cosette with her pail of water, and similarly, to Jean Valjean outside of Digne – the are not, for the most part, portrayed as dangerous places in this novel. Jean Valjean’s long ride from Montreuil-sur-mer to Arras for Champmathieu’s trial was troubled by logistical problems and inner turmoil, but the countryside itself was not a particular danger. And, of course, draped in illusion as it was, the countryside where Fantine, Tholomyès, and their companions had their outing was idyllic. What is threatening about this liminal space, for the adventurous Parisian that Hugo invites there, is precisely that it is not recognizable as countryside. Instead, suffers from what so many of our misérables suffer from: hybridity and contradiction. It is described via negatives as Thénardier was, “Ce n’était pas la solitude, il y avait des passants; ce n’était pas la campagne, il y avait des maisons et des rues; ce n’était pas une ville, les rues avaient des ornières comme les grandes routes et l’herbe y poussait; ce n’était pas un village, les maisons étaient trop hautes. Qu’était-ce donc? C’était un lieu habité où il n’y avait personne, c’était un lieu désert où il y avait quelqu’un” (p. 445) -- “It was not solitude, there were passersby; it was not the countryside, there were houses and streets; it was not a town, the streets were rutted like country roads and grass grew on them; it was not a village, the houses were too tall. What was it then? It was an inhabited place where there was no one; it was a deserted place where there was someone.” This area’s resistance to clear definition makes the reader uneasy, just as it does when we encounter it in a character. 

And this uncertain identity is also reflected in the building’s identifiers. Its number, as Hugo explains at length, is unclear; it may be number 50, or it may be number 52, an uncertainty that we recognize from our own protagonist. The provenance of its nickname is also rooted in a changeable name. This happens in a more lighthearted way than it does for our characters, when two lawyers in the 18th century named Corbeau and Renard petitioned the King to have their names changed when they grew tired of being mocked for their names’ resemblance to the title of  La Fontaine fable, “Le Corbeau et le Renard,” “The Crow and the Fox.” Nevertheless, this shifting name becomes yet another gesture toward what we are coming to recognize as the characteristics of the misérable.

And, finally, even as Jean Valjean seems to have at least temporarily escaped their former doom by hiding out in this tucked-away place, Hugo takes the time to point out to us that this sort of house is known for the size of its spiders. Fate continues to hang over them, but here we see it remain at bay for the moment, allowing their new familial relationship to grow. We will explore that relationship when we return.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Jean Valjean and Cosette’s relationship, as it begins in the Gorbeau house, looks on the surface like the relationship between a father and daughter, or perhaps a grandfather and granddaughter. For each of them, this sort of familial tie is deeply needed, and is emotionally ideal, perhaps even more so than their original families would have been. We already saw the similarities in their pasts, and we are reminded of that similarity here: when he informs Thénardier of his intent to adopt her, Jean Valjean chooses the image, “Je casse le fil qu’elle a au pied” (p. 436) -- literally, “I’m breaking the rope on her foot,” but figuratively, something more like “I’m breaking the bonds that hold her.” Another subtle reference to their shared past can be found in the title of the play that briefly catches his attention in Paris before he heads to Montfermeil, Les deux forçats. We can translate this title as The Two Convicts, but more specifically, we’ll remember that the word forçat refers to a convict who has been sentenced to hard labor – as Jean Valjean and Cosette both were, in their own ways. Although it doesn’t seem that either of them talks much about that similarity – Jean Valjean doesn’t talk about his past in the bagne at all – simple proximity to similar wounds seems to help them heal. “La destinée unit brusquement et fiança avec son irrésistible puissance ces deux existences déracinées, différentes par l’âge, semblables par le deuil.” (p. 454) -- “Destiny suddenly united and, with its irresistible power, betrothed these two uprooted existences, different in age but similar in grief.” They have both lost Fantine, and the image of Jean Valjean dressing the child in mourning for a mother she can’t remember, of her first warm clothes being all black, is a powerful one; the narrator says of this change, “elle sortait de la misère et entrait dans la vie” (p. 455) -- “she was leaving misère and entering life” -- a life that, Jean Valjean understands uniquely well, includes grief. But more deeply than that, they have both known the loss of all connection to the world, of a feeling of belonging, and of the possibility of a future. When the narrator says that they are cut off from everything by the walls of a tomb, this is as much figurative as literal, as much their own metaphorical tombs as Fantine’s literal one. 

For Cosette, Jean Valjean fills normal childhood voids both practical and spiritual. She is well fed, warmly clothed, and has leisure to play for the first time in her memory, and she is protected from physical and emotional harm. Beyond this, though, she loves and is loved. At the end of book 3 chapter 2, when the Hugo gave his more extensive descriptions of the Thénardiers and they were described as spiders who had a fly, Cosette, as their servant, the narrator concluded by asking, “Quand elles se trouvent ainsi, dès l’aube, toutes petites, toutes nues, parmi les hommes, que se passe-t-il dans ces âmes qui viennent de quitter Dieu?” (p. 397) -- “When they find themselves this way, so early, so small, naked, among men, what happens in these souls who have only just left God?” The question is left unanswered, for the most part, until now: having been rejected from love at all turns, her heart has begun to go cold, even at so young an age. The entry of a loving father figure into her life, even one for whom she has no name, changes that.

For Jean Valjean, the arrival of Cosette is even more complex, and more profound. He, too, is described as starved for love, having been alone in the world since his first arrest over a quarter-century ago. The narrator also suggests, although with another strange disclaimer about his certainty and his limited omniscience, that after his latest experiences with the uglier sides of humanity in its treatment of Fantine and Champmathieu, in the character of Javert and in his latest trip to the bagne, that Jean Valjean’s capacity for hope and kindness may have been in danger of discouragement. But we see the way Cosette’s presence in his life transforms his darkest impulses as he teaches her to read. We are reminded that he had learned to read in the bagne, with the hope that he might better take his revenge on society. But instead, he can now use this ability to help in his small way solve one of the central social problems of the novel: a lack of education.

In fact, his care for Cosette is compared to no less than his encounter with the Bishop in its importance. And we see this importance echoed when he first arrives with her in their room in the Gorbeau house. As she lies sleeping, the narrator tells us that she sleeps “avec cette confiance tranquille qui n’appartient qu’à l’extrême force et qu’à l’extrême faiblesse” (p. 451) -- “with that calm trust that belongs only to extreme strength and extreme weakness.” Back in Digne, when he stood at the Bishop’s bedside, just before he stole his silver, he watched as a holy light fell on “cette figure où tout était espérance et où tout était confiance, cette tête de vieillard et ce sommeil d’enfant” (p. 109) -- “that face where all was hope and all was trust, that head of an old man and that sleep of a child.” At that moment, we saw him “prêt à briser ce crâne ou à baiser cette main” (p, 109) -- “ready to crush that skull or to kiss that hand,” but we recall that he chose to do neither, and instead stole his silver. Attentive listeners will know that I have already referred back to this scene once, when he stood at Fantine’s bedside after her death, a metal bar in his hand just as he had had in the Bishop’s house, only then, he did bend to kiss her hand. Now, here in the Gorbeau house, the narrator himself refers to that moment at Fantine’s bedside when Jean Valjean bends once again, to kiss the hand of a sleeping Cosette. The bishop’s kindness, Fantine’s sacrifice, and Cosette’s innocence become a sort of trinity in the unorthodox, personal faith that gives Jean Valjean’s soul life. 

His love for her is not only paternal and religious, but it is also, interestingly, maternal. This was already suggested back in the last section, when he bought her the doll; as Cosette had admired it, the narrator told us that many children had done the same, “sans qu’il se fût trouvé à Montfermeil une mère assez riche ou assez prodigue pour la donner à son enfant” (p. 400) -- “without a mother in Montfermeil turning out to be rich enough or extravagant enough to give it to her child.” That rich, extravagant mother would turn out, as we know, to be Jean Valjean. And even more surprising is the way his first movements of love for her are described: “Quand il vit Cosette, quand il l’eut prise, emportée et délivrée, il sentit se remuer ses entrailles” (p. 453) -- “When he saw Cosette, when he had taken her, carried her away and liberated her, he felt movement in his entrailles.” The translation of the place where he feels this movement is tricky; so I think I prefer to discuss it than to select something misleading. Literally, the word means nearly what it sounds like it should mean: entrails. But for us in English, that evokes more disgust than this word should. Closer to its meaning is something like “loins,” but in that translation it is important to note that it can as easily be a woman’s womb as a man’s loins; for me, at least, without more context, the English word “loins” in the reproductive sense has a somewhat more male connotation than female. But the French word entrailles used in this sense, perhaps because of its literal association with the inner abdomen, has a more female connotation. This is reinforced in this passage by a phrase a moment later, “il éprouvait des épreintes comme une mère et il ne savait ce que c’était; car c’est une chose bien obscure et bien douce que ce grand et étrange mouvement d’un coeur qui se met à aimer” (p. 453) -- “he felt pangs like a mother and he did not know what it was; for it is a very obscure and sweet thing, this great and strange movement of a heart beginning to love.” The imagery used to describe his budding love for the child is that of the physical act of childbirth, which he does not recognize because it is so new to him, but also, perhaps, because of the strangeness of motherhood for a person such as him.

Another clue about Jean Valjean’s motherhood to Cosette can be found in the note from Fantine, which we saw Jean Valjean reveal to Thénardier and discussed briefly earlier in the episode. We had seen this note before, but when it appears in this section, a new element is quoted to us: the date when it was written. It was written on March 25 of 1823, a date that is celebrated by many Christians as the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrating the appearance of the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary and his announcement that she would conceive and give birth to Jesus. Jean Valjean’s adoption of Cosette, as we’ve seen, occurs on Christmas – nine months later, when the same Christian calendar celebrates the birth of the foretold child. Cosette is not born on this day, although, we might consider her, and she might consider herself, re-born, and we will have to wait and see to what extent she can otherwise be compared to the Christ child. But for Jean Valjean, this is the completion of much that we have watched build for many weeks now. We have been told before, and it was reinforced here, that he had never been in love in the romantic sense, and he shares Mary’s virginity. In the “Tempest in a Skull” chapter, concern for the fate of Fantine and her child were the considerations that came the closest to outweighing his obligation to free Champmathieu, and were the good he could do as Madeleine that was closest to the Bishop’s mission, the element that it is perhaps most fitting for us to see persist beyond his identity as Madeleine. And, of course, that weighty name of le père Madeleine, maire de Montreuil-sur-mer, itself foretold this moment to us – the moment when one repentant sinner steps into the place of another, where this old man manages to become at least as much a mother as a father. 

All of this sits on that point of contention that we have observed about Les Misérables from the beginning; it all feels very Catholic to readers who are not accustomed to that imagery or who are not inclined to resonate with it. But it can also be read as deeply transgressive, as sacred imagery is laid over the story in a way that contorts gender and makes a holy family out of an escaped convict, a prostitute, and an orphan. But this tension, this heightened religious sensibility coupled with a level of transgression against civil law and religious tradition, provides us with a reminder that we have come to need sometime since the beginning of the novel. It is squarely in line with positions Hugo took early on: the moment that the Bishop knelt before the Conventionist or lied to the police, the moment he took aim at “law and custom” in the Preface and set them in opposition to “divine destiny.” There are places in this novel where conventional-looking virtue comes to the fore, and it is easy to forget the potential for disruption in these stories. But remembering that potential is utterly crucial to a deep understanding of Les Misérables.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll follow this pair along the next steps in their journey together. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 2, book 4 chapter 5 through book 5 chapter 10, “Mysteries.”

[/Music]

We begin the section for today with Javert’s pursuit of Jean Valjean and Cosette through the streets of Paris. It is a sequence in which Hugo has carefully and masterfully orchestrated a crescendo from sneaking suspicion, through a decision to flee, a gradually intensifying chase, a culminating moment of desperation, and finally, Jean Valjean’s miraculous escape into an even more mysterious safe-haven. This is one of the places where this novel becomes a bit of a page-turner, but there is a lot going on beneath that surface. So I would like to start off today by making a few observations about the narration of the chase.

First, as we discussed last time, this chase takes place in the old, pre-Haussmann Paris. I hope my comments last time helped you to feel the full weight of Hugo’s reflections that opened book 5, where he expressed his nostalgia for the city from which he lived in exile. Hugo was inclined to favor conservation of historic monuments and the like anyway – this was a major impetus for writing Notre-Dame de Paris back in 1831 – but his exile from Paris only increased his longing to see the city again, and only made Haussmann’s radical renovations that much more painful for him. We’ve mentioned how he feared he would never return to Paris, that he would not outlive his exile, but even beyond this, as news of Haussmann’s work reached him, he feared that even if he did return, he wouldn’t know the place. 

For these chapters, though, the effect of the changes in Paris is that this past where the novel takes place, which would have been within living memory for many readers, becomes a kind of fictional fantasy world. From a practical standpoint, it allows Hugo to take liberties required by the plot, and by his imagination – he can say that this sort of building was on that spot, and no one can prove him wrong, because it’s all gone now anyway. But it also makes this Paris a setting that is more like the one for his other novels – Notre-Dame de Paris’s medieval Paris, for example. Details are sprinkled throughout the story that remind us that we’re in a former time, such as near the end of chapter 5, when the narrator mentions a medieval curfew that persists in habit, or the title of that chapter, which emphasizes that we are before the advent of gas street lamps. What happens in this recently bygone Paris seems at once to happen in the real world and to happen on a landscape tinted with fantasy and nostalgia. 

I have added some locations from the story of Jean Valjean’s zigzag through Paris to our map, and if the geography interests you, I definitely recommend harmonizing the Google map to the 1823 map for this one. But you will see that all the locations I’ve mapped are on the left bank, south of the river. Once our characters cross the Seine – when he pays the toll – the geography becomes fictional. Names of existing roads cease, and the geography stops being traceable. He asserts that Petit-Picpus is among the place names that persist despite the places having disappeared – even today, it’s easy to locate the neighborhood called “Picpus” and a “rue de Picpus” on a map of Paris, in more or less the area being described here, the 12th arrondissement. But this is not evidence that the neighborhood he describes in such detail ever existed, and indeed, there is no such evidence. The 1727 map that he claims confirms his description, that gives book 5, chapter 3 its title, never existed, despite the extremely specific information he gives about it. All this specific detail about a fictional area creates a reality effect, as he assimilates fiction into reality, placing his story around the edges of what readers at the time would have known to be true, and preserves his authorial freedom to create the setting he needs for his events.

Within the story, the stakes of what takes place in this landscape couldn’t be higher. If he’s caught now, from a legal point of view, a repeat offender like Jean Valjean would be unlikely to avoid the guillotine. One of the reports of his previous return to the bagne – which, admittedly, we saw at the time to be unreliable – said that he had only avoided death before thanks to the king’s clemency. But even returning to the bagne, now, would be a graver consequence than before, as he is now responsible not only for himself, but for Cosette. At the idea of recapture, his concern when he thinks of losing her is interestingly ambiguous: “Cosette perdue à jamais” (p. 473) -- “Cosette lost forever” could refer to his feeling of loss, or, particularly given the resemblance between her rehabilitation from forced labor and his own, to her loss more generally, to the loss of her soul. The result would be “une vie qui ressemblait au dedans d’une tombe” (p. 473) -- “a life that resembled the inside of a tomb,” for him, for her, or most terrifyingly, for both of them. And so, when he tells Cosette that she needs to keep quiet because Madame Thénardier is pursuing her, he is lying less than he seems to be. They are both being pursued by a similar doom, by abject misère, by the fatalité, fate, that awaits misérables, which Cosette has known so far in her young life to be personified by Madame Thénardier.

Perhaps this is why this scene brings together so many other images of pursuit, predation, and fate that we have already seen. It recalls Thenardier’s pursuit of Jean Valjean and Cosette after they left his inn, as vision, especially, cuts in and out, and Jean Valjean relies on not being seen, both in shadow and the maze of city streets. Javert and Jean Valjean are set up as predator and prey, respectively; when Jean Valjean first glimpses Javert, his impression is the same he would have “en se trouvant tout à coup dans l’ombre face à face avec un tigre” (p. 459) -- “finding himself suddenly in the dark face to face with a tiger,” and his instinct is that of self-preservation. A few pages later, as he traces a tortuous path through Paris, the narrator says that he is borrowing his tactic from a hunted deer. At the end of chapter 3, he says he feels caught in a net, which recalls another form of human predation, namely fishing, but also, calls up an image similar to the spider web that we have already seen as a long-standing metaphor in Hugo’s work. As he feels the net tighten, as he knows the spider is on its way, he is not yet caught, but is about to be, and he looks heavenward with despair. This gesture, and, indeed, the entirety of his situation recall once again the man overboard, still living, but without hope. 

And, interestingly, we hear an echo of an issue we haven’t thought about in a while, and that is the appearance of the number 4. The group that is pursuing Jean Valjean by the end of book 5 chapter 1 is a group of 4, and this is when he recognizes Javert for certain. They are described as four identical figures, and seem to be copies of Javert. This group just about doubles when, as they come up the rue Polonceau (p. 473), they are now “7 or 8 soldiers” plus one posted at the end of the rue Droit-Mur. We thought a bit about this number four back when the early part of Fantine’s story, her happy days in Paris, emphasized that her group of couples was two groups of four. We talked about that in episode 7, if you’d like to look back. In hindsight, we can feel the same doom in that moment as in this one. Associations with the horsemen of the Apocalypse begin to feel more apt when we think about Jean Valjean’s situation here together with Fantine’s at that point. We will continue to return to this issue, but connecting it to this desperate pursuit adds an important contour to the picture.

So things look dire, but to escape from this moment, we’re told that “il portait deux besaces; dans l’une il avait les pensées d’un saint, dans l’autre les redoutables talents d’un forçat” (p. 473) -- “he carried two bags; in one, he had the thoughts of a saint, in the other, the formidable talents of a convict.” It is Jean Valjean’s hybridity, his ability not to be either convict or saint, but both, earned through the crisis of the Champmathieu affair, that becomes his strength. And what it provides him the strength to do, he does, in a sense, for the second time, as his escape over the wall bears striking resemblances to his escape from the Orion. He makes a super-human looking, life-saving ascension, using the convict’s agility and the saint’s altruistic impulses. The moment when he is climbing down the rope to the crewman and is compared to a spider bringing life instead of death finds echo in his pulling Cosette the rope behind him. His ascension, here as there, is followed by an even longer descent – there, into apparent drowning in the sea, and here to below ground level on the other side of the wall. He is under ground not only literally now, but figuratively, as he has escaped Javert, and landed in a strange new world. 

When we return, we will look at this story from Javert’s point of view, and then later, we will explore that strange new world.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

The last chapter in book 5 re-tells the story, since the Orion, from Javert’s point of view. For those who are familiar with adaptations of the novel, we should note that by this point, they have often diverged in their representation of Javert from what we see here by having him obsessed with Jean Valjean, tracking him mercilessly across time and space. But in the story we have here, this is not the case. Here, Javert is going about his normal police business when he comes upon Jean Valjean through a series of coincidences – this book is admittedly not immune to implausible coincidences – plus hunches and logical deductions that aren’t all that implausible. The same was true when he unearthed Jean Valjean in his disguise in Montreuil-sur-mer: he was not looking for him, but hunches and flashes of recognition, plus anger at the mayor for countermanding his authority in Fantine’s arrest, pushed him to action.

What makes Javert unique among police officers relative to the Jean Valjean case here is not some kind of obsession with it; we are told quite clearly that he forgot about Jean Valjean, for the same reason that he had pursued him: he is a wolfhound, and “à ces chiens toujours en chasse le loup d’aujourd’hui fait oublier le loup d’hier” (p. 487) -- “for these dogs always on the hunt, today’s wolf makes them forget yesterday’s wolf.” Instead, he is put back on the scent by his unique history with the case. He is the only one who would have the intimate knowledge of the situation in Montreuil-sur-mer necessary to put all these pieces together as he does. The presence of this same officer in Montreuil-sur-mer and in Paris, in pursuit of the same criminal, is explained by the normal course and administrative banalities of police work, plus one or two deductions that only Javert could have made. 

But, their cat and mouse game does become personal here in this scene in some other ways. First, Javert’s ambition drives him to keep the pursuit to himself, recruiting reinforcements, but not informing his superiors. His unique vision of the situation that began the pursuit plays a part in this ambition, as he sees it open a door for him to a “magnifique succès” (p. 490) -- “magnificent success,” but he fears that higher-ups might undeservedly want some of the credit; the possessives stand out as the narrator tells us, “il craignait qu’on ne lui prît son galérien” (p. 490) -- “he feared they might take his convict from him.” This will, of course, turn out to have been hubris, and prioritizing his ambition in this way may ironically have been the thing that cost him his convict.

But his hesitation to seize Jean Valjean for the better part of the night certainly contributed as well, and that hesitation owes to two important parts of Javert’s character. For one, his hesitation bears the imprint of the Champmathieu affair. For a long time, during this pursuit, he doubts his conclusion that the person he is following is Jean Valjean. The narrator insists on his scruples, that he is not a mindless predator, but a highly trained and principled one, and mentions once that the stakes of his certainty in making an arrest are heightened by press coverage and public disapproval of police mistakes and misconduct. He wants to wait for certainty before acting. The text doesn’t say so, but when faced with doubt, Javert must be reminded of the events of about a year earlier, when he made an official statement that he recognized Jean Valjean in one man, then was convinced he was a different one, only to have it proven that his first intuition was correct. We’ll recall the emotional disarray when he believed he had wrongly denounced the legitimate mayor, and he asked to be fired for the mistake. Even though his initial hunch was ultimately vindicated, the whole incident proved to him that he is capable of making humiliating mistakes, and that emotional shock must have some influence here, as he listens to his doubt about once again recognizing Jean Valjean.

The second kind of hesitation we see in this chase is of a different type altogether, as Javert feels more and more certain that his success is imminent and allows himself to experience its pleasure. The chase becomes almost sexual; he wants to delay the culminating moment, and luxuriate in the pleasure of anticipation. But I say almost sexual, because this sensuality is also tied very closely to the pleasure Hugo imagines in the predators from the animal kingdom to which we refer so frequently: he talks about “cette volupté de l’araignée qui laisse voleter la mouche et du chat qui laisse courir la souris” (p. 492) -- “that delight of the spider who allows the fly to flutter around, and of the cat who lets the mouse run.” And he continues, “La griffe et la serre ont une sensualité monstrueuse, c’est le mouvement obscur de la bête emprisonnée dans leur tenaille.” (p. 492) -- “The claw and the talon have a monstrous sensuality, the somber movement of the beast imprisoned in their grasp.” For all the comparisons we have been making to predators, it is with Javert that we are taken inside the murderous pleasure of the predator. It is pleasure taken at grave expense, but so far as Javert is concerned, it is a pleasure justified by the absolute goodness of the law it serves.

Beyond what it can tell us about the character of Javert, though, the long pursuit of Jean Valjean, particularly when told from this point of view, should also be understood in the context of another 19th century trend: the detective or police novel, which is itself a reflection of a phenomenon in cities that was new at this time, namely modern policing. The industrial revolution around the turn of the 19th century caused urban populations to balloon, and with them, urban crime. Simultaneously, beginning in the previous century with its enlightenment ideals, governmental approaches to crime and policing became more empirical and methodical. In France, these changes also coincided, of course, with the Revolution and Napoleon’s reforms of the legal and judicial systems such that the early decades of the 19th century see a phenomenon that we take for granted today: a police force charged primarily with keeping order in the city, finding and detaining problem individuals, and delivering them to a judicial system along with empirical evidence demonstrating their violations of the law. Elements of this had been in place before this period of course, but they had been caught up, in France, in a system of social distinctions, privileges, and remnants of feudal structures, and it is in the 19th century that it all comes together in a way that begins to feel modern. 

Perhaps because of the novelty of this approach to crime, and/or perhaps because of middle-class concerns about urban crime and the activities of the poorer classes, this period also saw an increased interest in stories of crime and police work. In 1828, a former criminal turned detective and criminologist, Eugène François Vidocq, published his memoirs, to smashing commercial success. The public was intrigued by his criminal past and his insight into the inner workings of society’s criminal element, and he would publish other works as well, including a dictionary of argot, the criminal slang of which we will see much more in the second half of this novel. His success inspired other prominent figures in law enforcement to publish memoirs as well, but perhaps more importantly for us, his legend influenced a number of literary characters, including both Jean Valjean and Javert. This mid-19th-century period was also the time of the earliest detective novels, which would become increasingly popular (and numerous) into the 20th century. The public was, in short, rapidly developing an interest in crime, policing, and in reassuring stories of the triumph of the forces of order – an interest that we could see as continuing to the present day, with the popularity of television police and forensics procedurals, for example. 

In this section, by showing us the pursuit of Jean Valjean from the point of view of the police, after we have seen it from Jean Valjean’s point of view, Hugo connects what we have seen to this popular interest, but at the same time, he undermines it. It is clear here that the reassuring outcome would not be the criminal’s capture, but rather, the one we see in chapter 9: he and Cosette have found a safe haven, at least for the moment, and the criminal has slipped through the fingers of the Paris police. This reversal of the outcome that readers typically expect reminds us, once again, that our affection for Jean Valjean is in direct defiance of conventional prejudices. We may or may not see Javert as a villain – I tend to think that seeing him that way oversimplifies him. But there is no doubt, by this point in the novel, that Jean Valjean is our criminal hero, that it is a mistake to understand his story as Javert does, through the typical lens provided by stories of police pursuits, in which violation of the law is the only relevant consideration. The cat-and-mouse story of Javert and Jean Valjean, even as it provides all the intrigue and excitement of similar cat-and-mouse stories, continuously asks us to question our point of view on them, the point of view that favors the letter of the law and the narrative of the police ahead of all else. 

When we return, we’ll finish up by beginning to explore Jean Valjean’s newest hiding place.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

On the other side of the wall, once he escapes Javert, Jean Valjean finds himself in a garden. This will not be the last garden we’ll see, but it is also not the first: we’ll recall that the Bishop had a garden, in which he took great pleasure in working in the daytime and wandering at night, contemplating the stars. As was common for many people, especially the poor, Madame Magloire used it to grow food for the household, but the Bishop himself reserved one fourth of the space for flowers. His ever-practical housekeeper chastised him for allowing so much space to be useless, but he responded, “Le beau est aussi utile que l’utile, [...] Plus, peut-être.” (p. 26) -- “The beautiful is as useful as the useful, [...] More, perhaps.” In that passage, in part 1 book 1 chapter 6, if you want to look back at it, the narrator makes it clear that gardening is more a passion than a discipline for the bishop; he does not study best practices or methods or botany; he simply helps beautiful things grow. The description ends with this extraordinary sentence: “Il respectait beaucoup les savants, il respectait encore plus les ignorants, et, sans jamais manquer à ces deux respects, il arrosait ses plates-bandes chaque soir d’été avec un arrosoir de fer-blanc peint en vert.” (p. 26) -- “He respected the learned a lot, he respected the ignorant even more, and, without ever neglecting these two respects, he watered his flower beds every summer evening with a tinplate watering can painted green.” And, ever since the bishop, we have seen gardening used in Les Misérables as a metaphor for cultivating human minds; for example, we recall Madeleine, before it was revealed that he was Jean Valjean, discussing how even weeds like nettles might be better cultivated and put to use. 

The garden where Jean Valjean and Cosette land after their pursuit through Paris is relatively poor and joyless, mostly practical, not aesthetic – the narrator mentions fruits and vegetables, and trees and hedges lining the paths, but no flowers. The more salient feature of this garden, though, is its strange human inhabitants.

The less mysterious of these is the gardener, who turns out to be Fauchelevent, the man who fell under his cart in Montreuil-sur-mer, possibly the only man left in France who still believes that Jean Valjean is Madeleine. We recall that after that injury, Madeleine had had Fauchelevent placed in “un couvent de femmes du quartier Saint-Antoine à Paris” (p. 184) -- “a women’s convent in the Saint-Antoine neighborhood of Paris.” A Parisian, or anyone who overlayed Hugo’s imaginary map over a real one, would recognize that this is the neighborhood where we find ourselves. Fauchelevent has been here ever since, so for a couple of years, working as a gardener, relatively cut off from the outside world, and thus unaware of the downfall of the mayor of his hometown. All he knows of the man before him is that he saved his life, and he is delighted to have the opportunity to repay him.

This repayment, though, is a bit more complex than it first appears. As Fauchelevent welcomes Jean Valjean, he expresses a curious (and partly affectionately joking) admonition of his sudden guest’s delay in remembering Fauchelevent, saying, “vous sauvez la vie aux gens, et après vous les oubliez! [...] eux, ils se souviennent de vous! Vous êtes un ingrat!” (p. 486) -- “you save people’s lives, then you forget them! They remember you! You’re an ingrate!” This is a strange idea, that it is ungrateful, specifically, to be unaffected by saving a life. Fauchelevent, even as he was cut off from contact or communication with Jean Valjean, felt himself permanently connected to him, and as with any human connection, he expected it to be reciprocal. He seems to be saying here that if a person who renders aid does so without feeling or connection to the person being saved, the act is somehow diminished. Helping or saving a person ought to affirm their personhood; otherwise, it is a nearly selfish act – being the hero, doing the saving, is more important than the person being saved. In other words, saving them should indicate that they matter, in which case, you’d remember them. We had already observed that Madeleine’s goodness and charity, as truly generous and beneficial to others as it was, was rooted in his effort to improve his own soul, to “become an honest man.” This was evident in the Champmathieu affair, when he struggled to separate his soul’s goodness from his reputation, to separate being an honest man from being Madeleine. Fauchelevent, even unaware of all that we know, seems to intuit this about the man who saved him.

Still, Fauchelevent is eager for the chance to repay the man who saved his life, and this repayment, mirroring the life-saving aid he received from him, is just one way in which Fauchelevent begins to resemble Jean Valjean. Even though Fauchelevent is happy and living a life of simplicity and security, we nonetheless find that he is assimilated, in some noticeable symbolic ways, into the growing group of misérables in the novel. Because of his injury, he walks with a limp, as we have been told once or twice that Jean Valjean does thanks to the ball and chain that he dragged for 19 years. Fauchelevent also wears the bell that gives the title to chapter 9 here. In French, the word that is used in the chapter title is grelot, which refers specifically not to an open bell like a small church bell but a round bell, like a jingle bell, with a small freely-moving ball inside of it. The round shape of a grelot, combined with the limp, powerfully recalls a convict’s ball and chain. This is then connected to the condition of Jean Valjean’s life after his release from the bagne, as Fauchelevent explains that he wears the bell “pour qu’on m’évite” (p. 484) -- “so I am avoided,” because “il paraît que je serais dangereux à rencontrer” (p. 484) -- “it seems I am dangerous to meet” -- just as Jean Valjean’s yellow passport warned that he was a “very dangerous man.” So the bell that he wears echoes both Jean Valjean’s incarceration and his social damnation that follows, as it isolates him from the world in which he now lives. Meanwhile, in Jean Valjean’s mind, the bell also leads to a comparison to animals, the sort of comparison to which misérables are so often subjected. When he understands that the man he sees is wearing a bell, he wonders, “qu’était-ce que cet homme auquel une clochette était suspendue comme à un bélier ou à un bœuf?” (p. 481) -- “What was this man who had a bell hung from him like a ram or a steer?” The animals he chooses for this comparison also contain some foresight into the condition of Fauchelevent in this convent full of women: one is the potentially aggressive male of the species, the other specifically refers to a castrated male. But there is one important difference between Fauchelevent’s bell and Jean Valjean’s social damnation: by the end of the scene, Fauchelevent has taken the bell off. Unlike Jean Valjean, he can find reprieve from his status, so he talks about it cheerfully, as a quirk associated with this otherwise comfortable existence. 

The other strange feature of this garden is the sound of heavenly voices, and the figure that Jean Valjean sees when he goes to investigate that sound. We will learn much more about this in the coming weeks, but for the moment, it is only given to us as an “enigma” in the titles of chapters 6 and 7. Unlike the man with the bell, which is the part of that enigma that is quickly resolved, this other more mysterious presence in the garden is presented to us filled with contradictions. First, the sound of the voices seems to come to Jean Valjean and Cosette from Heaven, and it is set in explicit contrast to the sound of the voices of Javert and his men outside the walls; the latter are compared to demons, and the former, to angels, the sound of singing is “aussi ravissant que l’autre était horrible” (p. 478) -- “just as delightful as the other one was horrible.” It is made strange by its context, this somber and mostly unadorned kitchen garden, with its many signals of earthly life and pragmatism, its deserted and forsaken feeling. The voices bring a kind of  celestial beauty to a humble and unexpected place, and they pull our characters out of time in a way that we have seen before. It is a sound “que les nouveaux-nés entendent encore et que les moribonds entendent déjà” (p. 478) -- “that newborns still hear and that the dying already hear.” Hearing these voices seems to be an other-worldly experience, one belonging to a state that is not currently theirs – that is, they are hearing a thing of which they are already no longer capable, or of which they are not yet capable. Just like in other moments of transition, when we have seen Jean Valjean, as we have called it, out of phase with himself, we see them respond without full consciousness of their actions, as they feel an overwhelming but inexplicable compulsion to kneel. Then, once the voices stop, the garden is once again mundane, with the sounds of neither angels nor demons, only “quelques herbes sèches” (p. 478) -- “some dry grass.”

But this apparent contradiction – easily resolved by readers who have, by this point in the novel, been trained to look for the supernatural in humble places – is further complicated by the sight that Jean Valjean comes across in chapter 7, of the human figure lying on the ground with a rope around its neck. This sight of a person who might be either living or dead, real or some kind of grotesque apparition, fills him with horror. “Il était effrayant de supposer que cela était peut-être mort, et plus effrayant encore de songer que cela était peut-être vivant” (p. 480) -- “It was frightening to assume that it might be dead, and even more frightening to imagine that it might be alive.” This figure, inhabiting a space between life and death in a very different way than our characters had been just a moment ago, reminds us of horror stories that were popular among the Romantics. In particular, it recalls the Contes Fantastiques written by one of Hugo’s best-known disciples, Théophile Gautier, in the 1830s and 1840s, especially as Jean Valjean imagines the figure following him as he retreats from the window. I’ll link to a couple such stories from the website if you’re interested in reading them; they’re great in their own right, and really revel in the horror of which Hugo borrows just a pinch for this chapter. Even though he has these radically contradictory experiences sequentially, they are integrated into a single, complex, hybrid and bewildering whole: “Qu’était-ce que cette étrange maison? Édifice plein de mystère nocturne, appelant les âmes dans l’ombre avec la voix des anges et, lorsqu’elles viennent, leur offrant brusquement cette vision épouvantable” (p. 480) -- “What was this strange house? Edifice full of nocturnal mystery, calling souls in the dark with the voices of angels and, when they come, suddenly offering them this horrifying vision.” This place combines not only the divine with the humble, but also, both with a gothic, other-worldly horror. We will see in the coming weeks what all of this means.

[Music]

But that’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll learn more about this strange new place where Jean Valjean has landed. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part II, book 6, “Cloistered.”

[/Music]

In this section, Hugo provides us with a narrator’s-eye-view on the Petit-Picpus convent that we glimpsed last time through Jean Valjean’s eyes and Fauchelevent’s explanations. He situates it in the context of monastic traditions much in the same way that he situated it in the geography of Paris as Jean Valjean was approaching it from the outside: he nests it in an environment of places, people, and movements that is recognizably historically true, and fills both the fictional and real elements with details, such that the parts that are fictional could quite easily, so far as any given reader is concerned, be a lapse in individual or historical memory. This creates a reality effect for this whole section of the story which, as we’ve said before, is welcome, as it is intertwined with stunning coincidences and superhuman feats that run the risk of taking the story out of the realm of the real. Some of what I’m telling you here is a bit unbelievable, Hugo seems to be saying, and I know you’ve probably never heard of this place, but you recognize the reality of everything around it, so my story is probably true too, don’t you think?

But, this convent is in fact fictional, even as it draws on the memories of Hugo’s long-standing mistress Juliette Drouet and those of Léonie Biard, who was Hugo’s lover for a while – we mentioned her in Episode 10, where we discussed her arrest when they were caught in the act of adultery. The descriptions of the lives of the pensioners, the young girls who lived in the convent for their childhood and early adolescence, are in many cases taken directly from these women’s anecdotes. Convent education for young girls of means, as well as for some poor girls who were taken in out of charity, was common well into the 19th century; it was reliable in its quality and its values, its overall suitability for respectable women. And, the strictness of life in the convent ensured the pensioners’ virginity for as long as they were in there, which improved their marriage prospects afterward. It did not come with any expectation of entering the order, although some of the girls did. For the most part, they returned to the world, as they called it, in their late teens, and were soon, hopefully, married.

Also true here is the existence of a convent in the Picpus neighborhood in Paris, But the religious order that he describes here, and most of the other details, are either his own invention or a composite creation based on a multitude of sources. The order of Bernardine-benedictines is actually a bit of a strange composite, given the history of the real religious orders that it references: The Bernardines, more often called the Cistercians, were an outgrowth of the Benedictines who, in the 12th century, sought to return to a stricter adherence to the Rule of St. Benedict, on which the Benedictine order had been based since the 6th century. That is, in a sense, all Cistercians or Bernardines are related to the Benedictine tradition. The Obedience of Martin Verga does seem to have existed in Spain, but that is where the reality of that detail ends; the influence Hugo describes it having in France is fictional. And Perpetual Adoration was a real practice. But assembling all of these elements into one place is Hugo’s invention.

But this is not the only intersection between fiction and the reality of women’s monastic life. Hugo joins a long tradition in literature of using entry into religious orders as symbolic of a kind of death or suicide, a retreat from the world, often chosen under circumstances that leave few other honorable or tolerable options. A famous example in the French tradition is in the novella René by Chateaubriand, whom we’ve seen to be a powerful influence over the young Hugo. In that text, to which I will link in both French and English from the website, the title character’s sister enters a convent after realizing she will never escape incestuous feelings for her brother. The ceremony in that story that grants entry into the order resembles a funeral ceremony, much like the one that Hugo describes in Chapter 3 here, and her choice to join the order is met with grief resembling the grief that usually meets death. We will have more to say about how Hugo uses this connection next time. 

But similar symbolism surrounded adult women, usually, again, women of some means, who would retire to the convent to live without taking vows, but who would pay to live in its seclusion, either symbolically dead to the world or, perhaps, actually allowing their former social circles to believe they had died. Mme Albertine in chapter 5 here is a good example of this phenomenon, and it’s worth paying particular attention to her story, ironically, because Hugo tells us outright that the details about Madame Albertine are unrelated to the main story he’s telling. He says that it “ne tient par aucun fil à l’histoire que nous racontons” (p. 512) -- “is not attached by any string at all to the story that we are recounting” and that he mentions it only “pour compléter dans l’esprit du lecteur la physionomie du couvent” (p. 512) -- “to complete in the reader’s mind the physiognomy of the convent.” While he sounds like he wants to marginalize Madame Albertine’s story by saying this, the result is to emphasize it in another way. This sort of statement, which he makes with some regularity, often helps us identify passages that are particularly important for reasons beyond plot – if he admits that they’re not related to the plot, but includes them, we either have to assume that he constructed his novel carelessly, or that he included it for some other reason. 

We learn about Mme Albertine that, in the convent, “On ne savait rien d’elle sinon qu’elle était folle, et que dans le monde elle passait pour morte.” (p. 512) -- “No one knew anything about her except that she was mad, and that in the world she passed for dead.” But her story is unusual among those like it in that our glimpse inside the convent allows us to see such a story from the inside. The novelistic trope of retreat to the convent typically came at the end of a story of dramatic missteps and misfortunes in love; after her story ended badly, a woman would retreat in grief or shame to a convent, where she planned to live out her uneventful days away from the public eye. But here, we see her from beyond the metaphorical grave. Still, even from this perspective, her description resembles that of a corpse or a ghost. She “regardait vaguement avec de grands yeux noirs. Voyait-elle? On en doutait. Elle glissait plutôt qu’elle ne marchait; elle ne parlait jamais; on n’était pas bien sûr qu’elle respirât. Ses narines étaient pincées et livides comme après le dernier soupir. Toucher sa main, c’était toucher de la neige. Elle avait une étrange grâce spectrale. Là où elle entrait, on avait froid.” (p. 512) -- She “gazed vaguely with large black eyes. Could she see? One doubted it. She glided more than she walked; she never spoke; it was not certain that she was breathing. Her nostrils were pinched and pale as after the last breath. Touching her hand was touching snow. She had a strange spectral grace. Where she entered, it was cold.” With her figurative death made this real in her physical description, it is difficult not to think of the walls of the convent as the literal walls of a crypt, a metaphor that will develop in the coming pages. But we also think of Fantine in the later phases of her descent. Specifically, compare the passage I’ve just read to this sentence, from that poignantly titled chapter “Christus nos liberavit” that we read a few weeks ago: “Qui la touche a froid. Elle passe, elle vous subit, et elle vous ignore” (p. 196) -- “Whoever touches her feels cold. She passes, she endures you, and she ignores you.” The echo of death, a bit less vivid here, nonetheless connects our misérables to each other once again via the various sorts of living death to which society’s customs condemn them. And, it’s worth mentioning that both of these living dead are women condemned for deviation from norms of sexual behavior – in Fantine’s case, we are certain of this, and in Madame Albertine’s we strongly suspect it. 

Our lone hint to Madame Albertine’s former life is in her outburst during religious services, when she recognizes the duke of Rohan and cries out, “Tiens, Auguste!” (p. 513) -- “Hey look, Auguste!” The man in question, by the way, is another real historical person, Louis-François-Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, born in 1788, who had become a priest after his wife died in a fireplace accident in 1815. He is called a priest here, but would go on to become an archbishop (noblemen had a way of rising quickly through the Church hierarchy) before his death in 1833. Madame Albertine’s outburst is not terribly scandalous in its own right, but it suggests that both she and the young priest who so interested all the teenaged pensioners both had other lives in the world. 

Those two words are said to be a way in which “le drame” and “le roman” (p. 512) -- “drama” and “the novel,” enter this carefully guarded place. So even as this is given to us to demonstrate the girls interest in the world outside and, perhaps, the impossibility of completely squelching their naturally budding sexuality, Hugo hints here that it also points to another, more conventional novel on the other side of the walls. Madame Albertine might well have been the main character in one of those novels that end in disgrace and retreat to a convent, but we are seeing the story that there is to tell on the reverse, the underside of the typical novel. And perhaps this is true for Les Misérables more generally. After all, this is very much the same relationship that we saw Jean Valjean’s pursuit through Paris have to more conventional police stories – we saw it, too, from the other side, from the point of view of the person who was condemned, rejected, usually, in other novels, locked away for his crimes. Les Misérables is the story of those who suffer deprivation, distrust, and, it’s increasingly clear, separation and seclusion from society.

When we return, we’ll make a few observations about life inside the Petit-Picpus convent as Hugo describes it here, and later, we’ll take a first look at his philosophical orientation toward monasticism.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Most of book 6 was dedicated to describing the lives of the women and girls who live in the Petit-Picpus convent. The nuns’ life is harsh, with practices that are recognizable as the kinds of things that monastic orders were known for doing to discipline and mortify the flesh and the self or the ego: prescribed uniform dress, harsh conditions, uncomfortable clothing, limited speech, physical self-discipline – strict lifestyle requirements that prescribed hours for waking, sleeping, eating, and devotional activities, and left virtually no room for variation. This sort of practice is taken to an extreme here: the women don’t bathe or brush their teeth, and they don’t use the first-person possessive “my,” everything is considered to be in common, so they use only the plural “our.” Individuality is squelched by design in order to avoid sin – if there is no ego, there can be no pride or vanity; if the body is denied, there can be no lust or gluttony, if there are no personal possessions, there can be no greed. Access to men is strictly limited to the archbishop and the gardner – whom we met last time, and who wears a bell so that the women can avoid getting too close to him. The girls bear somewhat less of the burden of prayer, devotion, and self-denial, but their lives are still strictly regimented. Contact with the outside world, in particular, is strictly regulated, they are only allowed to visit through a screened and barred window. 

This separation is reinforced by the description of the journey (p. 495-496) from the street to the small opening to the convent where one can talk to the sister on guard. It resembles the description of the journey from the center of Paris to the neighborhood around the Gorbeau house and suggests that one must be daring and brave a series of off-putting encounters, if not exactly obstacles. Just like venturing into the forgotten outskirts of the city, finding one’s way to the women in this enclosure is like entering a terra incognita, and one does not do this without intention. Twice, Hugo mentions that there is a “magic word” required for entry: through the door on the street kept by the familiar doorman who may or may not be tipsy, and through the one kept by the incorporeal voice of the woman at the end of the forbidding labyrinth of stairs and corridors. Even if a person uses these magic words to gain a maximum level of access, there are always multiple layers of bars, shutters, veils. On more than one occasion, what is on the other side of this is compared, as we already saw, to a tomb. That tomb, like all tombs, is inaccessible to outsiders, with only the rarest and most limited exception. 

As such, the mysterious world behind the walls is almost completely separate from the world we readers know from outside. The people inside are like inhabitants of another world within this one. Other than the visits described in chapter 1, the only contact the public has with the nuns of Petit-Picpus is during religious services. The public can attend services in the same church with them, but cannot see them, and sometimes, depending on the holy day they may be observing, the women don’t speak along with the mass either, so the public only hears the shuffling of their movements behind a curtain. In a religious service, this makes them seem like angels, much as Jean Valjean and Cosette’s first impression of them did last time. 

As they are figured as both corpses in a tomb and angels in an invisible firmament, they are also strangely democratic, as we learn that the leader of the convent is elected. This might seem banal to us today, but in an era like 19th century France, when citizens’ representation in government was a pre-eminent political question, it cannot be passed over. Only the most senior members of the Petit-Picpus convent vote, and obedience to the elected prioress is absolute – Hugo does not repeat the phrase “obéissance passive,” -- “passive obedience” but that is certainly what he describes. But each individual is limited to three 3-year terms, so that no one individual can consolidate power. Also remarkable in a 19th-century context is the fact that Hugo has effectively described a miniature female republic within the convent walls, where women cast votes for other women. When Jean Valjean arrives, the prioress is someone of exceptional education, and good humor. He says explicitly that she’s more like a monk than a nun, but he nonetheless implies that in this world where men, in particular, are strictly excluded, women find a different kind of freedom and power.

The girlhood that Hugo places here is subject to much of the extreme strictness of convent life, it but remains joyous, and he shows us that joy through vignettes of their childlike creativity, describing their spontaneous conversations as works of art and their play as a breath of life in this dead place. We have seen this point of view on girlhood before, as we watched with delight the first time Cosette played with the Thénardier girls. But just as that charming innocent play soon became corrupted by social stratification, so too these girls’ childlike play with words is intermingled with an observation about the arbitrariness of social groups and identifiers. Hugo describes how the girls divide themselves into groups named after the insects they’re most likely to find in the four corners of the convent’s dining hall. Even as three of these “nations,” as Hugo calls them, seem playful and arbitrary, named after crickets, caterpillars, or potato bugs, a fourth group of girls are given an association that we have already seen have a larger significance: they are called spiders. Similarly, in an anecdote supposedly drawn from a convent other than Petit-Picpus, these sorts of monikers were assigned according to the girls’ role in a particular religious ceremony, where some of the girls played a role called virgins. The result, we’re told was that one started hearing the question “Qui est-ce qui est vierge?” (p. 509) -- “Who here is a virgin?” in the dormitory full of convent girls, and in one little girl declaring “Tu es vierge, toi; moi, je ne le suis pas.” (p. 509) -- “You are a virgin, I’m not.” On the one hand, this is comical. But on the other, this innocent play mimics the social groups that we have seen cause such harm elsewhere in the novel. Some girls take on labels associated with predation, and others, with purity. And now that we’ve seen, through Fantine, the dangers of being outside these groups, of taking on labels other than these, these children’s declarations feel more dangerous than they know. These girls enjoy total innocence thanks to the protected environment of the convent, but social distinctions creep in, as they have a seemingly inevitable impulse to sort and categorize each other, and give names to the categories that are ripe for taking on the weight of judgments and their consequences.

In a moment, we’ll conclude today’s discussion by pointing toward the more philosophical questions that Hugo asks about this life inside the convent.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Finally, today, I want to end by indicating some of the more philosophical issues that arise in this section. We will not flesh them out completely here, because Hugo doesn’t, but the next section, book 7, will be entirely devoted to a direct treatment of most of these same issues, so all I want to do today is indicate where they appear. I think this will make the next book easier to digest, as it is a bit heady.

First, a couple of details that should bend our ears, briefly, to larger issues. In chapter 7, in discussing the way the bells were used for communication, it is mentioned that Mme de Genlis was summoned to speak to visitors by two series of four rings (p. 518), and the number 4 catches our attention. Just to drive home the bad omen that it calls to mind, we’re told that “celles qui n’étaient point charitables” (p. 518) -- “those who were not charitable” called her (or possibly the bells; the grammar is unclear) “le diable à quatre” (p. 518) -- “the devil by four” and we had been told in chapter 6 that the nuns were relieved when Mme de Genlis decided not to stay with them for more than a few months. So why the antipathy? Stéphanie-Félicité du Crest de Saint-Aubin, countess of Genlis was associated with a variety of scandals, any of which might have been enough to put the nuns off. Before she was married in 1763, rumor had it that her mother had allowed her to play her harp in semi-public venues, such as high society salons, and be paid for it, an activity that would not have been acceptable for a young lady. Later, she was known for some high-profile affairs, and she wrote and published – considered by some to be immoral for women as well – both novels for adults and other texts for and about the education of children. Then, amidst further controversy, in the 1770s and 1780s, she was responsible for the education of the child who would, in 1830, become the July Monarchy’s King Louis-Philippe. The scandal of this at the time was that boys’ education beyond early childhood was usually entrusted to men; in hindsight, by 1862 certainly, the impact of her education on that king’s relatively progressive thought would also have been known. During the early part of the Revolution, Mme de Genlis socialized with some of the more progressive thinkers, and her husband was one of the early nobles to join the cause of the Third Estate, but was guillotined during the Terror, in the fall of the Girondins, one of the shifts in power during that time. She emigrated during the Terror, then with Napoleon’s permission to return, she supported him, and unlike many of the Old Regime nobility, she did not benefit much from the Restoration. In short, she is associated with political progress, intellectualism, and education, and as a woman at that. Her number four, in the convent, might be read as a death knell of the old way of life of which the convent is a part; we will see more about the convent’s relationship to progress in the next section. But it does not seem that Hugo would share the nuns’ discomfort with her. She is forward-looking, of the Revolution not only in her life story, but in the sense that Hugo sees it as unquenchable. Having her in the convent was like having a bit of Revolution there.

Petit-Picpus is situated relative to other historical periods as well, in a way that we can begin to understand now. Chapter 10 connects the practice of Perpetual adoration to the 17th century, as penance for a sacrilege that that century committed. In Chapter 9, which Hugo once again says has nothing to do with his story, the title of the chapter, “Un Siècle sous une guimpe” -- “A Century beneath a guimpe” – that is, the neck covering that was part of a nun’s habit – points to this sort of  importance: the old woman described there, in addition to being a century old, is a holdover from the 18th century. The difference between her monasticism and the sisters of Petit-Picpus is expressive, for Hugo, of the difference between that century and his: she is more joyful, more lighthearted, and has retained more of her connection to the world, including talking about the people she knew before entering the order, and a frivolous personal possession. Her separation from the world being less complete, she seems less spiritual, but also, less grim. 

Setting these nuns in opposition to the 17th and 18th centuries begins to make them feel impacted by a Romantic esthetic, but that work is brought to much greater fruition by the ambivalence in Hugo’s description of this place. Much of that ambivalence is contained in the scene we saw last time, where Jean Valjean first hears the women singing and thinks he hears the voices of angels, then comes upon the woman lying face down on the stone floor, arms outstretched, with a rope around her neck. The form seemed uncanny, both human and inhuman, and the rope around its neck evoked death. He couldn’t decide if it was more terrifying to believe that this was a living person or a corpse. As he turned to walk away from the scene, he imagined that the figure was following him. We learn here what that scene was: it was the practice they call “la réparation,” or “reparation,” where they pray, in 12 hour shifts, for the sins of the world. They may either remain on their knees – it should be noted, on a stone floor – or in the prostrate position that Jean Valjean saw, the latter being a resting position. This action, of assuming this much suffering in the world’s place, of taking on the world’s sin, is presented here as “grand jusqu’au sublime” (p. 501) -- “great to the point of sublime.” 

But it is worth considering Jean Valjean’s instinctive impression, which was the stuff of nightmares. The horror in it consisted, of course, of the ambiguity between life and death; he didn’t know if he was seeing a dead body or a living person, and the uncertainty was alarming. But of course, we have already discussed this sort of ambiguity in this novel, even in this episode; it is a characteristic that is frequently associated with the novel’s misérables, and we already see it as a prominent characteristic here – in his horrifying vision of la réparation as well as in Madame Albertine’s state and in the state of all the women who have chosen permanent retreat behind convent walls. At the same time though, Hugo is careful not to let this negate the women’s angelic, spiritual characteristics, not just in la réparation, but throughout their lives of austerity, selflessness, and sacrifice. They are capable of seeming both grotesque, as horrific visions of the living dead, and sublime, as humans doing the work of angels. We have talked about the presence of both the sublime and the grotesque in Hugo’s work, and we have touched a bit on his articulation of Romanticism, but a central idea in that Romanticism, which I don’t think we have discussed extensively, is the role that the sublime and the grotesque play in it. All of this is in the Preface to his 1827 play Cromwell, which I linked to from the website way back in the extras to episode 2, if you’d like to have a look. There, still somewhat inspired by Chateaubriand’s Christian Romanticism, Hugo argued that the art of a culture that found its spirituality in Christianity must admit the grotesque along with the sublime; the Romantic esthetic should mingle the grotesque and sublime into a new form of beauty. He set this in opposition to artists of earlier periods, whose esthetic cultivated beauty and kept anything base, physical, or ugly from view, for example, by showing any violent deaths in theater not on stage with special effects, but through long, poetic, euphemistic monologues, making even bloody violence beautiful through language. This practice, in Hugo’s mind, denied a fact of life that he thought should be replicated in art, that the sublime and the grotesque are inseparable. As he puts it in the Preface to Cromwell, Christianity, the religion in which a divinity becomes human and is subjected to horrific death, and in which every human being is a vessel for divine spirit, that religion tells humanity: “Tu es double, tu es composé de deux êtres, l’un périssable, l’autre immortel, l’un charnel, l’autre éthéré, l’un enchaîné par les appétits, les besoins et les passions, l’autre emporté sur les ailes de l’enthousiasme et de la rêverie” (Préface de Cromwell) -- “You are double, you are composed of two beings, one perishable, the other immortal, one carnal, the other ethereal, one a prisoner of appetites, needs, and passions, the other, carried away on the wings of enthusiasm and reverie.” 

We have seen this sort of mixing at each step along our way in Les Misérables. The Bishop was careful to care for both body and spirit. Fantine’s sublime sacrifices included horrific bodily suffering, and her death was both grotesque and a moment of sacred ascension. Jean Valjean, it might be said, tried to separate himself into sublime and grotesque parts when he became Madeleine, but the Champmathieu affair made that impossible, and learning to be both convict and saint was what brought him to this safe haven. But it is perhaps in these women, the nuns of Petit-Picpus, that the elements that Hugo combines are in the strongest concentration. These women’s proximity to both symbolic death and to God is extreme, and proximity to each, here, depends on proximity to the other. 

Finally, the last paragraphs of chapter 11 here point us most definitively toward the philosophical musings that are to come, and we can begin to see the deep ambivalence that book 7 will offer us. One sentence, which I will take my last few minutes this week to explain, offers a good sense of the plane on which that ambivalence operates. Near the end of this chapter 11, he writes, “Nous sommes à égale distance de l’hosanna de Joseph de Maistre qui aboutit à sacrer le bourreau et du ricanement de Voltaire qui va jusqu’à railler le crucifix.” (p. 525) -- “We are at equal distances from the Hosanna of Joseph de Maistre that ends up enthroning the executioner and from the snicker of Voltaire that goes so far as to mock the crucifix.” So first, who are these men he mentions? Both were quite well known in the French tradition, although you are more likely to have heard of Voltaire than Joseph de Maistre. Joseph de Maistre was a counter-revolutionary writer and thinker who advocated for the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy by divine right and the re-institution of official Church power in state matters. He connected the Enlightenment’s secularism very closely with the chaos and violence of the Revolution, believing that this would be the result of any movement against a divinely appointed monarch. This prevention of chaos through the concentration of power was, for him, more important than the individual, and that is the connection Hugo makes here to the death penalty; a king by divine right as de Maistre conceived of it would necessarily have the right to take a subject’s life. Hugo, we’ll recall, opposed the death penalty for reasons that Les Misérables has already made clear: each human life, even the most misérable, is a sacred soul, more sacred than a monarch’s power or the social order. Voltaire, on the other hand, was the French Enlightenment thinker par excellence, who called into question religion generally and the power of the Catholic Church and Christianity in particular, since they were the traditions that he saw having the strongest irrational hold over his particular culture. His questioning of church power, along with that of his contemporary philosophes, brought about a questioning of much of the Old Regime power structure, including that divine right of kings that Joseph de Maistre defended, and many of the issues they raised were at the center of the Revolution, as well as later upheavals and shifts in power. Voltaire is well known for his sardonic wit, and he is frequently associated with a biting and even cruel laughter that accompanied his criticisms. Hugo cannot get entirely on board with either of these thinkers. Even though, as we’ve seen, traditional orthodoxies and powerful hierarchical religions got no love from Hugo (at least not by 1862), he disliked Voltaire’s glib atheism and his mockery of the sacred even more. Hugo’s deeply personal religion meant that both Voltaire and de Maistre were wrong; religion should be neither enthroned in the halls of power with the right to take life, nor mocked for its belief in what it cannot see or prove. 

But, of course, Hugo does not put the executioner and crucifix together in this statement by accident; the crucifix, representing an ancient mode of execution, after all, creates a constant presence of death just as the death penalty does. This presence, which we’ve begun to see today, will also continue into book 7, where other questions on the table will be of past and present, freedom and civilization, religion and spirituality, hypocrisy and superstition. Book 7 will be short, but dense. Take your time with it, and I’ll look forward to offering what wisdom I can, and to hearing from you about yours. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll dig into Hugo’s digression on monasticism. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 2, book 7, “Life in Parentheses.”

[/Music]

This digression is titled “Parenthèse,” -- “Parenthesis.” A strange choice in a book with a handful of multi-chapter digressions and frequent shorter expressions of narrator or author opinion. We might ask what makes this one, in particular, a parenthesis? Was Waterloo not parenthetical? When we discussed it, we concluded that it’s at least somewhat less so than it first appears. But we suggested last time that when Hugo says outright that something is not connected to the story he’s telling, it’s usually a case of false modesty, or a way of tacitly suggesting we ask ourselves, “then why is this section here?” 

In two weeks, we’ll have the opportunity to bring out some more connections between the questions Hugo treats here and the others in the novel. But right now, it’s worth considering that the title of the chapter refers not to the text of the chapter, but to its subject. That is, perhaps the convent itself is parenthetical – set off from what surrounds it, and, in a sense, optional to its meaning. As a writer like Hugo certainly knows, parentheses express an ambivalence about what they enclose – they indicate that what’s inside them is perhaps less important, or beside the point, or a deviation – a digression? – from the thrust of the rest of the text, but it is nonetheless included, so it’s too important to leave out altogether. Based on what we read in these chapters, monastic life can be described similarly. Hugo expresses ambivalence about the phenomenon: it’s a useful early phase for civilization, but it’s not appropriate for civilizations as they advance; it fulfills a function, prayer, whose importance should not be diminished, but its separation from the world limits its impact. The existence of monasticism in society is like the existence of a parenthesis in a text, or, of a digression in a novel.

This seems especially true when we consider that it’s not difficult to see the superficial connection between this digression and the text: Hugo is giving us more background, biased as it may be, on the place where Jean Valjean now finds himself. Given the very fact that he emphasized in book 6 about the convent, and that he reiterates here – that it is closed off from the outside world – readers’ understanding of such places would likely be quite varied. Hugo himself, we’ll recall, relied on the recollections of women he knew who had had convent educations to create his picture of Petit-Picpus. But, of course, since he was creating a fictional convent to serve various purposes in his novel, he also relied on his own imagination, and created a place that resonated with the work in other ways. In the end, it’s less important to him to instruct his readers about monasticism for its own sake than it is to enrich the novel’s landscape of meaning. 

And he enriches it straightaway in book 7, in the first two sentences: “Ce livre est un drame dont le premier personnage est l’infini. / L’homme est le second.” (p. 526) -- “This book is a drama whose main character is the infinite. / Man is the second.” Up to this point, we have only sort of considered “the infinite” as a character in this story – in fairness, Hugo hasn’t suggested it quite this directly, either – and when we have, it would have been difficult to argue that it was a main character. The infinite was a subject of discussion for the Bishop and the Conventionist, and it was perhaps the realm in which our characters’ spiritual crises have taken place as they have felt themselves pulled into states like trances and out of touch with present realities. But overall Hugo has to this point placed his book first and foremost in the realm of the social. The Preface, for example, set the book up as a strike against “social damnation,” “social asphyxia,” and “ignorance and deprivation on earth” in the form of some very earthly problems: exploitation of labor, poverty and hunger, lack of education. And, these are the terms we have so far seen play out, as the novel has critiqued the justice system and prisons, social stratification in various forms, prostitution and exploitation. So, to say that the infinite is the main character asks us to recenter much of what we have read so far, and redefines the social. 

In each of the main characters that we have gotten to know relatively well to this point – Jean Valjean, Fantine, Cosette, even Javert – we have seen the conditions of social life take a toll on what Hugo calls their “soul.” At the beginning of Jean Valjean’s long night of deliberation in the Champmathieu affair, which we see in the “Tempest in a Skull” chapter, we’ll recall that the narrator took a paragraph to consider the enormity of venturing into the human mind. That’s in Part 1, book 7, chapter 3 if you want to look back. But at the end of it he writes, “chose sombre que cet infini que tout homme porte en soi et auquel il mesure avec désespoir les volontés de son cerveau et les actions de sa vie!” (p. 230) -- “what a murky thing, this infinite that each man carries within himself and against which he measures with despair the wishes of his brain and the actions of his life!” The infinite meets the social when the social operates or intrudes on this interior infinite, the human soul. This is the story not just of the material lives and suffering of les misérables, but of their souls, that bit of infinite that they have in them. For lovers of the musical, this points to one of the more apt lyrics that Herbert Kretzmer wrote, one of the most faithful to the text: after Jean Valjean’s encounter with the Bishop, in the soliloquy where he explores the effects of his compassion, Jean Valjean sings, “He told me that I have a soul – how does he know?”

But there is another time when the infinite meets the social, and that is when social mechanisms reach out to the infinite. This is where Hugo situates monasticism at the outset of this section. He calls it an “[appareil] d’optique” (p. 526) -- an “optical apparatus” that humanity, in various traditions, uses to perceive this infinite. He will go on to see this apparatus from both of these points of view, as a social phenomenon and as a spiritual one, as one point, among others in the novel, where the social meets the spiritual.

As he does this, the complexity of his point of view is vitally important to understanding this digression. He seems to frame his discussion as an evaluation of the phenomenon of monasticism, but I think that, “Is he for or against monasticism?” is the wrong question to ask as we read this section, and it will tend to leave us frustrated with the very ambiguities that he insists upon. We’ll remember that we discussed in the last episode his references to Voltaire and Joseph de Maistre, the anticlerical Enlightenment philosopher and the counter-revolutionary thinker who defended the divine rights of Kings, and that Hugo, in this same context, refused both of these points of view. In that section, he wrote of monastic traditions, “Nous ne comprenons pas tout, mais nous n’insultons rien.” (p. 525) -- “We do not understand everything, but we insult nothing.” And he repeats a similar sentiment here: “toutes les fois que nous rencontrons dans l’homme l’infini, bien ou mal compris, nous nous sentons pris de respect.” (p. 526) -- “each time we encounter the infinite in humanity, well understood or not, we feel overcome with respect.” Given what we’ve read here, if forced to take a side, it seems that Hugo would probably say that monasticism should go by the wayside in the modern world. But more importantly than this, it seems that his primary goal in this digression is to resist taking a side. Monastic traditions are not all bad; they have elements, and a usefulness in the life of his characters, that he loves; and he insistently sits in a place that forces us to reckon with that.

So, in the rest of today’s episode, I’m going to give equal time to thinking about the negatives and the positives that he sees in monasticism, taking it out of its parentheses, at least somewhat, and connecting it more robustly than we did last time to the novel’s other themes. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

As we saw a moment ago, Hugo begins book 7 with the assertion that any human effort to contact the infinite should be treated with respect. But then, he immediately recognizes a “côté hideux que nous exécrons” (p. 526) -- “a hideous side that we detest.” So, given the profound respect that he has for monasticism’s spiritual endeavors, what is its hideous side, that is so hideous that Hugo would use a word as strong as “exécrer” -- “to hate, detest, execrate, abhor?”

Last time, we hinted at where he finds the grotesque in monasteries and convents. We saw him represent Petit-Picpus over and over again as the inside of a tomb, inhabited by ghosts and corpses. But there, this was only one side of a coin; on the other, the other-worldliness of the inside of Petit-Picpus was portrayed as closeness to God, a sort of head start on the afterlife. Ultimately, we saw the grotesque aspects of Petit-Picpus as a part of a combination with its sublime aspects, and together, they corresponded closely to Hugo’s Romantic aesthetic. This idea is repeated here as he says that some Catholic monastic traditions are “rempli[s] du rayonnement noir de la mort” (p. 527) -- “filled with the dark influence of death.”

But his first objection to monasticism here is somewhat different than the simple morbidity of this one convent. After all, he recognized that this particular order was exceptionally strict, and that others had different, less grim ways of life. But all monasticism, by definition, involves a separation from the world, and it is to this separation that Hugo objects. He says that monasteries and convents are “des nœuds à la circulation” (p. 526) -- “kinks in the circulation” of society, places where healthy and productive movement – of work, resources, ideas, or social life – stop, and encumber the process generally. They create a kind of stagnation where there should be vitality. While he recognizes that this can be useful in the early stages of society’s development, when brutality needs to be controlled, the same contemplative inaction that stems violence also slows development of society’s more positive uses of energy. This way of recounting history in sweeping generalizations, its eras like stages of human development, recalls the Preface to Cromwell, where his procedure rested on a similar device. In that document, though, as we saw last week, Christianity’s contemplation of death made it “double,” alive, modern, aesthetically and philosophically complex. Here, though, he emphasizes it doing the opposite, making living creatures come to resemble the statues they adore. Speaking of nuns who spend their days in suffering and contemplation of the image of death that is the crucifix, he asks, “Ces femmes pensent-elles? Non. Veulent-elles? Non. Aiment-elles? Non. Vivent-elles? Non. Leurs nerfs sont devenus des os; leurs os sont devenus des pierres.” (p. 528) -- “Do these women think? No. Do they want? No. Do they love? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have become bones, their bones have become stones.” Having been taken out of circulation, so to speak, to join what is metaphorically presented later as a sort of harem for God, these women’s cloistering deprives them of a vitality that might have been put to use.

Of course, thinking of the convent in this way reminds us of some of the more abstract ways in which Hugo has described the plight of the misérable. Just like a person left uneducated who commits a crime to survive and is sent to prison, or worse, to the guillotine, these women are cut off from life, from productivity, and from a future. We saw social damnation cut our other characters off from the fullness of social life and place them on the other side of an impassable barrier, and the cloister, Hugo seems to say here, does something similar. For the individual, the contemplative life of the monastery may elevate the soul, but for society, the result is the same: people, and all they might have contributed, are lost. This is why, a few pages later, he calls monasticism a “phthisie” (p. 529) for civilization -- that is, tuberculosis. And the context in which he compares monasticism to tuberculosis makes the comparison sound more epidemiological than physiological. He says that monasticism, like tuberculosis “dépeuple” (p. 529) -- “depopulates” and that “Il a été fléau en Europe” (p. 529) -- “It has been an epidemic in Europe.” That is, he seems here to be comparing it less to tuberculosis’s effect on the body (wasting, suffocation) than to its effect on society (needless loss of life). 

The comparison is not perfect – those in the convent have, at least in theory, entered by choice. But that is of course only in theory, as there was a long tradition of younger non-inheriting children of noble families being expected, or forced, to become clergy or join monasteries, and Hugo lists this in a long string of harms done by monasticism not to the social whole, but to individuals: “la violence si souvent faite à la conscience, les vocations forcées, la féodalité s’appuyant au cloître, l’aînesse versant dans le monachisme le trop-plein de la famille” (p. 529) -- “the violence so often done to the conscience, forced vocations, feudalism leaning on the cloister, primogeniture sending families’ overflow into monasticism.” And, of course, the reference to tuberculosis catches our attention chiefly on the level of the individual because of Fantine. The images of separation, of shutting away as if in a tomb, remind us of the asphyxia – maybe the social asphyxia from the Preface – that her disease caused. By connecting the convent’s wasted vitality, the loss of productive life, to the harm done to individuals as well as to tuberculosis, this waste is connected not only to Jean Valjean’s social damnation, but to Fantine’s social asphyxia.

The second charge he levees at the phenomenon of monasticism is its anachronism; it is, simply put, a thing of the past that will not relinquish its existence in the present. It is compared to rancid perfume, spoiled fish, outgrown clothing, or, most strikingly, “la tendresse des cadavres qui reviendraient embrasser les vivants.” (p. 530) -- “the tenderness of cadavers who would come back to embrace the living.” We saw the horror of that two episodes ago, with the imagination of Jean Valjean after seeing the woman engaged in what these nuns call “la réparation” -- “reparation.” Of all of the items mentioned in this list of comparisons, this is the one that most evokes emotion – horror, but also, nostalgia, morbid longing – at the idea that monasticism would want to remain cherished past its useful life. It is this emotion that gives anachronistic institutions, institutions that have outlived their place in society, a hold on the present, and this is perhaps a second reason why images of the living dead, including Jean Valjean’s terrifying vision, are so common in this place. 

Normally, Hugo makes clear in chapter 3, anachronisms don’t have much hold on the present “mais nous ne sommes point en temps ordinaire” (p. 531) -- “but we are not in ordinary times.” The challenge of distinguishing Past from Present in 19th century France is in fact a frequent theme in this novel, and we have seen it elsewhere, in other passages that have required some explanation and interpretation. Most significantly, we saw progress and the passage of time as keys to understanding the Year 1817 chapter that set the stage for Fantine’s introduction at the start of Part 1 book 3, and, of course, in Part 2 book 1, the Waterloo section. In 1817, we’ll remember examining the early part of the Restoration, in which we saw efforts to erase the recent past, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, and to resurrect an older past, that of the pre-Revolutionary monarchy. And, of course, we saw those attempts to be largely destructive and unsuccessful. Napoleon, too, was presented in the Waterloo section as overstaying his welcome, as impeding progress toward a hoped-for future republic by becoming more despotic the longer he remained in power. Progress toward the future, Hugo always insists, is inevitable, not only because time marches forward, but because the future must be, to his way of thinking, a continued realization of the dreams of the Revolution. 

But he is also speaking to his own time, to France in 1862, under the Second Empire, with its own regressive and anti-democratic policies. He mentions theoreticians’ efforts to bring back the past, in which “ils appliquent sur le passé un enduit qu’ils appellent ordre social, droit divin, morale, famille, respect des aïeux, autorité antique, tradition sainte, légitimité, religion” (p. 530) -- “they apply to the past a coating that they call social order, divine right, morality, family, respect for elders, ancient authority, holy tradition, legitimacy, religion.” Some of these values, like divine right and legitimacy, smack of the social and political theories of the Restoration that we mentioned last time. But others, like morality, family, and religion, are drawn from more recent values rhetoric. In both cases, the values that the past was used to support were meant to reinforce the social order – also, of course, at the head of the list here – and to prioritize it over the Revolution and Republic’s ideals of “liberté, égalité, et fraternité,” -- “liberty, equality, and fraternity.” 

The convent, he says here, is this same sort of anachronism. He says that it is “en flagrant délit d’ascétisme au beau milieu de la cité de 89, de 1830 et de 1848” (p. 531) -- “caught in the act of asceticism in the middle of the city of 89, of 1830, and of 1848”-- three years associated with revolutionary movements. For Hugo, as we saw at the conclusion of the Waterloo section, the fact that each of these Revolutionary movements ended less hopefully than it began does not change the Revolutionary thrust of the long arc of his country’s history, and the increasing anachronism of monastic seclusion.

After a break, we’ll finish up with a closer look at the respect that Hugo nonetheless has for monasticism’s practices. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

When Hugo criticized the practice of monasticism as anachronistic and stifling for a society’s vital energy, he did so in a context that made his nuanced position on religion in general a challenging one to convey. Since the Revolution’s official atheism and its insistence on radical separation from the Church, the question of religion had been relatively politicized in France, and relatively polarizing. The ideological divisions around this issue still persist in French culture today, to some extent: conventional wisdom would have it that to believe in God is to be Catholic, and to be Catholic is to be politically conservative. Similarly, progressive politics assume agnosticism or atheism in France even more often than in the US. Today, the growing presence of Islam in French society complicates this equation somewhat, but the general sense of the place of Catholic and Christian beliefs in political life is still inherited from the early 19th century. 

And then, that simplistic picture of two ideological camps was perhaps an even better representation of reality than it is now. At the point of this discussion where he has made the assertions that we have just seen – that monasticism impedes progress and represents a hold-over of the past in the present – and particularly in the general environment of this novel, with its talk of revolution and progressive political ideas, many readers would be inclined to guess that Hugo, like many of his contemporaries, was an anticlerical atheist. 

But one hopes that readers of Les Misérables, the novel that held up a Bishop up as the source and inspiration for its story of human transformation, that has presented each of its most sympathetic characters in comparison to Christ, know better by now. We have discussed from the beginning of our series how this novel builds bridges across these kinds of ideological divides in the name of things that matter more, such as compassion and relief for the suffering, and hope for improved lives for all in the future. His approach to the convent once again makes that mission the priority. 

He fervently defends belief in God in chapter 5 here in the same terms that the Conventionist used back in book 1 – that even from a rational point of view, if the infinite is truly limitless, it must have a self, an intelligence. Even if one rejects dogmas, creeds, and church authorities – and Hugo was inclined to reject them – logic, for him, seemed to make the existence of God inescapable when defined in that way. And in that way of seeing things, prayer is simply the act of putting an individual’s intelligence in contact with that other, infinite mind. He more or less explicitly refuses to endorse any particular dogma on this point when he writes, “Quant au mode de prier, tous sont bons, pourvu qu’ils soient sincères. Tournez votre livre à l’envers, et soyez dans l’infini.” (p. 534) -- “As for how to pray, they’re all good, provided they’re sincere. Turn your book over and be in the infinite.” Even with all his critiques of monasticism, its sincere prayer is declared good. 

But more than that, this definition of prayer reminds us of the Bishop’s faith, way back in part 1, book 1. We’ll recall that it was to a great extent contemplative; that is, even though he performed the masses and rituals of the church, the substance of his faith was in the sort of contemplation that Hugo describes here. We’ll recall him strolling in his garden at night, “ouvrant son âme aux pensées qui tombent de l’Inconnu” (p. 59) -- “opening his soul to the thoughts that fell from the Unknown.” There, “il sentait quelque chose s’envoler hors de lui et quelque chose descendre en lui. Mystérieux échanges des gouffres de l’âme avec les gouffres de l’univers!” (p. 59) -- “he felt something take flight out of him, and something descend into him. Mysterious exchanges of the chasms of the soul with the chasms of the universe!” 

But the Bishop engaged in another activity in his garden, and that was working the earth, cultivating the corner of space that he dedicated to flowers – impractical, perhaps, for Madame Magloire, but for the Bishop, we’ve recalled more than once, the beautiful was as useful as the useful. It is precisely this beauty that is missing in the garden of the Petit-Picpus convent, and precisely this practical concern for “ce qu’on peut cultiver et cueillir” (p. 60) -- “what can be cultivated and picked” that is missing from monastic practice. The convent did, of course, provide education, but its seclusion from the world is its biggest difference from the picture that is painted of the Bishop, and that is what makes its practical impact on the world smaller. And it’s for that, for the ways that it differs from the contemplative and practical faith of the Bishop, that Hugo criticizes it. In its resemblance to him – its faith, its prayer – it receives Hugo’s praise. 

The convent also receives praise for the ways in which it resembles his ideal society. In what he admits is “the ideal convent,” (p. 532), social distinctions of all kinds are erased, and “ils secourent les pauvres, ils soignent les malades. Ils élisent ceux auxquels ils obéissent. Ils se disent l’un à l’autre: mon frère.” (p. 532) -- “They help the poor, they care for the sick. They elect those they obey. They say to one another: my brother.” Having read this novel to this point, we can see this as an attractive alternative to the world that’s been described. From the outset with the Bishop, this sort of existence and interaction with the world has been presented as the remedy for what ails that world. And Hugo sees in it much of what makes up the political ideal of the Republic, as it embodies two thirds of the motto of the French republic, created during the Revolution, that we cited a moment ago.  “Le monastère est le produit de la formule: Égalité, fraternité. Oh! Que la liberté est grande!” (p. 532) -- “The monastery is the product of the formula: equality, fraternity. Oh, how great is liberty!” Notwithstanding the objections to monasticism that he has already stated, it embraces other ideals that are urgently needed. 

All of book 7 expresses, even relishes, the contradictions in monastic life. Hugo has appreciated them aesthetically and he has held in tension his criticism and respect. But these contradictions are less contradictory in the context of this novel, where paradox and contradiction are everywhere. He suggests that monasticism’s motto may as well be “Abdiquer pour régner” (p. 537) -- “Abdicate in order to reign” -- but is that not also what Madeleine did in the courtroom in Arras, what Fantine meant, at least, to do, in leaving Cosette with the Thénardiers, what the Revolutionary spirit did at Waterloo? “Au cloître, l’enfer est accepté en avance d’hoirie sur le paradis” (p. 537) -- “In the cloister, hell is accepted as an advance on the inheritance of paradise.” This is virtually the same logic by which Madeleine said to Fantine, “cet enfer dont vous sortez est la première forme du ciel. Il fallait commencer par là.” (p. 210) -- “This hell from which you are emerging is the first form of heaven. You had to start there.” This was a troubling idea when we saw it at Fantine’s bedside, and it has been a matter of ambivalence about monasticism in this section, which has painted the suffering and asceticism of monastic life in a relatively negative light. But in that same passage, Madeleine associated it with a deeply dysfunctional world, “C’est de cette façon que les hommes font des anges [...] ils ne savent pas s’y prendre autrement.” (p. 210) -- “This is how men make angels [...] they don’t know how to do it any other way.” In other words, a world as imperfect as this only knows one road to the sublime, and it passes through suffering. And as he says this, Jean Valjean is gradually coming to realize that it was just this sort of transformation, this sort of advance on inheritance, that the Bishop was beginning when he gave him his silver and bought his soul. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thanks for listening. In our next episode, we’ll return to our main characters and their desperate need to remain hidden here. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 2, book 8, chapters 1-4, “Strange Echoes.”

[/Music]

For the last two episodes, we’ve been working through digressions – last time, Hugo’s discussion of monasticism in general, as a phenomenon, and the time before that, his portrait of life in his fictional Petit-Picpus convent. Now, we return to our main characters, and we see the plan they create for getting Jean Valjean and Cosette authorization to stay in the convent indefinitely – him as a second gardener, and her as a pensioner. The appeal of this place for Jean Valjean, in addition to the fact that he’s already here, lies in its seclusion for him and in the prospect of a proper education and socialization for Cosette – commodities so valuable that he will take alarming risks for them. 

A convent education would, of course, continue the one begun in the hell that was the Thénardiers’ inn. It’s easy to think that this would represent a complete reversal of fortune for our tiny heroine, and it is undeniable that her life would be vastly improved by the plan that’s concocted in these chapters. Still, though, echoes of her former life persist in this world in surprising ways that show that good fortune is not always the opposite of suffering, but rather, sometimes simply the same elements in different forms. In the final third of today’s episode, we will look at some of the details of the plan that they make here, but first, I would like to look at two characters that we get to know in this section – Mère Innocente and Fauchelevent. They are in many ways characters that are unlike any we have seen, but we’ll also see in them echoes, unbelievably enough, of the Thénardiers, and will consider just what we can make of those resemblances. 

This convent that Hugo has spent so much time vividly creating for us is something unusual in the works of a male writer, especially one like Hugo – it’s a world of women. We saw with Fantine’s story that Hugo is sympathetic to the cause of female suffering, and the novel will take on other questions relating to women’s particular problems, and their power, before it ends. But we have also seen some disappointingly typical 19th-century attitudes toward women, for example in his portrayal of Cosette’s desire to play with a doll as part of a universal female drive toward maternity. Hugo was on the progressive side in some ways around gender, but in others, he was very much a man of his time.

In the female part of the world of Les Misérables, Petit-Picpus occupies an interesting place, and it is there that I would like to begin today. Being an entirely female world, men are completely excluded except in the most peripheral roles – either permanent ones like Fauchelevent’s or the archbishop’s, or occasional ones like the coroner’s. None of these men has complete or permanent access to this world, and all are treated with suspicion for the simple fact that they are men. This is a world where, as we saw when Fauchelevent was first introduced, being male makes a person seem so dangerous as to be avoided the way Jean Valjean was when he was first released from the bagne.

It is worth giving Hugo some credit, I think, for the relatively positive portrayal of such a world. Of all the criticisms he made of monasticism in book 7, we only see women’s monasticism singled out in one instance: in chapter 2, we see its resemblance to a morbid harem that has “le crucifié pour sultan” (p. 528) -- “the crucified man as its sultan,” requiring all of the women’s attention and shutting them off from “toute distraction vivante” (p. 528) -- “any living distraction.” This is given as a paradigm of the living death that characterizes all monasticism, but his objection in these pages is not to this being practiced by women per se; he simply uses “l’antique couvent de femmes” (p. 527) -- “the ancient women’s convent” to create the closest possible resemblance to that other deprivation of liberty, the harem, that was usually considered unacceptable in 19th century France. As he expressed his objection to seeing isolation where he would have preferred to see vital and productive engagement with social life, though, he never suggested that this was less appropriate for women than for men. He never invoked that maternal drive, for example, to suggest that women in particular who dedicated their lives to religion were in some greater violation of nature. In fact, he repeatedly refers to the fact that the most senior among the women in the convent take on the title of mère, or mother, although it is metaphorical, a representation of their relationship to and responsibility for the younger women and girls in the community. They are mères in a way that is not all that different from the way Jean Valjean is – adoptive parents to others whose burden of suffering and exclusion is comparable to their own.

If anything, the women in the convent are more like men than most other women we will meet in Les Misérables. There is just one possible exception to this, and that brings us to our strange comparison to Cosette’s other adoptive mother – unworthy even of the name – Madame Thénardier. We’ll recall that she was described as physically masculine looking, large and angular, and that she was violent, aggressive, and lacking in maternal tenderness, except when it came to her own two daughters. She so lacked in that conventional maternal instinct that alternated between cruelty and neglect for Cosette and for a third child of her own, still a baby in 1823, whom we don’t see, but we do hear, crying and ignored. And yet, even as she manifested these worst traits associated with masculinity, she also displayed some of the worst of femininity as well, including passivity and submission when it came to her husband’s evil schemes, and the degradation of her mind through the reading of trashy novels typically associated with women. We saw her as a hybrid creature, both male and female, who had taken on the worst of each.

The women in the convent, even as they create an exclusively feminine environment, deny the delicacies of their female bodies and refuse to be beautiful, or to consider their physicality at all, including for the purpose of limiting bodily suffering. Any violence or pain they inflict is on themselves, as they submit to the same physical harshness as men in religious orders – hair shirts that give them fevers, literal self-flagellation, and marathon fasting and prayer. But their similarities to men are not all in their asceticism – we also mentioned two weeks ago that the relatively democratic way in which these women organize power within the convent – an elected prioress who is subject to term limits – that created an image that was pretty radical in its day, of women voting to elect other women to positions of power.

The woman who is in this position of power when our characters arrive is Mère Innocente. She was described in book 6 as “érudite, savante, compétente, curieusement historienne, farcie de latin, bourrée de grec, pleine d’hébreu, et plutôt bénédictin que bénédictine” (p. 517) -- “learned, knowledgeable, competent, a curious historian, stuffed with Latin, packed with Greek, filled with Hebrew, and more male benedictine than female.” The level and type of education described here would have been recognizably masculine in the 19th century, and relatively elite at that. But, she supposedly gets this gifted mind and penchant for education from a female ancestor, who also put her intelligence to work for the benedictine order, writing saints’ lives. Unlike Madame Thénardier, who eroded her intelligence by low-quality, stereotypically feminine reading, Mère Innocente is a great intellect beyond the level usually allowed for women. 

In her tête-à-tête with Fauchelevent, we also see her exercise her power with assuredness. She wants to get what she needs from Fauchelevent before granting his request, and she even ignores where Fauchelevent claims the two intersect, when he uses her request for heavy work to segue into how helpful his so-called brother would be in just such a task. As he is only the gardener, an employee in the convent that she oversees, and now needs a favor from her besides, she is legitimately in a position of power over him, and the scene betrays no hint of their genders in any way mitigating that power discrepancy. We can compare this to Madame Thénardier, who cowered at her husband’s authority, and only exercised power over the children she dominated with abuse. But Mère Innocente exerts her own authority with no more force than necessary, confident that her competence and position will speak for themselves. 

During this meeting, we come upon yet another feature of the text that we have been following: a multi-page monologue, this time inspired by the conflict between civil law and the religious laws to which Mère Innocente has dedicated her life. The convent’s deceased member, Mère Crucifixion, has requested to be buried beneath the church, and this is in violation of the city’s laws for health and sanitation – we’ll talk more about burial traditions in the third part of today’s episode, and next time. But for the moment, I’d like to look at the flood of words that this issue provokes, and how it contributes to Mère Innocente’s overall masculine profile. She is not the only woman to have uttered such a monologue; Fantine went on for pages at a time as well, in the police station during the incident where Madeleine ordered her freed. But, her long monologue was full of feeling, and desperation, and displayed confusion about the facts. Mère Innocente’s monologue here showcases encyclopedic knowledge, and in that, it more closely resembles Tholomyes’s.

But even Tholomyès’s knowledge is surpassed by Mère Innocente, because she is serious and earnest – and, well, sober. She does go on at length, but that is where the similarity to other monologues like this ends. She has a clear thesis: religious law (of Benedict and Bernard) is superior to the law that would forbid burying Mère Crucifixion under the chapel, and she intends to act accordingly without reservation or remorse. As she lays this thesis out, it’s an opportunity for Hugo to showcase the intelligence of this character. He had portrayed monasticism as a bit backward, maybe, certainly an artifact of a less enlightened time, of an earlier stage of human progress. But even though she is a member of a monastic order, this particular human being is not stupid, backward, or unrefined. While she may bring her intelligence to bear in a way that Hugo finds less than ideal, that intelligence is nonetheless worthy of admiration, and he gives us this mini-digression in the form of her monologue to admire it. Still, he continues the double-edged, ambivalent attitude that he has always had toward this phenomenon. Even as she herself sets her community in opposition to the modern world – this time, the specific modern phenomenon of municipal oversight of death – she shows the sophistication that can exist inside convent walls. 

At the same time, the appearance of this monologue on the page may signal what the others have: that it has an audience that doesn’t quite understand its contours. Fauchelevent, her only listener, never responds to its content. He has already agreed to keep the women’s secret by the time she begins speaking. He may be able to understand the argument she is making, but he is indifferent to the religious laws handed down by the benedictine order, and he is obviously flexible on the matter of city laws. Her argument, for him, is simply superfluous, and in that sense, it falls on deaf ears borne as much of disinterest as inability to understand.

So, in a variety of ways – in her erudition and intelligence, in her certainty of her power, and in the convent’s merciless ascetic practices, Hugo brings Mère Innocente and the other nuns into a kind of genderless existence, even masculinity. We have seen women deprived of their gender in this novel before, usually as a result of a holiness that causes gender, as well as other earthly characteristics, to seem beside the point – this was the case of the Bishop’s sister Baptistine or like Fantine’s nurse, who also happened to be a nun, Sister Simplice. Suffering, too, can deprive misérables of gender, as we saw with Fantine, whose feminine beauty gradually fell prey to her poverty. Those women were described not as masculine, though, but through negatives – the narrator claimed to barely be able to say they were women, for example. But, they were not described as men. The only example we have of a female character compared to a man or described as having masculine characteristics is the monstrous example of Madame Thénardier. Mère Innocente, whose name snaps into a new kind of significance when we make this comparison, will, if all goes as planned, take over where Madame Thénardier left off in Cosette’s upbringing, and we can hope that her masculine motherhood will have a different outcome for the child.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file, and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

In the first part of today’s episode, we looked at the character of Mère Innocente, and the surprising echoes of Madame Thénardier to be found in a character that is, on the whole, very nearly her opposite. The other character who is relatively new to us here is Fauchelevent. When we first arrived in the convent, we observed his resemblances to Jean Valjean, and in particular, the way he’s subjected to a kind of social damnation – within the walls of the convent, he wears a bell that not only physically recalls the ball and chain of a convict, but also serves the purpose of warning the nuns to keep their distance from him. Jean Valjean’s yellow passport had warned that, “Cet homme est très dangereux.” (p. 79) -- “This man is very dangerous,” and Fauchelevent’s bell seems to warn, more simply, “This man is a man,” and for the nuns, that makes him, as he puts it “dangereux à rencontrer” (p. 484) -- “dangerous to meet.”

But unlike Jean Valjean, Fauchelevent says this without pain or anguish; as we saw before, he takes being avoided in this way as simply a quirk of his life here. In the two years he has spent in the convent, Fauchelevent has retained an ironic distance from the lifestyle of these women. This irony will be a first hint at what will become an unusual contribution that Fauchelevent makes to the novel: comedy. If you’re reading in translation, I hope it is a good enough translation to convey the generally lighthearted tone that he brings to everything he touches. That can be a test for a translator, and the worst thing I could do for it here is to explain the jokes – that’s the fastest way to kill humor. But in the original, in a novel that, overall, has so far offered very little in the way of levity, the shift in tone here is remarkable. Even its brighter moments – we might think of Fantine’s early days in Paris, or the discussion of the Bishop’s peaceful life of generosity – even these moments aren’t exactly comical. Fantine’s idyllic love affair bears the imprint of the coming doom, and the Bishop’s virtue and contentment are punctuated with his wit, but don’t have a more generalized comic tone. But that tone seems to follow Fauchelevent everywhere he goes. As he considers Jean Valjean’s problem – his need to avoid discovery and find a way to make an officially sanctioned entry into the convent – the question is urgent and the situation is dire, but Fauchelevent never falters from his characteristic turns of phrase. Hugo seems to delight in the incisive and pragmatic vision of the common man, and the laughter that seems to inhabit his demeanor. 

Part of what contributes to this tone is the fact that he doesn’t take the religious devotion in this place seriously, but happily plays along to his own ends. When he’s explaining the convent’s various practices and rituals surrounding death to Jean Valjean, even the grim subject matter doesn’t seem to make a dent in this tone. For example, regarding the coroner’s visit, he says, “Elles n’aiment pas beaucoup cette visite-là, ces bonnes dames. Un médecin, ça ne croit à rien. Il lève le voile. Il lève même quelquefois autre chose,” and later, “Il a regardé, et dit: elle est morte, c’est bon.” (p. 545-546) -- “The ladies don’t much like that visit. Doctors don’t believe in anything. He lifts the veil. Sometimes he lifts other things” and later “He looked and said: she’s dead, it’s alright.” Hardly a reverent tone of grief for the end of a saintly life. In the conversation with Mère Innocente that we see in this section, this remains true as well. Her earnestness, and the intensity of her feeling about the convent’s obligations toward civil law, don’t seem to affect him one way or the other; he comes into the conversation with his own agenda – to get permission to bring his brother and his brother’s granddaughter into the convent. To find favor sufficient to accomplish this, he spends the chapter easily agreeing with everything Mère Innocente says, often with an “Amen,” as the narrator tells us he is “imperturbable dans cette façon de se tirer d’affaire toutes les fois qu’il entendait du latin” (p. 555) -- “unshakeable in this way of muddling through each time he heard Latin.” He could care less what the Latin means, or about the significance of Mère Innocente’s esoteric references, but his willingness to agree without understanding is presented by the narrator as funny.

And Fauchelevent is indeed harmless, and even potentially life-saving for Jean Valjean and Cosette in this desperate moment, but there is another way of reading his relationship to those around him that nonetheless connects him to the novel’s darker corners. In this scene with Mère Innocente, his sneakiness and deception, his false agreeability, and his secret irreverence, bring to mind Thénardier. But as with the comparison between Mère Innocente and Madame Thénardier, I don’t think that we can argue that this resemblance suggests an extensive connection; instead, it is a sort of echo, a study in the proximity that can exist between good and evil. Still, beyond the short list I’ve just made, a few other characteristics do support this comparison. 

But it bears saying first, for those who know the musical, that humor is not really one of them. We’ve talked about Fauchelevent’s comic tone, and in the musical, the Thénardiers are used as much-needed comic relief. But that does make them quite a bit less menacing there than they are here. Here they aren’t particularly comical. Those two characteristics, humor and threat, tend to work against each other. In fact, we might say that before he proves his trustworthiness in this part of the novel, the tone surrounding Fauchelevent is a primary signal that he is not a threat – for example, his nonchalance and gentle mockery of the nuns are an early sign that we don’t need to worry about him reporting Jean Valjean out of respect for their authority. Making Thénardier comical downplays his willingness to do harm, the threat he represents to anyone who stands in his way, and the novel takes care not to do that.

The first similarity between Fauchelevent and Thénardier is that both men are described as between classes, as hybrid in this characteristic that is so central to the novel. We have often seen characters described in terms of social class, and this has often linked them to each other. This has usually been true of our misérables: both Jean Valjean and Fantine, for example, come from peasant backgrounds, with uncertain origins and names, as unimportant to history as the animals to whom they are often compared. But bourgeois characters have also been brought into parallel with each other, such as when Bamatabois, just before he put snow down Fantine’s dress, was compared to Tholomyès, who started all of her troubles when he abandoned her. In this same way, both Fauchelevent and Thénardier are presented as between two social classes. In the initial sketch of the Thénardiers, just after Fantine leaves Cosette with them, they are described as “entre la classe dite moyenne et la classe dite inférieure” (p. 160) -- “between the class called middle and the class called inferior.” Fauchelevent, similarly, is “un peu rustre, un peu citadin” (p. 542) -- “a bit uncouth, a bit citified.”

He also comes into our central characters’ lives in a similar way. When Fantine found the Thénardiers, she was in a position that bears subtle comparison to Jean Valjean’s – in a precarious moment of her life, fleeing, in a sense, a past that pursued her and risked causing her more trouble, hoping for a safer means of survival, in need of cover and of care for her child. She had no human pursuer, as Jean Valjean did, but I think it is difficult not to see pursuit and, as we said at the time, a dynamic of predation and prey in her relationship to society in general. When Fantine happened upon Madame Thénardier and her two girls, the narrator tells us, “Elle crut voir au-dessus de cette auberge le mystérieux ICI de la providence” (p. 157) -- “She thought she saw above this inn the mysterious HERE of Providence.” It was this same force that guided Jean Valjean through the streets of Paris to this place, as, in the same way that Cosette followed him blindly that night, “Il lui semblait qu’il tenait, lui aussi, quelqu’un de plus grand que lui par la main; il croyait sentir un être qui le menait, invisible” (p. 463-464) -- “It seemed to him that he too held someone bigger than him by the hand; he thought he felt a being leading him, invisible.” During the suspenseful chase scene that we saw three weeks ago, we wanted very badly to believe in this feeling of Jean Valjean’s, but, given the outcome Fantine’s similar intuition, we would be remiss if we didn’t also question Jean Valjean’s feeling of being guided by the hand. This novel often presents us with those sorts of religious intuitions, but it does sometimes show them to be mistaken, and Fantine’s trust in the Thénardiers is perhaps the most significant example of that. Such intuitions need to be tested against the larger context and the rest of the story.

Still, this comparison between Fauchelevent and Thénardier, and the similarity between the dangers lying in wait for Fantine and Jean Valjean, are limited. The class hybridity in Fauchelevent is rendered harmless, because it is transparent. Thénardier had been sort of hard to figure as a result of his, and he manifested the worst of the various parts that he was made of, and none of what might redeem them, in the same way his wife combined the worst masculine and feminine characteristics. Thénardier’s hybridity is his “classe bâtarde composée de gens grossiers parvenus et de gens intelligents déchus, [...] qui combine quelques-uns des défauts de la seconde [classe] avec presque tous les vices de la première, sans avoir le généreux élan de l’ouvrier ni l’ordre honnête du bourgeois” (p. 160-161) -- his “bastard class composed of ill-mannered social-climbers and intelligent people in decline, [...] that combines some of the faults of the latter with almost all of the vices of the former, without the generous impulses of the working class or the upright order of the bourgeois.” Fauchelevent, on the other hand, is clearly presented as a peasant with some education, and has taken on good characteristics of the latter without obscuring his true self or losing the qualities of his origins. “Il était paysan, mais il avait été tabellion, ce qui ajoutait de la chicane à sa finesse, et de la pénétration à sa naïveté.” (p. 542) -- “He was a peasant, but he had been a notary, which added complication to his subtlety and insight to his naïveté.” Deception and sneakiness are not his normal modes; he is described as spontaneous, and sincere. “Ses défauts et ses vices, car il en avait eu, étaient de surface” (p. 543) -- “His faults and his vices, for he had some, were on the surface.” The result is his crucial difference from Thénardier, and that is that the sort of trickery we see in this section and the next is exceptional for him, a set of skills to which he has recourse only because of the desperate need of the man who saved his life. 

And, of course, he is strongly compelled to help the man he calls Madeleine primarily as a matter of gratitude, a sentiment that is unknown to Thénardier. For Fauchelevent, it has been especially his time in the convent that has made him more generous. This environment “avait détruit la personnalité en lui, et avait fini par lui rendre nécessaire une bonne action quelconque.” (p. 542) -- “had destroyed the personality in him, and had ended up making him feel a need for some kind of good action.” Doing good is compared to a thirst for good wine, but one that comes, first of all, from a destruction of the ego. This is the factor that we might begin to read as the difference between hybrid characters that retain all the negative characteristics of the elements that compose them, as the Thénardiers do, and characters who retain the positive characteristics, as Mère Innocente and Fauchelevent do. The Thénardiers’ ends are always selfish, but in these new characters, selflessness – again, both in the sense of generosity and of the gradual erosion of the self – turns everything to good. That is true of the insight that comes from education, the spontaneity and simplicity of the common people, masculinity, or maternity. Or, in the case of another selfless character, kindred spirit to both of them, even the darker skills of a convict.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Finally, before we finish up today, a few observations about the plan that Jean Valjean and Fauchelevent put in place to allow Jean Valjean to exit the convent, and thus to make an authorized entrance into true security. 

First, like the characters we find there, and like Jean Valjean himself, the convent is a place of paradoxes for him. It is “Le plus dangereux et le plus sur” (p. 540) -- “The most dangerous and the most safe,” precisely because his being there is so thoroughly forbidden as to be impossible and “Habiter un lieu impossible, c’était le salut” (p. 541) -- “To live in an impossible place was salvation.” Fauchelevent phrases it another way when, in his typically jovial turn of phrase, he sums up the problem to be solved: “Maintenant que vous êtes ici, comment allez-vous faire pour y entrer?” (p. 543) -- “Now that you’re in here, how are you going to get in?” Given the comic tone of the whole section, it is easy to consider these various reformulations of the problem to simply be Hugo playing with words and paradoxes, reveling in the strangeness of the predicament he’s dreamed up. But at the same time, it fits into a framework that we’ve seen at other moments of transition, for Jean Valjean as well as for other characters. We’ll recall that he found the place blind, wandering in an unplanned zigzag through the streets, more concerned with what was behind him than where he was going, holding that mysterious hand that he sensed in the darkness. He came here without intent – in the same way he stole from Petit-Gervais, or traveled to Arras to Champmathieu’s trial. He is, in virtually every sense, in a place “of which he is not yet capable.”

A second observation regarding this section is that with all the death and danger of death that we have seen, this is the first time its various ceremonies have been discussed. Fantine was of course buried unceremoniously in a common grave, and that common grave found its echo in the mass of death and destruction, the image of misère, that was Waterloo.

In these ceremonies of death, the medical meets the religious, the physical meets the spiritual, and as we hinted in the first part of today’s episode, the modern meets the ancient. These nuns want to preserve their cloistered existence after death, and this is challenging, given the modern government’s requirements. They don’t like having to have the doctor come, as Fauchelevent so glibly observed, because it’s an intrusion into their space, sometimes, even, examining the deceased’s body. But confirmation of death by a medical expert, an exceedingly modern phenomenon, was increasingly considered normal at this time and was increasingly bound up with legal procedures surrounding death. Then, Mère Crucifixion adds a second layer of complexity to all this with her wish to be buried under the chapel. This type of burial was an old practice throughout Europe. Many old churches and cathedrals have a crypt beneath them, and some, especially those where people of note might be buried, are open to visitors today. But as the text implies here, in the 19th century, higher urban populations and a better understanding of sanitation led to laws against this. 

So Mère Crucifixion’s request is illegal, but the nuns do not hesitate to violate civil law when they see divine law as higher, as we see Mère Innocente explain at length. This is not the first time we’ve seen a religious person’s obedience to what they see as a higher law outweigh the importance of the laws of the land. The Bishop, of course, lied to the police when he gave Jean Valjean his silver and his candlesticks, and, less memorably but not less importantly, we’ll remember all the way back in episode 2, that he considered, at least, giving stolen church goods to the poor when bandits returned them, since they were already stolen, and “la moitié de l’aventure était accomplie” (p. 30) -- “half the job was done.” And Sister Simplice, when Jean Valjean had escaped from the jail in Montreuil-sur-mer, told the first lies of her life to Javert to cover for him. These nuns have a different set of priorities in their understanding of divine law, but their readiness to disregard human laws is the same. In a book where human laws come off as badly as they do here, their repeated calling into question by men and women of the cloth, the very paradigm of answering a higher call, is at the heart of the novel’s thesis. Once we move into Part 3, the constant presence of formal religion will give way to other themes, but these first two parts will have laid a solid foundation for thinking about law and authority, and all that might challenge them.

As Jean Valjean and Fauchelevent contemplate the problem before them the idea to use Mère Crucifixion’s coffin to get Jean Valjean out of the convent is before their eyes for an implausibly long time before they see it. In particular, they anticipate it in the exchange where Fauchelevent marvels at the night’s dramatic events. He begins a sentence by saying, “Mère Crucifixion est morte et le père Madeleine…” (p. 547) -- “Mère Crucifixion is dead and le père Madeleine…” and Jean Valjean interrupts him “Est enterré” (p. 547) -- “is buried.” Fauchelevent responds to this, turning his pessimism to hope, “Si vous étiez ici tout à fait, ce serait un véritable enterrement,” (p. 547) -- “if you were fully here, it would be a real burial.” The layers of meaning in this exchange are remarkable. First, when Jean Valjean supplies that Madeleine is “buried,” it expresses both pessimism about the grave danger, so to speak, that he is in, and more ironically, the fact that the père Madeleine that Fauchelevent believes he has before him hasn’t existed for a year. But, Fauchelevent’s response makes this metaphorical death not a dreaded danger but the hoped-for happy-ending of any comedy: if he could arrange things so that he was there with permission, it would be a real burial, that is, he’d be well and truly hidden – so well hidden that only death and burial would be more complete. So, in this moment, Jean Valjean is already dead, is in danger of death, and is hoping for death, all at once, and the practical solution to their problem is also hiding in that riddle.

Jean Valjean recalls this grim joke when he finally suggests the solution of burying himself alive. This solution is associated with the bagne by the narrator, and it horrifies Fauchelevent, whose sensibilities have not been hardened by the same level of suffering. Once again, the phrase “social asphyxia” from the preface finds imagery when the narrator tells us “vivre longtemps dans une boîte, trouver de l’air où il n’y en a pas, économiser sa respiration des heures entières, savoir étouffer sans mourir, c’était là un des sombres talents de Jean Valjean” (p. 563-564) -- “living for a long time in a box, finding air where there is none, economizing breath for hours, knowing how to suffocate without dying, that was one of the dark talents of Jean Valjean.” Social asphyxia, like literal asphyxia, is, alas, something Jean Valjean knows how to survive in hopes of escaping the bagne.

And we can see this plan as a second phase in Jean Valjean’s escape from his second stint in the bagne. The first was on the Orion. When we read about that incident, we recalled parallels between the rescue there and the rescue of Fauchelevent from under his cart. Both instances involved a nearly superhuman life-saving rescue, and both rescues also echoed an important metaphor that the novel uses to figure social injustice and exclusion: the ever-present man overboard as Jean Valjean fell from the Orion, and the pyramid image of society’s structure, in which Jean Valjean saw himself at the bottom, being crushed under a great weight like Fauchelevent under his cart. Now, with this plan, we fear a third image of exclusion, social asphyxia, will be added to the list. But we also see a final way in which this last part of the escape echoes the first: both involve a deeply symbolic simulated death on the part of Jean Valjean, with hope of resurrection into a new phase of life. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. The podcast will be on vacation for the next couple weeks, but when we return, we’ll see this grim and risky plan play out. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 2, Book 8, chapters 5-9, “Death and Other Happy Endings.”

[/Music]

Comedy is an ancient genre, with conventions that date, in the European tradition, back to at least the ancient Greeks, and they persist to this day. Modern TV sitcoms, for example, routinely follow basic plotlines and employ character types that are far older than television. Think of how often you’ve seen this: a problem presents itself, and a group of mostly sympathetic, relatable characters cook up some sort of solution that is a bit risky and ridiculous, involving deception or a ruse. Often something goes wrong with this plan at the story’s climax, and tension builds around the danger of the situation becoming truly serious, but things always work out in the end. The old saw about sitcoms always solving problems in 30 minutes or less is actually a characteristic that they inherit from much older traditions in comedy, where positive resolution, a happy ending, is a long-standing part of the reassurance they provide. 

In our last episode, we talked about the comic tone that accompanies Fauchelevent everywhere he goes, and in the section for this week, as we see the plan they made last week play out, it does so as if it were a comedy in this tradition. In a macabre twist, though, most of the plot of this comedy takes place in a cemetery. Before we continue, just a few words about this setting. It is Vaugirard cemetery, which I have marked on our Google map. It is very far from the supposed location of this fictional convent – if you compare the modern map to the 1823 map that we’ve referenced before, you’ll see that this locale was not even in the city limits then, and it was on the far side of the city and across the river from where the convent was. Hugo invents a pretext here for having the Petit-Picpus nuns buried in this cemetery, claiming that the land used to belong to their community, so it was a sort of compromise with the city, which was forcing them to bury their departed sisters outside the convent walls. But the most likely reason why Hugo chooses this cemetery is personal: Hugo’s mother was buried there in 1821, as was Victor Lahorie, his godfather who assumed many of the roles of his father in Hugo’s childhood; when the senior Hugo was away on campaigns as a general in the Napoleonic wars, Lahorie was a tutor for the children and lover to Madame Hugo. Interestingly for this section of the novel, Lahorie, a royalist, had conspired against Napoleon and lived in hiding for some time in a small hut in the Hugos’ garden. The child Victor had a great deal of affection for him. In 1812, as a result of another conspiracy, Lahorie was arrested and executed. The burial we see here resonates powerfully with this detail of Hugo’s biography, as it combines an adoptive father who hides from the law in a garden, with a mother – in this case, “mother” is the title of the senior nun whose grave this was supposed to be. Incidentally, Hugo’s real father, who died in 1828, was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. This cemetery is better known one today, and is a stop on many tourist itineraries in Paris as the final resting place of many well-known figures of France’s past – as well as Jim Morrison of The Doors. Père Lachaise is mentioned in this section of Les Misérables as the more correct and desirable one for the respectable bourgeois. Hugo expressed distaste for Père-Lachaise, but when his brother Eugène died in 1837, he was also buried there, and Hugo had his mother moved to Père-Lachaise then as well. 

So the Vaugirard cemetery is the stage on which Fauchelevent’s comedy will play out. As they arrive at the cemetery, he even seems to be a character on stage, expressing his supreme confidence in his double ruse in a moment that resembles a theatrical aside, “Fauchelevent, heureux, regarda le corbillard et se frotta ses grosses mains en disant à demi-voix: --En voilà une farce!” (p. 568) -- “Fauchelevent, happy, looked at the hearse and rubbed his big hands together, saying softly, ‘What a farce!’” This sort of obliviousness to what’s coming on the part of the conspirator is a typical moment in a comic plot, and for audiences who are familiar enough with the genre to expect that his confidence is misplaced, it can provide a bit of ironic humor. 

Even when he discovers that his grave digger friend has died, the tone remains comical. The narrator himself joins in the fun, commenting, “Fauchelevent s’était attendu à tout, excepté à ceci, qu’un fossoyeur pût mourir. C’est pourtant vrai; les fossoyeurs eux-mêmes meurent.” (p. 568) -- “Fauchelevent had expected everything except this, that a grave digger might die. And yet, it’s true, grave diggers themselves can die.” Fauchelevent’s own reaction to this complication also manages to keep the tone at the graveside comical by translating his concern into a sort of nervous laughter, followed by the phrase, “Ah! Comme il arrive de drôles de choses!” (p. 569) -- “Oh, what funny things can happen!” He doesn’t appear to take this death any more seriously than that of Mère Crucifixion, and his principal concern, as the scene progresses, seems to be how he will proceed with the plan to get the gravedigger out of the graveyard. He transitions from his strangely lighthearted grief to an invitation to drink together via a pun on the phrase “bon vivant,”--literally, “good living man”, but also meaning what the French phrase has come to mean in English, someone who likes to indulge in life’s pleasures. It’s unfortunate that Mestienne is now a dead man, because he was a good living man, and for the purposes of Fauchelevent’s plan, it was also handy that he enjoyed a drink or two. This persistent joking about death, pronounced by a grave digger at the edge of a grave, recalls the opening scene of the final act of Hamlet, and we’ll recall that Hugo admired Shakespeare a great deal precisely for the way he mixed genres, and allowed the base and macabre into his work is these same sorts of ways. 

But, despite all this joking the situation is, so to speak, grave. We don’t meet Mestienne, of course, but his successor seems to be his opposite, not a bon vivant at all, but serious and diligent. Although he provides the complication in Fauchelevent’s comedy, he is hardly a villain, and given the reminders he provides of the perils surrounding the poor, we can’t fault him his diligence. He has seven children, just like Jean Valjean’s sister, and we know how that family’s dire need ended up precipitating the tragic events of Jean Valjean’s life. The motivation for his seriousness, then, is transparent; he avoids alcohol in order to focus on making an honest living, because “Leur faim est ennemie de ma soif” (p. 570) -- “Their hunger is the enemy of my thirst.” He was a man of letters – his father worked at a military school, and prioritized his education, but then lost money in stocks, so Gribier has had to work for a living. But thanks to his education, in addition to the hard physical labor we see him resort to here, he is also a public scribe, someone who makes money writing letters dictated by people who can’t write themselves. This brings to mind the practitioner of that profession that Fantine employed in Montreuil-sur-mer. We’ll remember that that public scribe did drink, and when the town gossips wanted to know where Fantine’s letters were going, they had used this fact to her detriment. So it’s difficult to fault Gribier his seriousness, because even though he is part of this odd comic interlude, he is still in Les Misérables, and we all understand the precariousness of life for the poor and this working man’s terror of the one small mistake that will spell his end. In other words, he is a very Les Misérables complication for a comedy that is, we can’t help but notice, a bit out of place in this novel to begin with.   

When it becomes apparent that this new grave digger is impossible to distract, chapter 5 ends with a repetition of the phrase that had signaled the opening of the comedy’s complication, “What a farce!” Only now, Fauchelvent’s tone is somewhat more worried. He finally resorts to an expedient that would also be at home in a sitcom – he surreptitiously slips the card that would allow them to exit the cemetery without paying a fine from Gribier’s pocket. The fine for needing to exit without the card is 15 francs, which is, as we’ve seen, a not insubstantial sum of money for our relatively poor characters, enough to make the absence of the card, when Gribier discovers it, a higher priority than finishing the work at hand. So Fauchelevent’s intelligence and spontaneity--both characteristics that we saw last time--allow him to adjust his plan, and transform the same character trait in Gribier that nearly ruined the plan into the one that saves it. The priority he gives to his family’s financial stability, to avoiding the many pitfalls of working class life, motivates him to go to great lengths to avoid this fine. 

Fauchelevent’s comedy ends comedically – it all works out in the end. Jean Valjean is extracted from the grave without any permanent injury, Gribier’s evening’s work is done and his card is retrieved, and Fauchelevent’s double ruse is successful. We might well quibble about the happiness of the scene that Fauchelevent finds at Gribier’s home, where “la mère avait pleuré, les enfants probablement avaient été battus; traces d’une perquisition acharnée et bourrue. Il était visible que le fossoyeur avait éperdument cherché sa carte, et fait tout responsable de cette perte dans le galetas, depuis sa cruche jusqu’à sa femme” (p. 579-580) -- “the mother had been crying, the children had probably been beaten; traces of a relentless and bad-tempered search. It was visible that the gravedigger had searched frantically for his card, and held everything in the place responsible for its loss, from the water jug to his wife.” Fauchelevent’s ruse was not victimless, but in accordance with the conventions of a comedy, we are asked to pass over this suffering – all’s well that ends well, one might say – and the chapter ends with a joke about who will buy whom drinks at the convent’s next burial. 

But even during this typical comedy, the Les Misérables that we know lurks beneath the surface, not only in the details of Gribier’s life behind the scenes, but inside the coffin that sits silently at the center of the scene. More on that coffin when we return. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file, and extras, or you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

We have seen several examples of parallel narratives since the beginning of this novel, moments when the narrator has told the same story twice, from different points of view. Most recently, we saw Javert chase Jean Valjean through the streets of Paris first from Jean Valjean’s point of view, then from Javert’s. We saw Jean Valjean discover Cosette in the woods from both characters’ points of view successively. Early in the novel, we saw Jean Valjean arrive at the Bishop’s house through the eyes of our narrator, and then we saw it recounted and commented upon in a letter from Mlle Baptistine. In this section we have an especially interesting example of parallel narratives, as we see the journey into the cemetery from Fauchelevent’s point of view, then we see, or rather, feel it from Jean Valjean’s point of view before returning to the conclusion of Fauchelevent’s comedy. This chapter, chapter 6, is extraordinary precisely because of the vocabulary challenge I just had: it is a full chapter with no visual description whatsoever, from an author that we’ve seen to have a keen eye for visual description. He removes that altogether for chapter 6 by confining himself to the point of view of a man in a coffin. It’s the funeral ceremony from the perspective of the deceased, including the prayers at the graveside and the sprinkling of holy water, almost certainly among the grimmest narratives imaginable, that breaks up the comedic tone of the rest of the scene. Then, chapter 7 comes back to the more cheerful perspective of the living. 

The story that’s told in chapter 6 ends by evoking a fear that is not uncommon – being buried alive. This was an even more reasonable and common fear before the era of modern medicine, as death was confirmed by less scientific, and less certain means. We’ve already seen one way this was done in this novel, in the mirror that was held beneath the nose of the person who was believed to have died; Jean Valjean discovered that his hair had turned white after the Champmathieu affair by looking in a mirror designated for this purpose. The problem was that methods like this weren’t exactly foolproof, and a person in a deep coma or similar state could, it was believed, pass for dead, be buried, and wake up under ground. The theoretical possibility seemed plausible to people, a few documented cases of scenarios similar to this existed, and fiction and urban legend amplified the possibility. Fear of premature burial, or taphophobia, was pervasive enough that by the end of 19th century, there were a variety of designs of safety coffins, with an arrangement such as a string in the coffin that was attached to a bell above ground – with one of these handy setups, if you were buried alive by mistake, you could just pull the string and ring the bell, hopefully alerting someone like Gribier or the guard at the gate of the cemetery, who could rescue you before your air ran out. I’ll put a picture or two of these safety coffins on the website for those who might be interested. 

And for Jean Valjean, the realization that he may be being buried alive shakes even the hardened fearlessness of the convict, and the last line of the chapter reads, “Il est des choses plus fortes que l’homme le plus fort. Jean Valjean perdit connaissance” (p. 573). -- “There are things that are stronger than the strongest man. Jean Valjean lost consciousness.” The shovelfuls of dirt that have landed on his coffin have only just blocked one of his air holes; he has not yet run out of air; this loss of consciousness is a result, simply, of terror. But it also brings him into a growing group of misérables who have lost consciousness at critical moments of change in their lives. We mentioned this in passing when Madeleine rescued Fantine from Javert’s clutches in the police station, and at the end of the scene, she fainted. We allowed, at the time, that the physiological explanation of her illness combined with emotional strain was sufficient to explain her fainting. But it was also true, as we saw then, that Madeleine’s kindness was leading her to “changer toute son âme” (p. 207) -- “change her whole soul,” and accept care and forgiveness. Cosette, too, when they first arrived in the convent’s garden, gave Jean Valjean a terrible fright when she fell asleep and turned pale from the cold, and we see here in chapter 9 that she too is on the threshold of a new phase in her young life. 

But Jean Valjean’s loss of consciousness here is perhaps the clearest example we’ve seen yet of this phenomenon signaling a transition significant enough to be called a death and resurrection, a change in life that might indeed be an entirely new life. This example is especially clear because of the circumstances – he loses consciousness in a coffin, underground. Even beyond that, back in the comic environment of the story from Fauchelevent’s point of view, after he gets the coffin open, other signs of death persist. When Fauchelevent first sees him, Jean Valjean is pale and unconscious, and Fauchelevent believes he’s dead. Seeing this, Fauchelevent unleashes a monologue – again, a sign that he is misunderstanding what is before him. But he is also understandably overwhelmed by the emotional intensity of the situation. When Jean Valjean opens his eyes, it startles Fauchelevent, and the narrator explains this by way of the event’s more important, metaphorical meaning, “Voir un mort est effrayant, voir une résurrection l’est presque autant” (p. 577) -- “It is frightening to see a dead man, and it is almost as much so to see a resurrection.” Interestingly, by witnessing this resurrection, Fauchelevent comes into another resemblance with Jean Valjean or, as he calls him, Madeleine. We’ll remember that Mary Magdalene, Marie-Madeleine in French, was said to be the first person to see the resurrected Christ, an experience that Fauchelevent, albeit much to his terror and without much reverence, has now shared. 

When Jean Valjean fully regains consciousness, he says very little at first, just “Je m’endormais” (p. 577) -- “I was falling asleep”  and “J’ai froid” (p. 578) -- “I’m cold.” Each of these might be seen as euphemisms for death, but they might also be seen simply as casual observations; conveying the experience we saw him have at the end of chapter 6, when he hears the dirt fall on the coffin and passes out in terror as “falling asleep” is something of an understatement, but it’s easy to read it as intended to calm an obviously panicked Fauchelevent. A few minutes later, after they’ve replaced the dirt in the grave on top of the now-empty coffin, the narrator tells us that Jean Valjean is walking stiffly “Dans cette bière il s’était roidi et était devenu un peu cadavre. L’ankylose de la mort l’avait saisi entre ces quatre planches. Il fallut, en quelque sorte, qu’il se dégelât du sépulcre.” (p. 578) -- “In that coffin, he had stiffened and had become a bit of a cadaver. The ankylosis of death had seized him between those four planks. He needed, in a sense, to thaw out from the sepulcher.” But neither the narrator nor Jean Valjean dramatizes this here, and it is presented as if it’s little more than a colorful way of describing the stiff joints of a 55-year-old man who hasn’t moved in hours. When Fauchelevent observes this stiffness, it’s part of the comedy, the death metaphors pass for more graveyard humor, and Jean Valjean responds, essentially, that he’ll just walk it off.

But just as we saw with the other parts of Fauchelevent’s comedy, Les Misérables lurks beneath. However much light is made of this experience, it is impossible to ignore that this character who is so often compared to a martyr, to a scapegoat, to Christ himself, passes through yet another experience that resembles a death and resurrection. And, more morbidly even than that, this death is one that, so long as it is metaphorical, is not entirely unwanted. He experiences a deep calm inside the coffin. “Les quatre planches du cercueil dégagent une sorte de paix terrible. Il semblait que quelque chose du repos des morts entrât dans la tranquillité de Jean Valjean.” (p. 571) -- “The four planks of the coffin give off a kind of terrible peace. It seemed that something of the rest of the dead entered into Jean Valjean’s tranquility.” We’ll recall that when the nuns took their vows and dedicated their lives to their religious order, the ceremony resembled a funeral, and we discussed in episode 20 how literature often followed the lead of this symbolism, figuring entry into the convent as a kind of symbolic suicide, a retreat from a life where nothing desirable remains. Now, Jean Valjean enters the convent in this same way, and he experiences much of the same relief at leaving behind the burden that his life has been. Within these walls, thanks to this experience and Fauchelevent’s help, he may now rest in peace. 

The section on the convent ends as it began at the beginning of book 6, 100 pages ago for me, with a description of how one gets to the convent from the street. Only now, we’re insiders, Fauchelevent is our guide, and he knows all the passwords and all the right answers, and their journey is much easier than the one described before. Unbeknownst to the nuns, the man who will now be called “Ultime Fauchelevent” has gained entry through the wiliness of their gardener and through a deeply symbolic near-death experience. But it is Cosette, and the nuns’ judgment that she will grow up to be ugly, that is their most powerful key to entry, as they hope she will join the order. 

And, of course, I say this section “ends,” when, in fact, the final chapter remains. The adventure part of the story, though, feels as though it comes to an end in chapter 8, and chapter 9 is separate from the rest. In a moment, we’ll finish up with that final chapter of Part 2, the happy end of this, dare I say, breathless adventure.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

The final chapter of this section, in French, is entitled “Clôture.” This word may be translated in a few different ways – possibly “Closure,” which is actually pretty close to its meaning, but has taken on some connotations for us, thanks to popular psychology, that it wouldn’t have had for Hugo. When we talk about “closure,” in modern American English, we often mean a feeling of resolution after a set of emotionally charged events. As appropriate as this feels to us for this chapter, this sort of emotional or psychological understanding of the word or the situation would be unlikely in 19th century France. But the word is a bit of a play on words in French. It can be related to an enclosure, like the one where Jean Valjean and Cosette now find themselves, and it can also refer to the closing of something a closing as an event, like an ending. This chapter is, of course, also the end of Part II, and it will be the last we’ll see of Jean Valjean and Cosette for a while; other characters will take center stage at the beginning of Part 3. Their enclosure is also the closure of the first part of these characters’ story, and years will go by as Jean Valjean gardens in peace, and Cosette grows up. And as the rhythm of the section suggests, there is a third sense, something like, a musical Coda, or the closing of a letter, the epilogue of a book. It is detached from what precedes it, but provides it with a closing.

In this closing, all the resemblances between Jean Valjean and Fauchelevent are brought to fulfillment, as they become doppelgangers of each other, a kind of double-vision, old-looking men limping through their work in the convent’s garden with bells on their legs. The nuns, who had already deformed Fauchelevent’s name to “Fauvent” now call Jean Valjean “l’autre Fauvent” -- “the other Fauvent,” as if he is simply a second copy of the same person, just as much a man, and therefore “dangerous to meet” and to be avoided. He also takes on the work of Fauchelevent and, as we saw a few weeks ago, of the bishop – he gardens. In this place of women’s ever increasing saintliness and girls’ education, these older men spend their days acting out one of the novel’s key metaphors for the cultivation of human minds. Indeed it is perhaps in this place where both practical education and spiritual contemplation take place that we understand how this metaphor, where Madeleine had encouraged us to make nettles useful, can also accommodate the Bishop’s statement that, “Le beau est aussi utile que l’utile, [...] Plus, peut-être.” (p. 26) -- “The beautiful is as useful as the useful, [...] More, perhaps.” Practical and spiritual education are both part of the gardening that these men pursue, and both are useful. What’s more, in the context of the rest of this section, where we saw an image of death and resurrection, another layer meaning for these gardeners begins to take shape: after Jesus’s resurrection in the account in the Gospel of John, he is mistaken for a gardener by that same person who first saw him, and who is so important to our understanding of our protagonist – Mary Magdalene. Our Madeleine, Jean Valjean, found the image of his own salvation in a gardener not once but twice, in the Bishop and Fauchelevent. And now, he has symbolically died and been resurrected, and he too appears in the humble guise of a gardener.

It is also in this place that these first two parts of the novel – which, as we’ve said, will feel quite different from the remaining three – come full circle. We began Part 1 with the Bishop, and saw how he changed the course of Jean Valjean’s life. The narrator now tells us that “Tout ce qui était entré dans sa vie depuis six mois le ramenait vers les saintes injonctions de l’évêque; Cosette par l’amour, le couvent par l’humilité.” (p. 589) -- “Everything that had entered his life in the last six months brought him back to the Bishop’s holy commandments; Cosette through love, the convent through humility.” Now, the convent becomes a similar sort of place for him, and we find that this already long story has all been of a piece. He recognizes that these are both “maisons de Dieu” (p. 590) -- “houses of God,” but he doesn’t seem able to approach God directly, as we see him repeat the gesture that ended Part 1 book 2, when he knelt before the Bishop’s door, now kneeling before the woman performing the 12 hour prayer session called reparation. 

At the same time as it is compared to the Bishop’s house, though, and in a way that may seem paradoxical at first, this convent is also powerfully compared to the bagne. Much of the parallel to be found in their physical descriptions speaks for itself – the physical suffering of these women, which was first described in book 6, snaps into a new kind of focus when seen through Jean Valjean’s eyes. He knows the harshness of their lives all too well, and he watches in admiration as they take up voluntarily what he risked life and limb over and over again to escape. 

In this comparison, Hugo does something else remarkable that doesn’t translate well into English: early in the comparison, he calls the women “êtres” (p. 587) -- “beings,” a word that is masculine in French even when it refers to women. This is not all that strange, just a quirk of languages with gendered nouns; the word “personne” -- simply “person” -- is feminine, even when it refers to men. But what that one word choice means for this passage is stunning. First, referring to them as “beings” makes them seem somehow more mysterious, ethereal, as if the narrator can’t be more specific as to what sort of beings they are. But then, for the rest of the paragraph describing their physical deprivations and the discomfort of their ascetic practices, using this masculine noun means the pronouns and adjective agreements must be masculine. In other words, the section reads as if it is describing men. The women are not only, in a sense, deprived of their gender, but perhaps more importantly, they more closely resemble the men in the bagne to whom they’re being compared. The same masculinity that we saw last time conferring power on Mère Innocente, here makes these women more like the outcasts living in this paradigm of an earthly hell. 

As Jean Valjean considers the condition of these women, he comes to a conclusion that is curious in the context of this novel: he is humbled by watching these women happily accept, for the sake of others, the same kind of suffering that Jean Valjean had resented for the sake of his own crime. Living in this ascetic community, he is shocked to remember that he himself “avait osé se plaindre” (p. 589) -- “had dared to complain.” When he hears the singing that had so dazzled him and Cosette just after their arrival, “[I]l se sentait froid dans les veines en songeant que ceux qui étaient châtiés justement n’élevaient la voix vers le ciel que pour blasphémer, et que lui, misérable, avait montré le poing à Dieu” (p. 589) -- “his blood ran cold when he thought that those who were justly punished only raised their voices to heaven to blaspheme, and that he, misérable, had shaken his fist at God.” This reflection sits strangely when virtually all of the first two parts of this novel have pointed us toward the idea that the men subjected to the punishment he’s thinking of, the men in the bagne, are not always being justly punished, and at a minimum, Jean Valjean was not. So what do we make of this idea, offered as something of a finale to the novel’s first main story arc, and at the same time undermining it in this way?

First, it is important to heed the caveat offered by the narrator – here, I think, clearly the voice of Hugo himself: “Ici toute théorie personnelle est réservée, nous ne sommes que narrateur; c’est au point de vue de Jean Valjean que nous nous plaçons, et nous traduisons ses impressions.” (p. 588) -- “Here, all personal theories are reserved, we are just a narrator; we place ourselves in the point of view of Jean Valjean, and we translate his impressions.” Hugo sets aside his own agenda, his questioning of monasticism, and of the justice of the carceral system, and offers Jean Valjean’s present point of view in their place. We are asked to understand, perhaps even admire, the humility that the convent provokes in him, even as it sits in tension with the other lessons we have learned from experiencing his point of view – namely, the harshness of his early life, the heavy weight of the judicial system he did not understand and the carceral system he could not escape, the social damnation that followed him even after he was released, having in theory paid his debt to society. 

We asked early on in his story if he was perhaps suffering for others, taking our lead from a reference to Pontius Pilate’s “Ecce homo” / “Behold the man.” This was in episode 4, if you would like to look back. We had no answer then, but have since found compelling images of just this sort of substitution in the Champmathieu affair, where we heard an echo of this same moment from the gospels, and in Cosette, whose suffering at the hands of the Thénardiers recalled Jean Valjean’s time in the bagne, and who explicitly bore punishment for their own children. If Jean Valjean’s excessive punishment did indeed somehow include the weight of the crimes of others, Hugo has not yet made a clear suggestion as to whose, but we have seen others cause harm with impunity – we think of Tholomyès and Bamatabois in particular. In any event, this suggestion, which has followed Jean Valjean’s story just beneath the surface up to this point, brings him into closer resemblance with the model of the nuns than he realizes, as the nuns undertake “la plus divine des générosités humaines: l’expiation pour autrui” (p. 588) -- “the most divine of human generosities: expiation for others.” Hugo allowed us to suspect, at least, that Jean Valjean is engaged in the same process, giving us a perspective on his story that he himself does not have. 

And, finally, the Bishop offered us an early clue to understanding how we might integrate this step in Jean Valjean’s evolution into the rest of the novel. As dinner was being served on the evening that Jean Valjean spent in the Bishop’s house, we’ll remember that he listened to his guest’s tale of suffering, and his response mixed compassion with a higher call. “Si vous sortez de ce lieu douloureux avec des pensées de haine et de colère contre les hommes, vous êtes digne de pitié; si vous en sortez avec des pensées de bienveillance, de douceur et de paix, vous valez mieux qu’aucun de nous.” (p. 82) -- “If you leave that painful place with thoughts of hate and anger against humanity, you are worthy of pity; if you leave with thoughts of goodness, gentleness, and peace, you are more worthy than any of us.” We saw then that the Bishop was not blind to the injustice of what Jean Valjean had suffered, but he chose not to nurse his anger against that injustice. Instead, he offered him an emotional way forward from that place that was safe and healthy for Jean Valjean’s own mind and soul. Of course, at that time, Jean Valjean could not integrate such a lesson; his transformation into a man of kindness and generosity accompanied an improvement in his life and even a change of identity, and being Madeleine seemed to serve as a buffer against his past. It’s not until now that we’ve seen him consider the response of his own heart and mind to that suffering, really reckoning with it. He seems to recognize that these women have accomplished what the Bishop said would make him “more worthy than any of us,” and that truly accomplishing the same is work that he still must do.  

All of Hugo’s objections to what Jean Valjean has suffered stand, I think, at the end of part 2. But for Jean Valjean, a full understanding of them will take longer to arrive, if it comes at all. For now, he will live, along with Fauchelevent, as an outcast in this secluded world of self-made outcasts. As he remains behind these walls and the nuns avoid him, he is doubly subject to isolation, to social damnation. But strangely, these isolations seem to negate each other, instead of accumulating, and as an outcast within a closed off world, he finds a kind of freedom. We will leave him with this freedom for now, as both he and Cosette heal and grow. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll meet a new character type, the gamin de Paris, and discover the world he inhabits. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 3, Book 1, chapters 1-13, “Child of Paris, Child of Misère”

[/Music]

As we begin part 3, we’ve jumped ahead in time to 1832 or so, 8 or 9 years after the events in book 2, which took place 1823 and 24. For those of you who may know a little about French history, you know that we’ve skipped over a big event that we might expect a book like this to take an interest in: the July Revolution of 1830. There’s a short-term reason for this and a long-term one; the former will become apparent next week, while the latter will be a subject of more discussion for us as we move through the rest of the book.

For now, we’ve come to 1832 only to meet one particular character: Gavroche, and with him, the more general character type he expresses, develops, and ultimately bends to Hugo’s purposes – the gamin de Paris.

Hugo spends most of book 1 here introducing us to the gamin, only to tell us in chapter 13 that his character, Gavroche, doesn’t quite exemplify the type. This, of course, begs the question of why he would provide us with this long portrait of a character type that he doesn’t quite use? Today, we will try to answer that question, first by understanding what he has to say about the gamin, then by considering the real phenomenon that he seeks to reveal beneath the gamin. And finally, in the last part of today’s episode, we’ll consider how Hugo situates this character and his type in the political and artistic landscapes that provide Hugo’s perpetual backdrop.

When we find Gavroche, he drops in occasionally on his family, who are living back in the Gorbeau house, which we talked about in episode 18. When Jean Valjean and Cosette arrived in this house on the outskirts of Paris in Part 2 book 4, we mentioned that it was our definitive entry into Paris. Up until that point we had been in other parts of France, only entering the big city briefly. I mentioned then that from that point on, the novel would focus its action in the capital. But I think we felt then that our entry into Paris was tentative – we sat on its edge, in a place that was presented as if Parisians might hesitate to venture into such wilds. It was definitely in Paris, even back when the city’s walls enclosed a smaller area than its périphérique highway does today, but far from the sophisticated neighborhoods and seats of power in the center of town. A bit later, we skulked with a pursued Jean Valjean through the empty streets at night in the hope of remaining unseen, then disappeared into another world, a secluded place that might as well be a remote island – that just happened to be in town, but certainly was not of it. We’ve been in Paris for over 200 pages in my edition, but have not gotten much of a feel for the city.

Today, that changes. Now, we will plunge into the city’s heart and its spirit, and we will do so through what Hugo calls its “atom,” its most basic component, the smallest thing that is still recognizably Paris: the gamin. When the musical makes Gavroche our tour guide in the first big number that takes place in Paris, the creators were almost certainly thinking of this section. The picture Hugo paints of the gamin is vivid, I think, and while I will provide a bit of historical background of this type in the French imagination and of some relevant child welfare issues as we go along today, I don’t think this section requires a lot of context in order to understand the character type it describes. What I want to focus on for the most part is situating the gamin in the network of characters, character types, and phenomena that we’ve already seen in this novel, to settle him into his place as he opens what I suggested last time was a second half of the novel that will be very different from the first.  

So this word, gamin, might be translated as “street urchin” or maybe something like “street kid,” or, in modern French, simply “kid.” But it represented a specific idea in 19th-century France, and that idea was deeply embedded in the Romantic imagination. The version of the gamin that we see here expresses the type fairly well – an unsupervised, untamed boy, happy and free, deeply integrated in the life of the city, and depending on it to sustain him on the edge of survival the way a sparrow depends on the forest. This was a Romantic image that was already familiar in literature and the arts, perhaps most famously and concisely portrayed in Eugène Delacroix’s 1831 painting La Liberté guidant le peuple -- Liberty Leading the People, which I’ll add to the website. In that painting, the type retains all its joy and freedom, but also becomes political, as a pistol-wielding gamin seems to skip joyfully off to Revolution alongside the bare-breasted allegory of Liberty, as if this is simply this day’s latest amusement, leading the people into what appears to be a political uprising that will have real human costs. Hugo may or may not have been the first to use the word in print, as he claims in chapter 7; certainly other writers did so in the middle of the 19th century, and contributed to creating the Romantic type. But what is clear is that Hugo brought the concept of the gamin into the public’s consciousness so powerfully that, by the end of the century, “gavroche” with a small ‘g,’ as a common noun, had become a synonym for a gamin. 

The gamin, both before and after Hugo, is a kind of national symbol, associated with a true spirit of France, especially the French Republic. Monarchies, of course, have the person of the monarch to serve as a symbol of the nation, but a republic needs some other kind of personification. In the US, we might think of Uncle Sam. In France, the female figure of Marianne has generally fulfilled this role; many people associate the image of Liberty in the Delacroix painting with Marianne, and she has been represented in a variety of ways across the various Republics, often wearing the red Phrygian bonnet that we saw as a symbol of the Revolution back in episode 3. Since 1969, she’s been modeled on various contemporary actresses from film or television – I’ll add some pictures of different Mariannes to the website. But just as we see in the Delacroix painting, a defiant boy, innocent and courageous, in late childhood or early adolescence, was also often made an avatar of the Revolution and Republic. The earliest model for this type was the real historical figure of François Joseph Bara, who was mentioned here in chapter 9 and assimilated into this type of the gamin under the chapter title “La Vieille âme de Gaule” -- “The Old Spirit of Gaul.” As a young teen, Bara was a drummer in the Revolutionary government’s army, fighting Royalist sympathizers in the Vendée region of western France in 1793. He was killed in that campaign, and the real circumstances of his death are unclear in the historical record. But the legend propagated by French Republics and pro-Republic movements thereafter had him playing his drum to the end, facing royalist bullets when he cried “Vive la République!” -- “Long live the Republic!” when the opposing army commanded him to say “Vive le Roi!” -- “Long live the King!” We can’t help but think of Cambronne at Waterloo here, and feel that his defiance, as well as Cambronne’s notorious word, could as easily have been the acts of a gamin. 

The gamin may well do time as a symbol of the nation, but Hugo makes him into the spirit of Paris in particular, as he tells us early on that the city might say of the child, “C’est mon petit.” (794) -- “That’s my kid.” In this respect, he places particular emphasis on the gamin’s freedom, his happy-go-lucky attitude, and his vitality. He is part of the life of the city; as it pulses, feels, and lives, so does he. He is irreverent and full of bravado. Like other children we’ve seen, a group of gamins also represents a kind of miniature society, with exploits and distinctions that can set them apart from the crowd and elevate their status – often, this means having seen something extraordinary in the life of the city, such as an execution, or having some good first-hand story to tell. Making mischief and mocking authority make them heroes in their little world. They find their ways into the city’s darker nooks and crannies, they know thieves and have learned to swear and speak in street slang.  

As they represent Paris, these children stand in contrast, in many ways, to another group we have seen here, namely the nuns of Petit-Picpus. They were described in a similar digression, but, as we hinted a moment ago, they are set off as a phenomenon apart from the city, precisely not representing it, but spiritually inhabiting another world in the city’s midst. The gamin is the convent’s polar opposite. Where Hugo reproached monasticism for cutting itself off from the world, the gamin infiltrates the city at all levels and becomes a part of what it finds there. Where the women in the convent were figured as half-dead, already entombed, living a kind of shadow existence between life and death, the gamin is all vitality, spirit, and creativity. The gamin is irreverent where the nun is submissive. The city that the gamin represents is, for Hugo, the source and center of Revolution and progress, where the nuns are a hold-over from the past, an anachronism. 

But even the nuns bear some similarities to the gamin, as both groups belong to the novel’s ever-broadening category of misérables, and they share in its poverty, suffering and exclusion. And, as we saw of the nuns, and will see increasingly of the gamin, they are prepared to call authority into question. The gamin, with all his particularities, is also part of the mass of humanity that makes up the anonymous Parisian crowd, and although we have not yet spent much time in Paris, we have already gotten some sense of this crowd. We have seen two features in particular of it that are also important features of the gamin, and I would like to spend the next two segments discussing them: the gamin as one of the novel’s misérables, and the gamin as spectator-turned-revolutionary.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Hugo brings the idea of the gamin into Les Misérables much as he did the grisette in the early part of Fantine’s story. We’ll remember that like the gamin, the grisette was an idealized Romantic type who was common in the cultural imagination in the middle of the 19th century. Grisettes were imagined as working-class women, usually seamstresses, who typically had love affairs with Paris’s students and artists. Fantine’s story unearthed the real human suffering hiding behind that Romantic image along with the social problems that created it and that spring from it, and now, we see Gavroche begin to do the same for the Romantic image of the gamin.

Child abandonment had been prevalent in France for centuries, with parents, usually mothers, motivated by poverty or the stigma of having borne a child out of wedlock to give their children up. Over the centuries, the practice had been institutionalized in various ways, with the church, until the Revolution, providing for some kind of care for these children. In the 1790s, the Revolution had transferred the administrative responsibility for children whose parents couldn’t care for them to the state, and increased the number of facilities called tours d’abandon, where children could be left anonymously. These children were usually placed with families, often in the countryside, and these families were paid by the state to provide their care. But that pay decreased with each year, because it was assumed that the older the children got, the more they could be expected to work for their keep. These reforms were largely maintained in Napoleon’s overhaul of French law, and persisted well into the 19th century. If this sounds familiar, it’s probably not from this section, but rather from another childhood we’ve seen – Cosette’s. The state wasn’t involved in placing her with the Thénardiers, but otherwise, the arrangement was similar. The Thénardiers’ assumptions about Cosette’s presence in their home – that they should be compensated for it, either financially or by the child earning her own keep, or ideally both – as repugnant as they seem in this novel, were codified into law in the period we’re seeing here. Then, at the child’s 12th birthday, the state’s responsibility ended, and so did any payment at all for the families. Children could, of course, stay with the family they knew and work, but often, these young adolescents were motivated to consider other options.

As you may have noticed, education was nowhere in this formula. As much affection as Hugo expresses in these chapters for the gamin, he does not ignore the social problem hiding beneath the image. Charming as his ways are, the gamin is a result of large-scale neglect, not only by parents and these foster families, but by the nation that should see to all children’s education. We’ll recall the importance of education that we saw in the preface, in our very first episode – the third of the “century’s problems,” that Hugo mentions there is the “atrophy of children by darkness.” At the time, we saw that as possibly referring to a call for universal education, and here, we see more evidence for that understanding. These are the children atrophying in darkness. 

He uses the same image in chapter 10 as he does in the preface, asserting that while the gamin is “une grâce” (p. 603) -- “a grace” for the nation, he is also a symptom of an illness that must be cured with light. He also sees this problem extending across generations, as he tells us that “Ces abandons d’enfants n’étaient point découragés par l’ancienne monarchie” (p. 598) -- “These child abandonments were not at all discouraged by the former monarchy.” Because this problem extends back through time, Hugo implies, these children’s neglectful parents may well have had similar childhoods, without education, and so from generation to generation, an entire class of people atrophies in metaphorical darkness. He goes on to explain, perhaps a bit cryptically, that the existence of this atrophied class provided evidence for those who opposed educating the masses, who used their unsophistication as evidence that they were unfit for education and justifying this massive public neglect.

In this same chapter, chapter 6, entitled innocently enough “A Bit of History,” he explains that allowing a portion of the population to fester also provided men for the galleys, in the original sense – rowers for that part of the Mediterranean naval fleet. The galleys were, as we’ve said before, the precursors to the bagnes, hard labor prisons for convicted criminals, but if ever there were not enough legitimate criminals, any vagrant over the age of 15 or any man whose ignorance caused him to stumble into suspicion would serve. In other words, Hugo repeats in slightly more specific terms that these children were intentionally sacrificed, left uneducated so that they could be used, essentially, as slaves. This oblique reference to slavery may make us think of the more direct one we saw with Fantine, and mention of the galleys may make us think of Jean Valjean. You may even have the place where Jean Valjean served his 19-year sentence translated as “galleys,” thanks to a common anachronism in both French and English. And so, yet again, the man, the woman, and the child from the preface are connected in the portrayals of the exploitation of Jean Valjean in the bagne, Fantine in the metaphorical slavery of prostitution, and Gavroche in the darkness of ignorance and neglect. And Hugo also shows all three of these problems to be part of a cycle, as “tous les crimes de l’homme commencent au vagabondage de l’enfant” (p. 597) -- “All men’s crimes begin with children’s vagrancy.” 

This is, of course, not the first child we have seen – not the first one we have seen suffer abuse and neglect, not the first one that we might say was atrophying in darkness. We might think back to Jean Valjean’s nieces and nephews when Hugo describes “ces enfants autour desquels il semble qu’on voit flotter les fils de la famille brisée” (p. 598) -- “these children around which seem to float the threads of a broken family.” But Cosette’s miserable state is the one we have seen most closely, and it was, in fact, arguably worse than the gamin’s: she was younger than the typical gamin, whom Hugo places in the 7-13 year-old range (p. 591), and in addition to neglect, she suffered beatings and verbal mistreatment from the person who was supposed to care for her. She was alone, not part of one of the groups of children Hugo describes as sharing the struggles of this existence, but singled out for mistreatment within her household while affection was showered on the other children. She is also female – despite the overwhelmingly male portrayal of the gamin, Hugo does mention that girls may be mixed in among the groups of gamins. We recall that Fantine had been a homeless orphan in childhood, and if Madame Thénardier’s threats were to be believed, Cosette was one day away from becoming one herself when Jean Valjean found her. While the girls included in Hugo’s idealized picture of the gamin don’t seem to be subject to any particular suffering, we already know enough to suspect that the realities of this life would have been different, and probably much darker and more unpleasant, for a girl – and we will have occasion to learn more about this as the novel progresses. This sort of childhood – poor, neglected, disconnected from family – is part of every story in the novel at some point, a kind of central node. 

So, the Romantic images of the gamin and the grisette are in fact related, as Hugo’s gamin reworks the Romantic image to serve as an entryway into exploring real social problems. In connecting the real social problem of childhood neglect to the joyful Romantic type of the gamin, Hugo seems to create a paradox. This is a child who is cut off from his family, who doesn’t eat every day, who is insulted in the streets and who, sooner or later, is likely to end up in forced hard labor – how can he also be this picture of joy? Hugo solves this problem in a few different ways. First, he suggests that this existence is a choice, a preference for freedom, like the wolf in the fable of the dog and the wolf that we saw a few weeks ago. “Il a quelquefois un logis, et il l’aime, car il y trouve sa mère; mais il préfère la rue, parce qu’il y trouve la liberté” (p. 592) -- “He sometimes has a home, and he loves it, because he finds his mother there; but he prefers the street, because there, he finds freedom.” And because this freedom places him in the streets of Paris in particular, he benefits from what Hugo claims is the exceptional environment of that city; he is “intérieurement à peu près intact,” (p. 597) -- “pretty much intact inside,” because “une certaine incorruptibilité résulte de l’idée qui est dans l’air de Paris. [...] Respirer Paris, cela conserve l’âme” (p. 597) -- “a certain incorruptibility results from the idea that is in the air in Paris. [...] Breathing Paris conserves the soul.” Cosette, our other suffering child, is not in Paris to benefit from its inexplicably salubrious effects, so she cannot become this sort of gamin. 

But a second part of the answer to this riddle brings us back to the question we asked early in the episode, about why Hugo insists that Gavroche is not quite the typical gamin in the Romantic ideal. Now that we’ve come full circle, we realize that in Gavroche, we have a version of the gamin that is more like Cosette, more affected by the misère of his life. He is more broken inside than the typical gamin. He “eût assez correctement réalisé cet idéal du gamin ébauché plus haut, si, avec le rire de son âge sur les lèvres, il n’eût pas eu le cœur absolument sombre et vide.” (p. 609) -- He “would have expressed the ideal of the gamin that we sketched above quite precisely if, with the laughter of his age on his lips, his heart hadn’t been absolutely dark and empty.” He is disconnected from his family even though he has one. The family he has is not dispersed as other families of misérables have been, but they are nonetheless another picture of abject misère. Hugo is careful to tell us, heartbreakingly, that his mother loves his two older sisters, but not him, and that he is “un de ces enfants dignes de pitié entre tous qui ont père et mère et qui sont orphelins” (p. 609) -- “one of these children most worthy of pity who have a father and mother and who are orphans.” His state is based in something much more like intentional rejection – not the choice to be free that the typical gamin had supposedly made, or even something like death or distracted indifference. Gavroche’s emotional misère is real, and runs deep.  

By creating his specific gamin just slightly off-center in this way from the more generalized, familiar type of the gamin, Hugo subtly undermines the Romantic ideal even as he spends twelve chapters describing it. He creates an image that his original readers would recognize, but then, as he connects it to the real problems of child neglect and lack of education and to a specific character who suffers more than we expect, he forces his reader to question the happy Romantic image. Just as it did with the grisette, Romanticism has papered over a real problem created by poverty, and these chapters make it much harder to persist in that illusion.

As he highlights the purifying character of Paris for the gamin, though, Hugo adds an odd observation, saying that the Parisian gamin’s purity “éclate dans la splendide probité de nos révolutions populaires.” (p. 597) -- “bursts forth in the splendid integrity of our popular revolutions.” We have already seen a tenuous connection between Revolution and the gamin in the figure of Joseph Bara, but when we return, we will dig more deeply into the connection Hugo makes between these two aspects of his home city.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

The gamin, like the Parisian masses in general, is a spectator. Back at the beginning of Fantine’s story, we read the Parisian crowd as uncomprehending spectators of the events of 1817, in the disorienting chapter about that year that put us in their place as those events paraded before us one after the other, undifferentiated. But the role of spectator has also been imagined in the novel as more sinister, even predatory. It was not a Parisian crowd of which the narrator said, “Voir, c’est dévorer” (p. 199) -- “To see is to devour,” as they watched Fantine’s altercation with Bamatabois and her arrest, but the fictional crowd that inspired that comment, we’ll remember, was based on a real one that Hugo was a part of in Paris. No gamins were mentioned there, but in this section, we see them as part of the equally predatory crowds that gather for public executions, and the role of that spectacle in the vast spectacle that is all of Paris is also expressed using culinary language: “Que serait toute cette fête éternelle sans cette assaisonnement?” (p. 605) -- “What would this whole eternal feast be without that seasoning?” 

Hugo tells us that the gamin, in the theater, becomes a “titi.” These words “gamin” and “titi” are close in meaning, both referring to children, especially street children. But Hugo explains the distinction himself by way of an analogy: the gamin is to the titi as the larva is to the moth. In the theater, in other words, the gamin finds his fullest expression, he spreads his wings and flies.

It does make some sense to ask what Hugo seems to anticipate we’ll ask: if this child is effectively homeless, living in the street and gleaning what he can from the city’s detritus, how can he afford the theater? The practical answer, given just a bit dismissively, is that he always manages to find a few sous somewhere, and he’ll spend them on the theater before he spends them on food if he has to choose; one of the first things we learn about him is that, “Il ne mange pas tous les jours et il va au spectacle, si bon lui semble, tous les soirs.” (p. 591) -- “He doesn’t eat every day, and he goes to a show, if he feels like it, every night.” But this practical explanation of his priorities is at the surface of an important connection between this character type and the aesthetic issues that have run as an undercurrent of the novel since its beginning. A few pages after Hugo tells us about the gamin’s love for the theater, we see him characterized in this way: “Donnez à un être l’inutile et ôtez-lui le nécessaire, vous aurez le gamin.” (p. 593) -- “Give a being the useless and take from him the necessary, and you will have the gamin.” This is not the first time we’ve seen the novel assert the value of useless beauty; we of course remember the Bishop, cultivating flowers instead of vegetables in his garden, insisting that “le beau est aussi utile que l’utile” (p. 26) -- “the beautiful is as useful as the useful.” The gamin, I suspect, would agree with him. Through his love of theater and, as we will see later in the book, poetry and song, this child is a study in what happens in misère if there is still an aesthetic sense – indeed, if there is only an aesthetic sense, as he is deprived of the necessary elements of survival.

The gamin’s aesthetic sense, unsurprisingly given what we know about him, includes the grotesque, but he makes the grotesque beautiful, as he “se vautre dans le fumier et en sort couvert d’étoiles” (p. 594) -- “rolls in manure and comes out covered in stars.” This is what leads the narrator to call him “Rabelais petit” (p. 594) -- “a small Rabelais.” The writer to whom he is referring here, François Rabelais, lived and wrote in the first half of the 16th century, so, the early part of the French Renaissance. He is best known for the books Gargantua and Pantagruel, whose title characters, father and son, are giants. Rabelais’s works, these books and others, are full of grotesque, bawdy humor, but this has not kept them out of the French literary canon, and as such, Hugo refers to them frequently as a precedent for his own aesthetic innovations, for inviting the bodily, physical, and dirty parts of life into literature. The gamin that we find here, without any literary education whatsoever, finds this same beauty simply by following his “intuition littéraire” (p. 593) -- “literary intuition.” He also, we see in chapter two, repeats the trope that Hugo himself allowed to occupy most of Part 2 book 8, that of comedy accompanying a funeral. The gamin jokes when he sees a doctor in a funeral procession, “Depuis quand les médecins reportent-ils leur ouvrage?” (p. 593) -- “Since when do doctors return their work?” He says explicitly that the gamin’s love for theater does not extend to Classical theater – we’ve talked about Hugo’s distaste for the older, more traditional, more academic neoclassical style of theater, and how, when he was leading the charge in the second wave of the Romantic movement as a young man, he set it in opposition to this style. 

All of this suggests, from the earliest parts of this description of the gamin, that the gamin’s aesthetic tastes correspond to Hugo’s. This should not surprise us by now, as Hugo has a pattern of claiming sympathetic characters for his “side” of the various debates of his time. By saying of the gamin that “Sa tendance, nous le disons avec la quantité de regret qui convient, ne serait point le goût classique.” (p. 593) -- “His tendency, we say with the appropriate amount of regret, would not be the classical taste” he claims him for Romanticism, as he claimed the Bishop, and has, over time, claimed Jean Valjean. The “appropriate amount of regret” he refers to having in doing this is, in fact, very little. 

But beyond his choice of play or, as we will see later when we’ve seen more of Gavroche, the aesthetic qualities of his own literary creations, the gamin’s presence in the theater, his participation in the crowd, transfigures it. Hugo describes this as follows: “Les théâtres sont des espèces de vaisseaux retournés qui ont la cale en haut. [...] Il suffit qu’il soit là, avec son rayonnement de bonheur, avec sa puissance d’enthousiasme et de joie, avec son battement de mains qui ressemble à un battement d’ailes, pour que cette cale étroite, fétide, obscure, sordide, malsaine, hideuse, abominable, se nomme le Paradis.” (p. 593) -- “Theaters are a kind of vessel with their hold at the top. [...] It is enough for him to be there, with his radiant happiness, the power of his enthusiasm and joy, clapping his hands as if flapping wings, for this small, fetid, dark, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable hold to be called Paradise.” This image is profoundly rich, and connects the gamin’s love for theater to much that we have already seen in the novel, but it may require a bit of explanation. First, Hugo’s description of the theater as having “Paradise” or Heaven at the top, is in keeping with a conventional way of referring to the cheap seats high up in the back balconies of theaters, the nosebleed section. Classic film buffs may be familiar with Les Enfants du paradis, Children of Paradise, which refers to this same usage of the word, and portrays, albeit a bit fancifully, the Bohemian lives of actors and other artists in just this period, around 1830. The film was made in 1945 under a regime of heavy censorship in Vichy France, and it is fascinating to watch it for veiled references to freedom, betrayal, and domination. It also, as it happens, includes the real-life character of Lacenaire, who is mentioned in this section among the executions that gamins bragged about watching--he was guillotined in 1836. 

But Hugo’s use of this image of the poor section of the theater complicates this traditional usage claiming that this Paradise is the hold of an overturned cargo vessel with its hold now at the top. By doing this, he opens up important connections to the rest of the novel. First, it gives us another image of a ship, putting us back in mind of the man overboard who has from the early part of the novel figured the poor and disenfranchised, left behind by society, and the Orion, from which Jean Valjean fell, or, appeared to fall. The hold that he describes with this profusion of adjectives: “small, fetid, dark, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable” takes this image a step further. Where the first ship had been of non-descript type, and the second a military vessel, this seems to be a slave ship, and the occupants of the hold are brutally exploited human beings, forced into a living hell. We have already seen an image of slavery in this episode, and it connects this place to the harsh rebukes contained there. All of the novel’s major stories of suffering so far are, in other words, once again connected to the gamin, implied in this image of the theater. 

But with the gamin there, this passage claims, Hell becomes Heaven, that horrific ship’s hold becomes Paradise. And it does so through the gamin and all he is – the true spirit of Paris, of France, and thus, of all of humanity, a natural mini-man of Romantic letters, a lover of art and spectacle. And this inversion – we might say, this Revolution – happens in another way as well. This novel, and indeed much of life and language, is full of expressions of social hierarchy that organize society vertically, with the rich and powerful above and the poor and oppressed below. As Jean Valjean, during his first prison sentence, contemplated his circumstances, he saw himself as crushed beneath a great mass of society. We compared that to a traditional image of French society in the shape of a pyramid, with the king, clergy, and nobility at the top and the great masses of the people at the bottom. The theater is the one place we’ve seen where the usual social hierarchy is inverted by simple fact and language – the cheaper seats, where the poor would naturally sit, are at the top, and really were called Paradise. So the theater, with the gamin in its poorest section, overturns that preponderance of imagery, and places society’s weakest and most misérable in Heaven. Perhaps this is why he would rather buy a theater ticket than food – acting out this reversal, this release from society’s ills, is an act of defiance befitting the Old Spirit of Gaul.

But the gamin is not only a spectator, and this is not our only hint of his revolutionary potential; we’re warned that what he sees when he’s mixed in with Paris’s watchful crowd may one day spur to action his “initiative inépuisable” (p. 594) -- “inexhaustible initiative.” Just as Hugo pointed out the mistake of Paris’s chief of police when he described the city’s 1817 residents as lazy, docile housecats, warning that cats can become lions, he points out that this little Parisian spectator, the gamin, should also not be mistaken for unthreatening. “Qui que vous soyez qui vous nommez Préjugé, Abus, Ignominie, Oppression, Iniquité, Despotisme, Injustice, Fanatisme, Tyrannie, prenez garde au gamin béant. / Ce petit grandira” (p. 594) -- “Whoever you may be who are called Prejudice, Abuse, Indignity, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, Tyranny, watch out for the staring gamin. / This little one will grow up.” 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll meet yet another child, whose life is perhaps a bit different from the gamin’s. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 3 book 2 chapter 1 through book 3 chapter 3, “Generations.”

[/Music]

Here in Book two of part 3, we make one of the more abrupt transitions in the novel, from discussing the gamin, whose joy, pain, and revolutionary potential we saw in our last episode, to the least misérable character we have come across yet, the grand bourgeois Luc-Esprit Gillenormand. He is the only such character who is sometimes left out of adaptations – it’s easy enough to tell the central story of Jean Valjean and Cosette without him. To its credit, the 2012 film adaptation of the musical wrote him back in briefly, although, they costumed him all wrong – I’ll put pictures on the website to help you compare, if you’re interested, and will also map Gillenormand’s two residences mentioned here on our Google map. 

Gillenormand is one of only a handful of characters whose portraits create a long pause in the action as they occupy multiple chapters and take multiple angles. Part 1 opened this way with a portrait of the Bishop, and the introduction of Madeleine echoed that first long introduction for reasons that became clear later. To a lesser extent, the presentations of Javert and the Thénardiers do this, although those moments create somewhat less of a feeling of stepping outside the story. These presentations of characters are also, in a sense, settings for the story, a way of saying something larger--the Bishop about compassionate religion, Javert about the Law, and the Thénardiers about society’s truly malignant elements.

The section that immediately precedes Gillenormand’s introduction, the discussion of the gamin, is another one of these, and it is immediately followed by this one. And so perhaps instead of thinking of the transition from the little gamin to the grand bourgeois as a hard turn and a curious way to get where we’re going – which is to a third character, Marius – we might think of the introductions of the gamin and the bourgeois together as our entryway into Part 3, as the Bishop was our entry into Part 1 – and, for that matter, into the entire novel – and Waterloo was our entry into Part 2. In our first couple of episodes, we discussed why Hugo might have started his novel about social justice with the image of a clergyman who supported it, understanding it to imply that association between concern for the poor and leftist or Revolutionary politics was a false equivalence. Through the bishop, a broader segment of the reading public, politically speaking, might find sympathy with the novel’s central concerns and a model for interacting with them. The long Waterloo digression, we said, brought together different sorts of opposites as it forged victory for humanity out of defeat for France, and insisted, defiant as Cambronne in the face of a discouraging reality, that regression from the Revolutionary era to the restored monarchy opened the door to future progress. Now Part 3 opens on two starkly contrasting aspects of Paris that coexisted in the years around 1830: the deeply impoverished child who embodies the spirit of Paris’s forward-looking vitality and the rich old monarchist who embodies a nearly-dead past.

And so this is given to us as Gillenormand’s primary characteristic – he is a Royalist, of the flavor that was sometimes called an “ultra;” which we’ll examine more closely in a few minutes. The Revolution in any form, including the more moderate form it took from 1789 to 1791 and in the more recent constitutional monarchies of the 19th century, is an abomination in his mind. And, of course, the radical phase of the Revolution, the Terror is, to him, just that. He jokes, as he passes 90 years old, that he hopes not to see 93 twice, referring to that year when the Revolution asserted itself the most violently and Old Regime royalists, including the King himself, so often lost their heads. 

These political opinions put him in a curious position relative to power, which it’s worth taking a moment to understand: he is explicitly bourgeois, and that, in the Old Regime context, means precisely not having access to political power. We will see him persist in his ultra-Royalist views even as the 19th century gives more and more power to the middle class. Economically, the merchant and emerging industrial classes were amassing more wealth, and the July Monarchy, beginning in 1830, decreased the power of the social elites, and gave the bourgeoisie more political power as well. But none of this is to the liking of Gillenormand, who was and would remain a Legitimist, a believer in the House of Bourbon’s right to the throne, even at the expense of his own political enfranchisement. His interest is not in his own power, but in a power structure that conforms to his beliefs about the proper order of the world. It is, to a modern eye, a strangely self-excluding position, but one that was relatively typical of ideological legitimists. Despite some obvious differences, we might compare it to Javert’s general posture, in which an orderly moral universe depends on society excluding the criminal class that he comes from, and that he could fall back into at any time. In particular, we’ll remember when Javert thought he had falsely accused the mayor of being an escaped convict, and he reasoned that the only way to protect his status as guardian of order was to relinquish his post as police inspector, that protecting order could, and in that case did, include prosecuting himself. Gillenormand takes a similar position toward political power as he mocks the bourgeois-sounding names that appear in the newspapers as being part of the government. He bursts out laughing: “Je me figure ceci dans un journal: M. Gillenormand, ministre! Ce serait farce.” (p. 615) -- “I can imagine this in a newspaper: M. Gillenormand, government minister! That would be a farce.” The result of this is that even he, in a sense, experiences the exclusion that is so typical of the misérable, and this least miserable of characters begins to suggest another way of thinking of the word, and the status it represents. 

But even as Gillenormand gets this taste of the exclusion that is served up in giant helpings to our misérables, much about him seems ignorant to, and even complicit in, the misfortunes of other characters we’ve known. Like Javert, Gillenormand patrols boundaries, only his are not those established by law, between criminal and citizen, but rather by the Old Regime’s hierarchies and the Revolution’s divisions. The narrator doesn’t omit the detail of his wall hanging, which bears an image of the galleys, in their earlier, literal sense of a style of military vessel requiring rowers. For him, they are military objects that allow him to celebrate King Louis XIV’s exploits at the height of the monarchy’s power, a half century before he was born. For our other characters, of course, almost to a person, the galleys would have a very different meaning. He disregards the individuality and human autonomy of people of the lower classes, specifically his servants, by literally naming them as if they were pets (p. 617), and money is supposed to compensate for their mistreatment. This is especially true for women: we note the detail that he buys off his wife (p. 617), giving her control of finances in exchange for any say she might have over his personal life, so she’ll ignore the fact that he’s having affairs. Pay is implicit for his male domestic help, but is not mentioned, whereas the narrator relates to us the story of Gillenormand offering his female servant nearly twice the salary she requested, so that he can call her Nicolette, the same name that he calls all his female servants. And money is the intermediary in his most significant act of exclusion, his control over Marius: he threatens him with disinheritance, in order to strip him of his connection with his father and his father’s identity and perspective. Father and son are both diminished by this insistence on purchasing control, and we will see in the rest of this episode how Gillenormand brings them into resemblance with the novel’s misérables as well.

However, the description we have here does not go so far as to justify calling Gillenormand cruel. While he may sometimes use money as a substitute for humane treatment, his financial generosity is nonetheless a virtue that benefits the poor. For example, we have the story of the two children that his former maid, Magnon, claims are his: he does not acknowledge them, but also does not abandon them, and supports them financially. Compared to his younger brother, who was even a priest, Gillenormand “ne marchandait pas l’aumône, et donnait volontiers” (p. 619) -- he “didn’t haggle over alms, and gave willingly.” And it seems as though this generosity is his way of expressing love. We might even consider that it is out of tenderness that he tries to mitigate his mistreatment of his servants and his grandson with financial generosity. The narrator tells us that even as he berates his grandson, he idolizes him, and when the rubber meets the road, we’ll find that love lurks beneath many of his harsh actions, even though it will often be badly expressed. 

But of course, he is not the model of generosity and kindness that the Bishop was, because he only manages to be generous, not kind. Gillenormand is brought into explicit comparison to the Bishop at the end of book 2, with the discussion of his older daughter, the one who never married, who attends to him in old age as Baptistine attended to the Bishop. Gillenormand and the Bishop would in fact be about the same age, both born around 1740, but where we saw the Bishop change from the 18th century to the 19th, becoming more serious and reflective as his culture did, Gillenormand has not. His defining characteristic in 1831, apart from his political positions but certainly harmonizing with them, is that he seems to still be living in the 18th century culturally. He is frivolous, loving women and pleasure, and irreligious, as, like a man of the Enlightenment “il croyait fort peu en Dieu” (p. 619) -- “he believed very little in God.” And, in what cannot be a coincidence, he considers himself financially “ruined” (p. 612) on the exact amount of money that the Bishop had *before* his extensive donations – we’ll remember that the Bishop kept only 1/10 of that amount.

And just as he is no Myriel, Mlle Gillenormand, who cares for him, is no Baptistine. She is sour and judgmental, and rather simple-minded; she only ever dreamed of a husband who might be a good provider and confer some status, but she never found one. She is compared unfavorably to his younger daughter, from his second marriage, who scandalized him when she married a military officer who fought for the Republic and for Napoleon. This younger sister, who had died young, was “une charmante âme, tournée vers tout ce qui est lumière, occupée de fleurs, de vers et de musique, envolée dans les espaces glorieux, enthousiaste, éthérée, fiancée dès l’enfance dans l’idéal à une vague figure héroique.” (p. 620-621) -- “a charming soul, turned toward all that is light, occupied with flowers, poetry and music, soaring through glorious spaces, enthusiastic, ethereal, betrothed from childhood in her mind to a vague heroic figure.”

That heroic figure took human form in a character we’ve seen before, and see here again. More on him after a break.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Looking in on Marius’s father, Georges Pontmercy, is one of the only pretexts we will have in this second half of the book for leaving Paris, as he is living in exile a few miles down the Seine in Vernon, which I will add to our Google map. I say that he is living in exile, even this close to the center of French life, because his exile is much like the Conventionist’s was back in Book 1. And he is exiled for the same reason, namely, his activities during the quarter-century of Revolution and Empire make him persona non grata. He was an officer in the armies of that period, rising to the rank of Colonel, and was given the title of Baron by Napoleon. This is actually the second introduction of this character, and it provides a bit more context for the first time we encountered him – he is, of course, the officer that Thénardier pulled out of the carnage of the sunken road at Waterloo, intending to rob him, and inadvertently saving his life. He, and his son Marius, Gillenormand’s grandson, are the ostensible connection between the Waterloo digression and the plot, and Hugo reiterates some of the conclusions of that digression here as he recounts Pontmercy’s heroic exploits and the tragedy of them being wilfully forgotten by the Restoration. 

We have seen both the Restoration’s intentional forgetfulness and its spurning of political heretics before, but here, as those two phenomena are brought together around a single character, we can once again see the human costs of these political divisions. Pontmercy is deprived of all that he’s earned in his life, from his full pension, to the cause of the deep scar on his face, to his titles and honors which, having been bestowed by the Empire, are considered illegitimate by the Restoration, and it is actually illegal for him to claim his title and rank or to wear his symbol of the Legion of Honor. There is an autobiographical echo in some of this for Hugo, as his own father was a general in Napoleon’s army, and also had a title conferred on him that would have implied a hereditary title for the author as well, but it was not recognized by the Restoration. But all the things that Pontmercy has been deprived of, the most poignant is contact with his son, Marius, which Gillenormand stubbornly forbids. 

The importance of Gillenormand’s insistence in Pontmercy’s exile and deprivation makes them more personal than the Conventionist’s. We see Pontmercy first through Gillenormand’s point of view, which calls him as a Brigand of the Loire – an epithet that was applied to all soldiers who remained faithful to the Empire even in defeat, but that refers literally to a group who deserted in the Loire region rather than serving the Restored monarchy in 1815. Gillenormand claims that his daughter’s marriage to Pontmercy was “la honte de ma famille” (p. 619) -- “my family’s shame.” To his mind, Pontmercy had taken up arms against his legitimate king, and all the military exploits we see described in book 3 chapter 2 here were treasonous. Where the Conventionist had had anonymous townspeople calling him regicide and wishing for his death or exile, Pontmercy’s father in law, the guardian of his son, is a driving force in his ostracism. 

When we first see him for ourselves, though, the image gives the lie to all we have heard from Gillenormand. He is presented, anonymously at first, in the most sympathetic way possible, with his idyllic country existence, his quiet contentedness, his humility, solitude, kindness, and generosity, and then he is identified as the Brigand of the Loire who is so maligned by Gillenormand. He spends this peaceful existence in his garden, connecting him in the reader’s mind to other beloved gardeners like the Bishop and Jean Valjean, which can only make them more sympathetic. He grows flowers, as the Bishop did, only he focuses on them exclusively, making no concessions to a “useful” vegetable garden despite his table being described as “meager.” Instead, he seeks out, and even breeds, rare types of flowers and plants, showing a creativity that none of our other gardeners so far have done. This is presented to us with phrases that suggest a nearly divine capacity for invention, such as “il avait réussi à créer après le créateur” (p. 627) -- “he had succeeded in creating after the creator” and “il avait inventé de certaines tulipes et de certains dahlias qui semblaient avoir été oubliés par la nature” (p. 627) -- “he had invented certain tulips and dahlias that seemed to have been forgotten by nature.”

This approach to gardening contrasts with that of the other, older men we have seen at the endeavor. We’ll recall that the Bishop, while he rejected adherence to the practical and focused on flowers much like Pontmercy does, had “aucune prétention à la botanique” (p. 26) -- “no pretensions at botany” and that “il n’étudiait pas les plantes; il aimait les fleurs” (p. 26) -- “he did not study plants; he loved flowers.” Jean Valjean, both as Madeleine and now in the convent as Ultime Fauchelevent, drew on his work in his early life as a tree pruner, and has “toutes sortes de recettes et de secrets de culture” (p. 585) -- has “all sorts of formulas and secrets of cultivation.” The result for the convent is that through his knowledge of pruning and grafting he makes their wild-stock fruit trees produce excellent fruit, much in the same way he taught the peasants around Montreuil-sur-mer how to use nettles so that they don’t become harmful weeds. The Bishop was interested in beauty and Jean Valjean in usefulness, but both approached their gardens with a peasant’s simplicity. And, of course, we’ll recall that Jean Valjean’s wisdom about the uses of nettles provided us with a key to interpreting all of these, the extended metaphor in Hugo’s work that we’ve discussed before, in which the cultivation of plants is compared to the cultivation of human minds. Each of these men brings a different approach to the task. For the Bishop, it was a labor of love and simple attention that excluded study of complex categories and expert techniques. For Jean Valjean, cultivation benefits from a peasant’s practical skill and intuition. But for Pontmercy, the cultivation of plants is a God-like endeavor, a matter of collecting the world’s rarities and pushing nature beyond what it had come to on its own. Pontmercy focuses on change, development, the creation of something new as a gift to the world.  

Described in this way, Pontmercy’s approach to gardening risks sounding Promethean, like human overreach into a realm that should only be divine. And, of course, Hugo has argued that much of what Pontmercy dedicated his life to serving was on this too-divine scale as well; we’ll recall that he attributed Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo to the fact that “L’excessive pesanteur de cet homme dans la destinée humaine troublait l’équilibre. Cet individu comptait à lui seul plus que le groupe universel” (p. 344) -- “The excessive weight of this man in human destiny was upsetting the balance. This individual alone counted more than the group as a whole.” Despite the reforms that he and the Revolutionary period had made for the sake of human progress, Napoleon himself had become too overpowering and “il gênait Dieu” (p. 344) -- “he was disturbing God.” Still, while Pontmercy’s endeavors in botany may in one sense mirror this same sort of overreach, they are not presented to us in this way at all; like the Bishop and Jean Valjean, his efforts at cultivation are part of a life of gentle humility and relative solitude. But none of these men lives entirely alone, and their cultivation is metaphorical as well as literal – their contact with others does bring about positive change, individual human-sized work toward progress and a better world. We have seen this happen with the first two, and we will see Pontmercy’s work toward progress, now brought down to a human scale by the defeat of his emperor, continue outside this garden as well. 

Along with how generally sympathetic he is, the loss of his child is, of course, what works most powerfully to make his exile more emotionally affecting than the Conventionist’s. We feel an echo of Fantine’s separation from Cosette in the way he longs to see Marius, so much so that he does what Fantine could not, and risks discovery and Gillenormand’s reprisals by trying to catch a glimpse of him at mass. 

The heartrending scene of Pontmercy weeping in church as he watches his son from afar draws the attention of the churchwarden, whose brother just so happens to be Pontmercy’s priest in Vernon. The visits that the Vernon priest Mabeuf and the Paris churchwarden Mabeuf pay to Pontmercy remind us a bit of the Bishop’s visit to the Conventionist, as they bridge the same sort of barrier. These churchmen are lower in rank, of course, but they serve the same Catholic church that the Bishop did, that was supposed to have been allied to the Restoration and the enemy of all that Pontmercy had served. At the end of part 3 chapter 2, the description of the friendship that develops between Pontmercy and his priest could just as easily describe the Bishop and the Conventionist after their conversation. “Au fond, c’est le même homme. L’un s’est dévoué pour la patrie d’en bas, l’autre pour la patrie d’en haut; pas d’autre différence.” (p. 632) -- “At heart, they are the same man. One devoted himself to the nation here below, the other to the nation above; there is no other difference.” 

But where now three representatives of the Church have managed to bridge the gaps created by 25 years of Revolutionary violence, Gillenormand, it seems, cannot. He allows Marius to write carefully supervised, even dictated, letters to his father, but he hides the elder Pontmercy’s affectionate responses from the child. He threatens Marius with destitution, with the precarious economic fate that we know so well, if he has any contact whatsoever with his father, and he cultivates shame in the child’s heart about his origins. 

After a break, we will finish up by looking more closely at this child, and what passes for his childhood. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Pontmercy’s son Marius appears to us first as a kind of acolyte to the grand bourgeois in book 3 here, which bears the title “Le Grand-père et le petit-fils” -- “The Grandfather and the Grandson.” In other words, he enters our story, appropriately, in the shadow of Gillenormand. I say this is appropriate not because Gillenormand’s total control over his grandson is anything other than one of the novel’s injustices, but because that control means that Marius’s childhood is in fact spent in a sort of shadow of Gillenormand’s creation, a shadow made of the ignorance, anachronism, and forgetfulness that have come to characterize Gillenormand’s ideology as Hugo portrays it.

You may have noticed that we’re back in that famous year 1817 in book 3 chapter 1; this part of the story, like Gillenormand, will hang back in this early, reactionary phase of the Restoration, even though we have already once crossed the threshold of 1830. That threshold takes us into a time that Gillenormand and his ultraroyalist associates cannot and do not want to understand, and so for this part of the narrative, our awareness of it will be similarly vague. Instead, we’ll linger in the year when we saw Fantine’s story begin, and we’ll remember that that story began by creating a snapshot of the year itself that left us focused on its denial of both past and future changes in society. The image of 1817 that we have here is more ideological; instead of presenting us with a disconnected series of events, the narrator makes an attempt at explicit description. He repeats the early Restoration’s most triumphant feat of denial, which was also part of that earlier portrait, in which 1817 was called the 22nd year of Louis XVIII’s reign.

This time, though, that claim is not in the words of Louis XVIII himself, but rather in the discussions of the attendees of Mme. de T.’s Salon. This phenomenon, the salon, was a common one in 18th and 19th century France, and had a great deal of social and even political influence. Salons were get-togethers in private homes where guests would discuss politics, philosophy, literature, the arts, and similar topics. They were generally hosted by women, who could exercise influence through decisions about whom they invited and how they guided the conversation – this was in fact one of the only, and most effective, ways that women might participate in public life. 

A given salon in a particular woman’s home tended to have known themes and political leanings, and Mme de T.’s salon is a place where nothing is too extreme in the direction of counter-revolutionary, Legitimist thought. Even Louis XVIII, the first Restoration king, who accepted constitutional limits on his power and was otherwise minimally post-Revolutionary, is seen in this salon as too Revolutionary, and they have been known to, inaccurately, call him a jacobin. They spend two afternoons a week in lamentations, mockery, and impotent rage against the changes of the previous quarter-century. The more radically they can reject all things Revolution, Napoleon, Republic, and Empire, the more brilliant they seem in Mme de T.’s salon. Her salon is an echo chamber where participants come to hear their own resentments confirmed. Gillenormand applies his wit to that task, and, even as a relatively humble bourgeois, with no noble title, he is a member of this club, to which ideological purity is the main key to entry. 

Marius, as a child, joins Gillenormand in this environment, along with his dour aunt, and much of what we learn about his childhood revolves around this being his “milieu respirable” (p. 631) -- the air he breathes. Most immediately, this environment creates an emotional separation from his father that reproduces the physical one that Gillenormand insists upon. He is never told explicitly to be ashamed of his father, but in a bit of insight into child psychology that feels quite modern, Hugo tells us that he absorbs the attitudes of the adults in Mme de T.’s salon intuitively, and it’s here that he develops his shame of his origins. 

But the effects of this environment on the child Marius are broader even than this, and in many ways, despite the material comfort of his life, our description of his childhood bears surprising resemblances to Cosette’s. We have seen the painful physical separation from an adoring parent, and the child’s developing sense of emotional separation from that parent as well. Cosette, we’ll recall, told Jean Valjean in the woods that she was unsure whether or not she had a mother, and Marius, while vaguely aware that he has a father, is ashamed of him. Through the separation, as well as the impressionability of childhood, these parents – Fantine and Pontmercy – are relegated to a kind of non-existence, another kind of living death.

We also see a kind of darkness that comes to surround both children’s existences, and as a result both children come to be described as “sombre” (p. 415/p. 639) a word that in French can mean either literally without light, or figuratively, like the similar word “somber” in English, emotionally gloomy – both a dark night and a sad person can be “sombre.” At the Thénardiers’ inn, Cosette is often shown in literal cold and darkness, being insufficiently dressed and forced to work before sunrise and well past sundown, most notably when we see her sent into the dark forest for water on a December night. This cold and dark seem at first to be the effects of poverty and cruelty, but we see them extended as metaphors into her life in the convent, which is a world that is cloaked in a tomb-like darkness that we remember Hugo exploring at length. And Marius, too, although not hidden away behind convent walls, is still limited in his experience, and that limited experience is figured as one of limited warmth and light. “Le salon de madame de T. [...] était la seule ouverture par laquelle il pût regarder dans la vie. Cette ouverture était sombre et il lui venait par cette lucarne plus de froid que de chaleur, plus de nuit que de jour.” (p. 632) -- “Madame de T.’s salon [...] was the only opening through which he could see life. That opening was dark, and through that window, more cold came to him than warmth, more darkness than light.” 

Hugo’s main objection to the convent was, of course, its anachronism, its refusal to remain in the past where it belonged, to “consent to be dead.” This same sort of anachronism is the defining feature of Mme de T’s salon as well, and he describes it in virtually the same terms: “Tout cela avait l’air d’avoir vécu il y a longtemps, et de s’obstiner contre le sépulcre. [...] C’était un monde momie” (p. 636) -- “All of this seemed to have lived a long time ago, and to persevere against the sepulchre . [...] It was a mummy world.” This perseverance is the goal of most of the conversation in the salon, the echo chamber that lends vital energy to its members’ anachronistic positions, keeping them alive. “On jugeait là les faits et les hommes. On raillait le siècle, ce qui dispensait de le comprendre. On s’entr’aidait dans l’étonnement. On se communiquait la quantité de clarté qu’on avait. [...] Tout était harmonieux; rien ne vivait trop; la parole était à peine un souffle” (p. 636) -- “There, men and events were judged. They mocked the century, which excused them from understanding it. They supported each other’s astonishment. They shared what light they had. [...]. Everything was harmonious; nothing lived too much; speech was barely a breath.” This salon even resembles the convent in the people to be found there, a group that includes a number of older women, who look to the child Marius like “des patriarches et des mages, non des êtres réels, mais des fantômes” (p. 633) -- “patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but ghosts.” His childhood, like Cosette’s in the convent, is depicted as a kind of half-lit tomb full of these kinds of beings from another age, not quite living, but not quite dead. 

In the darkness at the Thénardiers’ inn, we’ll recall that Cosette suffered emotionally, and we saw adjectives describing her like “inquiète,” and “hargneuse,” (p. 164) -- “worried” and “bitter” and her sadness made her ugly. By the time she was five years old, we have the image of her that is known the world over, and that may be on the cover of the book that you’re reading, “un énorme balai dans ses petites mains rouges et une larme dans ses grands yeux” (p. 165) -- “an enormous broom in her little red hands and a tear in her big eyes.” She became this way because of her egregious mistreatment, but even though Marius lives a very different life, he also ends up with a somber disposition unbefitting his age. He is not the bon viveur of the old regime that Gillenormand continues to be, but the somber, melancholic young Romantic of 19th century stereotype – a type that was usually also royalist, especially in the first wave of Romanticism. But he did not start out that way any more than Cosette did, and we might as well be reading about her when the narrator says of him, “Cet enfant, qui n’était que joie et lumière en entrant dans ce monde étrange, y devint en peu de temps triste, et, ce qui est plus contraire encore à cet âge, grave” (p. 632) -- “This child, who was nothing but joy and light upon entering this strange world, soon became sad, and even more contrary to this age, grave.” We hear a faint echo of Fantine here, when he is described as starting out as joy. In a strange way, the effects of poverty and cruelty are the same as the effects of this reactionary, anachronistic world that rejects progress and social change.

Hugo insists, perhaps a bit too much, that nothing remains of this time, that history has never seen anything else like it. I suspect this excessive insistence is, in fact, a denial – I think we all know that history has seen other times like this, where fear of the future and of social change motivate people to cling to the past, to insist that a disappearing world is still alive and well, and even to foster hatreds and divisions in the hope of making it so. But Hugo tells us even here that the ultra-royalist salons of the early Restoration were short-lived, and history shows that they will not have the last word. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll see how durable the effect of this salon on Marius turns out to be. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 3, Book 3,  chapter 4 through 8, “His Father’s Son.”

[/Music]

Last week, we were introduced to Marius via his grandfather, Gillenormand, the grand bourgeois. Now we pick up in 1827, when Gillenormand “withdraws from the world,” that is, he ends his regular, formal social life, due to age. He is 87, and Marius is 17.

Up to this point, we’ve mostly seen Marius from the point of view of an adult observer. Interestingly, Cosette is the only child whose experience we’ve yet seen from her own point of view, through her own impressions and experiences. Even though, as we saw last time, Marius’s childhood is oddly similar to Cosette’s, Marius has only been shown to us from the outside – not as he would have been seen by any of the adults in his life, since his environment was presented so negatively, but not from his own point of view either. Our narrator, in fact, has pretty clearly been Hugo himself – for most of the novel, actually, but definitely here. That can’t always be assumed in novels, of course, but in Hugo’s works, he usually inserts himself fairly unapologetically, especially by this point in his career. He had a public persona, and was in the habit of communicating publicly as himself, so even leaving aside his ego, it makes some sense that he would assume his audience expects to hear from him directly. And in this section, he also takes that as an opportunity to present Marius’s ultraroyalist upbringing with the disapproving tone that matches his own point of view. 

Some motivation for that may come from the fact that much of Marius’s story is autobiographical; it’s an accelerated and dramatized version of Hugo’s own political evolution. Hugo himself had inherited royalist views on his mother’s side, and allegiance to Napoleon from his father. He tended toward his mother’s views in his youth precisely because of his father’s sympathies – he spent more time with his mother, as his father was one of Napoleon’s generals, and was away at war. In fact, when the narrator mentions in passing that Marius consults with “the count H,” (p. 645) supposedly a general under whom Marius’s father had served, the reference is likely to the elder Hugo, who was made a Count much as Georges Pontmercy was made a Baron. In Victor Hugo’s early career, in the early 1820s, the author was a vocal Legitimist, and his relationship with his father was poor in this period, for this reason and for others. But over the course of the decade, Hugo gradually reconciled with his father before his death in 1828, and his political opinions gradually came to resemble his father’s more as time went on as well, so much so that by 1834, when he re-published some of his literary essays from around 1820, he submitted them to revisions in both their politics and their portrayal of his father. Politically, Hugo would creep to the left over the course of three decades or so, where Marius, we will see in this episode and the next, makes a similar change in just a few weeks. In this chapter, as we start to see Marius’s experience from the inside, to get a clear sense of his mind and emotions, the narrator will continue to be Hugo, and this point of view will give a particular inflection to the way we see Marius: we’ll be able to feel that the narrator has experienced much of this himself, but is looking at it now with the wisdom and perspective of age. 

So what we see here is how the situation we discussed last time, of Gillenormand’s reactionary political views creating a separation between Marius and his father, ends in Marius’s late adolescence. First, today, I would like to paint a more complete picture of the situation in which Marius first makes direct contact with his father. Then, we’ll take a closer look at the two major transitions that we see in this section – Marius’s conversion, and his break from Gillenormand. 

This metaphorical journey in Marius’s life begins with a physical journey, and one of similar significance to the one we saw Jean Valjean make in Part 1: the trip from Paris to Vernon, depending on the route, is in the neighborhood of 50 miles, just a bit shorter than Jean Valjean’s trip from Montreuil-sur-mer to Arras. But unlike Jean Valjean’s trip, which was hurried as much as possible, at great expense, and delayed by inevitable mishaps, this journey goes smoothly, but suffers from delays borne of indifference. Gillenormand takes his time in informing Marius of his father’s illness, and then neither he nor the unconverted Marius thinks to investigate the quickest way to get to Vernon. These delays, based in human apathy, prove more damaging than the ones Jean Valjean encountered, and where he arrived just in time to save Champmathieu, Marius arrives just a little bit too late to see his father before he dies.

This apathy, and the resulting tragedy of Pontmercy’s deep sadness at the moment of his death, is only the latest effect of Gillenormand’s efforts to separate father and son. At the beginning of chapter 4 (p. 640) it’s clear that Marius’s separation from his father operates on two levels: political disagreement, of course, but also, and perhaps more importantly, on a personal and emotional level. There is a strange dissonance for us as readers when we see the recently deceased Georges Pontmercy through his son’s eyes. The description begins “Marius considéra cet homme qu’il voyait pour la première fois” (p. 641) -- “Marius considered this man that he was seeing for the first time,” so we know we’re seeing through his eyes, but we can’t help but bring Hugo’s other, more sympathetic portrayal of him to the scene, and we’re left wondering how much of the positive image of Pontmercy is Hugo’s and how much is Marius’s. The description is extremely sympathetic to us, thanks to the way the character has been portrayed up to this point. The positive portrayal of his military exploits in chapter 2 would make our interpretation different from that of this acolyte of Gillenomand when he sees, “ces membres robustes sur lesquels on distinguait çà et là des lignes brunes qui étaient des coups de sabre et des espèces d’étoiles rouges qui étaient des trous de balles” (p. 641) -- “those robust limbs on which he could see here and there dark lines, which were saber wounds, and these sorts of red stars, which were bullet wounds.” But Marius also seems to see some of the same emotional content in the scene that we do, as “il considéra cette gigantesque balafre qui imprimait l’héroïsme sur cette face où Dieu avait empreint la bonté” (p. 641) -- “he considered that gigantic gash that gave heroism to that face to which God had given kindness.” But even after he seems to have made this emotional progress, the paragraph still somehow ends with “Il songea que cet homme était son père et que cet homme était mort, et il resta froid.” (p. 641) -- “He thought about how this man was his father and this man was dead, and it left him cold.” The small amount of first-hand knowledge of his father that Marius can glean from this image has begun to soften his approach to him and to wear away at his defenses, but it’s not enough to create real grief. He fakes some effects of grief, but only really feels guilt at not feeling grief. The narrator then asks, in free indirect discourse in the voice of Marius, “Mais était-ce sa faute? Il n’aimait pas son père, quoi!” (p. 642) -- “But was it his fault? I mean, he didn’t love his father!” Marius returns to Paris after his father’s funeral more or less unaffected by the loss.

And, of course, we know the answer to his question – no, to a great extent, it’s not his fault that he doesn’t love his father; we know that he has been put in this position by Gillenormand’s insistence on separating him from the “Brigand of the Loire,” from the traitor who served “Buonaparté.” Gillenormand cultivated not only a set of political tendencies in his grandson, but also a sense of personal, emotional separation from his father, by preventing any contact between them, including hiding Pontmercy’s heart-felt and emotional letters from his son. It doesn’t seem that this was malicious, exactly, but it’s worth spending a moment thinking about Gillenormand’s motivations. We know that he felt shame in his ultraroyalist social circles about having a bonapartist in the family, and hiding this shameful fact may have been part of the impetus. But also, he and his older daughter are said to think of Pontmercy as “pestiféré” (p. 631) -- “plague-ridden,” a metaphor that suggests that they fear a kind of ideological contamination if Marius were to have contact with him. The result, in any case, is to allow so little contact between the two Pontmercys that Marius believes he was abandoned by his father. He’s not only ashamed of his father’s political views, but he also, and perhaps more importantly, feels that he wasn’t loved by him. 

And, that, it turns out, is the belief that has to change first, to set off the great revolution inside Marius. When he meets Mabeuf, we note that Mabeuf does not engage in apologetics for Pontmercy’s politics; the only thing he says about politics is that he thinks political feuding gets taken too far by some. What he does assure Marius of was that his father loved him. (p. 644) 

At that point, we step out of Marius’s point of view; the transformation that this knowledge sets off is kept secret from us at first; we only see the beginning of some strange behavior that Gillenormand interprets as a love affair. Then, we dive into a moment of personal conversion that will feel familiar, but will also do something that we have not yet seen in Les Misérables – it will get political as well. 

More on that in a moment.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

The title of chapter 4, “La Fin du Brigand” -- “The End of the Brigand” recalls another work of Hugo’s that we’ve had occasion to discuss before: the unfinished poem “La Fin de Satan”-- “The End of Satan.” We talked about it back in episode 6. It was the one where, at the conclusion of the story, which was on a world-historical scale, Satan’s “end” is not his destruction, but the redemption of the archangel Lucifer – it is not the being that comes to an end, but his evil, and, as a result, his exile. Here, the Brigand’s end is similar – thanks to Marius’s conversion, he ceases to be a Brigand, at least for the person who counts most. He is, in a sense, brought back into the fold, restored to his status and his original title. Of course, the sad difference is that Pontmercy’s restoration is posthumous. He does meet his end in the real sense that the titles of both pieces lead us to expect; unlike in “The End of Satan,” Pontmercy’s death is easily understood to be the first-level meaning of the chapter title “The End of the Brigand.” But, at the same time, the posthumous redemption he finds means that he has a chance that he never thought he would have to live on in his son. He is no longer a brigand, so far as Marius is concerned, and because of that, it’s not really his end. 

As we discussed before the break, the catalyst for this profound change is the churchwarden Mabeuf. Mabeuf’s appearance is another coincidence that feels relatively unbelievable, but once again, as we look closely, it’s hard to pinpoint where the implausibility is – at each step, Hugo does construct the circumstances leading to it, as he did with Javert’s re-discovery of Jean Valjean in the Gorbeau house, so that each step is reasonable. Still, though, both encounters can feel either coincidental or providential, depending on one’s bent.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider Mabeuf, because this is not the last we’ll see of him. He is, in French a marguillier, usually translated as churchwarden, that is, he is a layperson who is partly responsible for the administration of the church’s physical property, such as the upkeep of its buildings, and the administration of funds designated for that purpose. We can already see that he is tender-hearted; he’s sentimental about his particular seat during mass because of memories of Pontmercy. Once he begins speaking with Marius at more length, he appears like a voice of reason in all this political feuding, uttering one of the wisest sentences in the novel: “Certainement j’approuve les opinions politiques, mais il y a des gens qui ne savent pas s’arrêter.” (p. 644) -- “Of course, I approve of political opinions, but there are people who don’t know how to stop.” But the most important piece of information for the short term is the assurance he provides of his father’s love. Placing the blame on “des parents, je ne sais plus trop” (p. 644) -- “relatives, I don’t remember who exactly” who separated Pontmercy from his son, he offers enough of the story of this father’s love for Marius to recognize his own family story, then assures the young man, “pauvre enfant, vous pouvez dire que vous avez un père qui vous a bien aimé!” (p. 644) -- “poor child, you can say that you had a father who loved you well!”

For a brief moment after this revelation, the narration takes the same course that it did for each of Jean Valjean’s crises: Hugo shows us Marius’s reaction from the outside first, then allows us into his experience. His first reaction is a three-day absence, followed by intensive reading and research. The text provides sufficient explanation to understand Marius’s goal: he wants information about his father’s life and service to the nation that he has not gotten from his grandfather. But, his specific sources may benefit from a bit of explanation. Le Moniteur that we see him reading was the official state newspaper in France for virtually the entire period from 1799 to 1868, with some changes to its name. Its political leanings followed the period’s various regime changes, so when Maruis reads back into its archives from the Napoleonic era, he would find a sympathetic perspective on Napoleon (and on Pontmercy) that his grandfather never would have given him. Le Mémorial de Saint-Hélène, or The Memorial of Saint Helena published in 1823, was written by Emmanuel de las Cases based on interviews conducted with Napoleon during his final and permanent exile on the Island of Saint Helena. It’s part memoir, but also part political treatise, laying out principles of Bonapartism designed to survive the emperor himself, including a strong but elected central executive, nationalism, social hierarchy based on merit, and rule of law equally applied to all. Les Bulletins de la Grande Armée, or The Bulletins of the Grand Army, were reports from the various battlefields in Napoleon’s wars, published in the Moniteur as a public communication tool, and sent to all fields of engagement as a way of keeping them abreast of the bigger picture. There were around 200 Bulletins between 1805 and the end of the Empire. Among Marius’s other sources, we find generals, including “the count H.,” that we mentioned in the first segment, and Mabeuf, from whom he learns about his father’s non-military life. 

As he does this research hoping to learn about his father’s activities, his father and his country become connected, and he comes to love and understand both simultaneously. “[I]l n’avait pas plus compris son pays qu’il n’avait compris son père” (p. 646) -- “he had no more understood his country than he had understood his father,” and now, when he comes to understand his father and his country, even the vocabulary changes to reflect their connection. Once his conversion is underway, they are called “son père et sa patrie” (p. 646) --the word for “country” is now not “pays” but “patrie.” This word shares a root with words like patriotism or patriotic, but also, more remotely, the French word “père” -- “father,” and in English words like paternity. Our closest equivalent in English is “fatherland,” although that tends to have different connotations for us that make it a bit tricky as a translation for “patrie.” But it is important to recognize that “patrie” is related to fatherhood, that the connection between nation and father becomes so profound here that Hugo even embeds it in his choice of words.

Napoleon becomes a third part of this group, but with somewhat more difficulty, we’re told, because Marius has no first-hand knowledge, nothing personal from which to draw motivation. The monstrous portrayals of the Emperor created by the Restoration compete for credibility with the heroic portrayals he finds in his new readings, but in the end, they’re all portrayals. (p. 647) Before a profound change can take place, something more compelling must intervene. 

As in other moments of crisis and conversion that we've seen – in particular, Jean Valjean’s first conversion in the field outside of Digne, then his long deliberation in the “Tempest in a Skull” chapter – what intervenes is an almost supernatural shift in perception. Even as he is learning about the republic and empire, and his father’s participation in them, his change in perspective is described as a vision that is at first blinding, like darkness turned to light, then, as his metaphorical eyes adjust, as an ability to see clearly where there had been darkness. (c. p. 645) But his new understanding of Napoleon brings about an even more powerful visual and auditory disruption, almost a hallucination of the battlefield before his eyes, in which the stars in the sky outside his window mingle with “d’autres choses colossales” (p. 648) -- “other colossal things” on the page of the Bulletin of the Grand Army, and in which he thinks he hears the drums, trumpets, and cannon blasts of battle mixing with his father’s voice whispering in his ear. 

All of this builds in its appearance of realism, but also in its energy and Marius’s enthusiasm for it, until, “Sans savoir lui-même ce qui était en lui et à quoi il obéissait, il se dressa, étendit les deux bras hors de la fenêtre, regarda fixement l’ombre, le silence, l’infini ténébreux, l’immensité éternelle, et cria: Vive l’empereur!” (p. 648) -- “Without knowing himself what was within him or what he was obeying, he arose, extended both his arms out the window, gazed fixedly at the darkness, the silence, the shadowy infinite, the eternal immensity, and he cried, ‘Long live the emperor!’” He is, like others we’ve seen before, acting without awareness of what he’s doing, taken over by a force that has mastered him more than he has mastered it, following an impulse that he does not yet understand, perhaps even doing a thing of which he is not yet capable. 

The narrator does not follow Marius into his enthusiasm, and we can see in his various hesitations and qualifications that Hugo’s own evolution did not end at this same point. He clarifies that Marius’s first love for Napoleon is like that of a new religious convert, and goes too far. He ignores the “circonstances atténuantes,” (p. 649) -- the “extenuating circumstances” in Napoleon’s glory just as he ignores them in the Restoration’s mistreatment of him. In other words, while Hugo seems to see this changing of sides as progress, greater nuance and a questioning of these extremes would be better still. But we do also see in this new way of understanding Napoleon a complexity that has already been encouraged elsewhere in this novel. That complexity is, at its root, a capacity for change, and we have only begun to see how this new-found capacity will impact Marius and those around him.

The first of these impacts will be at home, and we will look at it more closely after a break.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

With Marius’s rediscovery of his father and his country comes a change in identity, persona, and name. He devotes himself to his father’s memory, and respects his father’s wish that he bear his title of Baron, still in defiance of the Restoration. To make his adoption of this title official, and not being one for half-measures, he has calling cards printed that read “le baron Marius Pontmercy” (p. 649). These would be the sorts of cards that, in respectable social circles, he would leave at the door, perhaps with household staff, for a friend who was not available when he dropped in for a visit – like business cards for people whose business is social life. That is, they are social objects, meant to be seen by others, so in addition to serving as a plot device and setting off the conflict with Gillenormand, they do also represent an intention to shift his social identity. Considering that we were given shame of Pontmercy as one of Gillenormand’s principal motivators in keeping Marius from him, we can see how this sort of intention would enrage his grandfather.  

But Marius is not exactly averse to alienating Gillenormand. Now that they no longer have their political sympathies in common, the difference in their temperaments that had always been present takes on more significance. Here, it’s expressed through literary references: “La gaîté de Géronte choque et exaspère la mélancolie de Werther.” (p. 650) -- “Géronte’s gaity shocks and exasperates Werther’s melancholy.” Géronte was a stock character type from comedies dating back to the Renaissance and taken up most famously in the French tradition, in various forms, in comedies by the playwright Molière. Géronte was a silly old man whose gullibility offered myriad comic possibilities. Werther was the prototype of the melancholic Romantic hero from the German writer Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Setting them in contrast here highlights their difference not only in tone, but also in literary era. We have always known Gillenormand to be lighthearted and frivolous and Marius to be serious and melancholic, and here, this fact begins to add esthetic and emotional divisions to their political ones. Plus, thanks to Mabeuf, Marius has come to understand what he didn’t when he first saw his father had died – that it was Gillenormand who was responsible for their separation. 

As Marius discovers his father’s love and beliefs, and as the Gillenormand household discovers Marius’s sins against ultraroyalism, we see, curiously enough, elements of Fantine’s story repeat themselves. We saw a hint of this last time, when one of the resemblances between Marius and Cosette’s childhoods was their separation from an adoring parent. And now, we see other echoes of Fantine’s story in both Pontmercy’s and Marius’s in the ways that transgressions are discovered and punished with social damnation. The elements come to us out of order, both chronologically and in terms of cause and effect, and, of course, the sins of Pontmercy, father and son are in the familial/political domain that is so important to Gillenormand, not the sexual and moral one that Fantine’s was. But we might look at both as sins of inheritance, as similar in their transgression against a particular idea of the family line. Either way, they powerfully reveal the harm caused by prejudices that lead to exclusion, now to be understood more broadly than before. 

Once he’s begun to make frequent trips to his father’s grave, Marius is subject to the same judgmental curiosity of an old “bigote,” or zealot, that we saw mark the beginning of Fantine’s descent. In this case, that person is Mlle Gillenormand, with the assistance of her own acolyte, Théodule. Théodule has been known to cause some confusion as to his relationship to the family, but this part of the text says he is Gillenormand’s great-grand-nephew, grandson of his brother, apparently, and thus son of Mlle. Gillenormand’s cousin, even though he calls her “aunt.” We should keep our eye on him as a doppelganger of Marius, just as other characters have had doppelgangers. Here, Mlle Gillenormand sends Théodule to “voir la fillette” (p. 654) -- “see the girl” she believes Marius to be in love with, just as Mme Victurnien traveled to Montfermeil to see Fantine’s child for herself. This element, too, takes a form that is just a bit different from the form it took in Fantine’s story: the sin that is revealed is one of the child, not the parent, and Théodule’s mission turns out to be misdirection, not the the mechanism by which the Gillenormands ultimately learn about Marius’s conversion. In fact, Théodule himself becomes more or less superfluous to the story because of his own breach in orthodoxy – he doesn’t reveal Marius’s secret out of respect for the tomb of a military officer, even one whose allegiance was to the Empire. But the very fact that this plotline is superfluous suggests that it’s there to signal something else, perhaps the resemblance between Mlle Gillenormand and the women who uncovered Fantine’s story. We fear that this sort of travel for the purpose of revealing a secret will bring disaster, because we’ve seen it do so before. 

But in a sense, disaster has already struck, because also like Fantine, Georges dies without seeing his son, even though he lives in anticipation of his arrival until his final moments. Then, we see the disassembly of all that he had of beauty, namely, his garden. For Fantine, this kind of disassembly of course painfully preceded her death, but here, we see Georges’s rare and valuable flowers pillaged by neighbors, and the rest of his garden allowed to go feral. 

Finally, we have Pontmercy’s final will for his child expressed in a short note and cited in its entirety in the text, just as Fantine’s was, on not one, but two occasions. Fantine had of course signed a note instructing the Thénardiers to turn Cosette over to “la personne” -- “the person,” who turned out to be Jean Valjean. Here, Pontmercy instructs his son to bear his title of Baron and to do what he can to repay Thénardier for saving his life. The first time we see both of these notes is when they are new, in simple descriptions of their content, before it’s clear whether or not the wish they express will be fulfilled. Then, later, we see both a second time, cited again, after that will has been carried out. When they are repeated, though, both serve a new purpose:  they have become markers of identity for the people who bear them, and dangerous ones at that. Both are also cited somewhat differently the second time. The second time we see Fantine’s note in the text, it includes additional information: the date, which, as we saw, was imbued with a greater meaning. Here, the second time we see the the note, the post scriptum about Thénardier on the back is omitted. Hugo is careful to let us know that Mlle Gillenormand turns it over, but he doesn’t repeat the portion that has less meaning to her. We will nonetheless see this portion of the note again, as even though the piece of paper was lost, the text survives in Marius’s memory.

Of course, the discovery of this note and of Marius’s new calling cards sets off a climactic confrontation between Gillenormand and Marius, and before we finish up today, I would like to offer just a few observations about that scene. 

Gillenormand’s anger, as we’ve seen, is based on some combination of political betrayal and personal betrayal. For him, the two are closely linked, as he seems to take political agreement and allegiance as personal loyalty, and has bound the two up together in separating Marius from his father for political reasons. So, when Marius returns home after Gillenormand’s shocking discovery, what he addresses first is the place where these two questions meet: in Marius’s perception of his identity, his acceptance of the title of Baron. What is really at stake here, and what Gillenormand seems, at the root, to want is control, is who Marius believes he is, whether he finds that in personal origins, in political identification, or both. We think back to his insistence upon naming the members of his household staff – Gillenormand has understood, perhaps only intuitively, the pervasive power of personal identity in people’s behavior. 

Marius’s explanation of the title of Baron on the cards is irrefutable, almost tautological: “Cela veut dire que je suis le fils de mon père” (p. 658)). -- “It means that I am my father’s son.” This, too, is a matter of identity. We all, if only biologically, can claim this fact as part of our identity, but in this context the meaning obviously goes far beyond biology to a sense of both personal and political defiance. It is suggestive of an accusation that Gillenormand had interfered with this most basic of facts about him, and of a declaration that in rediscovering his father, he has come to resemble him more closely. Saying it this simply suggests that claiming the title of Baron has only restored the natural order, that he has only become who he should always have been. Gillenormand, instantly understanding all the implications of Marius’s claim, responds in kind with an assertion about Marius’s identity: “Ton père, c’est moi.” (p. 658) -- “I am your father.” Only this declaration is, and always has been, false.

Marius, in a solemn and respectful tone, explains his newfound respect for his father, but Gillenormand escalates the conflict with a nearly incoherently angry string of insults to all things Revolutionary and Bonapartist. These are all of course familiar to Marius, but now they’re deployed in the hope of changing his mind, regaining control of his identity, and returning him to political orthodoxy. Marius resorts to the most biting expression of defiance he can muster against his grandfather: “A bas les Bourbons, et ce gros cochon de Louis XVIII!” (p. 659) -- “Down with the Bourbons and that fat pig Louis XVIII!” This has as much of a new meaning now as any of the strange terms of this argument we have seen so far – it is a proxy for an expression of personal anger and betrayal. In Marius’s particular situation, much about his childhood is implied in the expression he chooses. “A bas,” literally “down with,” usually implies an opposition to someone with some kind of power, and the person with power here is less Louis XVIII than Gillenormand. This is especially true once we read the narrator’s intervention in the next line: “Louis XVIII était mort depuis quatre ans, mais cela lui était bien égal.” (p. 659) -- “Louis XVIII had been dead for four years, but that didn’t matter to him.” In other words, as political declarations go, this one is a bit silly. By this time, in the waning years of the Restoration, the King is Charles X, and it’s becoming apparent that Louis XVIII was in fact the more moderate of the Restoration kings; Charles X, as we have mentioned, had more difficulty accepting constitutional limits on his power, and his overreach led to the revolution of 1830. In 1828, if this budding young lawyer had wanted to challenge the power of the Restoration and nothing more, a reasoned critique of Charles X in constitutional terms would have been more effective, but that is, of course, not his goal. Louis XVIII was the king during Marius’s childhood, the one he was indoctrinated to love more than his father, and that makes him the better proxy for Gillenormand. This odd throwing down of the gauntlet only barely avoids saying what Marius really means: down with Gillenormand, and his unfair hold on his grandson. 

And so, Marius sets out on his own, free from his grandfather’s control, fully his father’s son in both his allegiances and in his exile, having claimed control over who he will be, and how he will form his identity.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll see the answer to this section’s final question: what will become of Marius? In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 3, book 4, “Landscapes and Horizons.”

[/Music]

In this section we met the Friends of the ABC, the radical political group at the center of many of the events of the half of the story. For readers who are unfamiliar with 19th century French politics, these characters are challenging for many of the reasons that lead to their motivations being vague in most adaptations: more than any other character or group of characters in the novel, they are rooted in an understanding of issues that are specific to this place and this moment in history. Hugo assumes, rightly, that his intended audience won’t need a fulsome explanation of France’s political landscape, and adaptations, also wisely, usually choose not to bog their storytelling down with much political exposition. 

But that sort of explanation is part of why we’re here, so I’d like to take the first part of today’s episode to sketch out the landscape of 19th century French politics. Then I’ll situate the Friends of the ABC in it. We’ve had occasion to discuss parts of this picture before, but I think now is the time to have a look at the whole thing once and for all. But before we do, a couple of caveats. First, while this is important context for Les Misérables, the amount of time I can devote to it here only allows for the roughest of sketches; I’ll put some resources on the website for those of you who might be interested in more detail. And second, while I have to organize this in some way that’s manageable in an audio format, any choice I make in that regard will have problems. What I am going to do is look at the different political categories of the time, one at a time, moving from right to left, conservative to what we in the US today would call liberal – we’ll get to the particular confusion around that word in a moment. But this scheme implies a linearity that is already deceptive, even if it is particularly unavoidable in a podcast. That is, I have to present these parties and factions one at a time, and better in some discernible order than not, but we should bear in mind that they would be better organized on more than one axis. Any number of issues might define a political position – who should have power and how that should be determined, how the economy should be organized, what the status of this or that group of people should be, and how governments should relate to each other, to name just a few. As Hugo suggests here, these elements can combine in a variety of ways, leading to real-life political opinions that can’t be organized in a neat right-to-left scheme. The result for 19th century France is that, even though there are broad categories, which I’m about to define, they could and did mix and combine, sometimes in ways that seem contradictory.

That said, here we go.

Starting on the right, the word “conservateur,” -- “conservative” usually, at this time, meant monarchist. The most conservative of these were Legitimists, who were the monarchists who believed in the divinely-appointed rule of the House of Bourbon – the Kings who were on the throne before the Revolution, and during the Restoration, from 1814 to 1830. They opposed the Revolutions of 1789 and 1830, and usually also the idea of a constitutional monarchy, that is, the limits on the monarch’s power that were established, during the Restoration, by the Charter of 1814. In short, they wanted to go back to the way things were before the Revolution, to the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime. The most extreme of these are ultras; this is Gillenormand. They were often religious traditionalists and members of the nobility as well, although there were exceptions to this, and Gillenormand is one. Just to the left of them, early in the Restoration, Doctrinaires were more moderate monarchists who were interested in incorporating some ideas from the Revolution into the restored monarchical government; they fell from relevance when it became clear, later in the period of the Restoration, that Legitimism would not grow into a comfortable post-Revolutionary existence, and many Doctrinaires, appreciating a middle road between ultra-royalism and more liberal ideas, sympathized with the Orleanists.

Orleanists appeared around 1830 and, as the name suggests, supported the monarchy of the house of Orléans, a younger branch of the same family, connected centuries ago to the house of Bourbon. This was the house that supplied King Louis-Philippe of the July Monarchy that began with the Revolution of 1830. In practice, they also supported the increased power that the bourgeoisie got out of that change in government, so more of this group were rich bourgeois. They did not hold the traditional belief in the divine right of Kings, but did think that monarchy, usually a constitutional monarchy in which a King had to work in some form with an elected legislature, worked for France, and kept order. 

Next as we move to the left was Bonapartism, which gets its name, of course, from allegiance to Napoleon Bonaparte. This allegiance persisted in many of the veterans of his armies who, like Georges Pontmercy, were done wrong by the Restoration and had little motivation to support it. But as we saw last time, after the end of the Empire in 1815, in the Memorial of Saint Helena, Napoleon also sought to lay out principles of a Bonapartism that could outlive him: a strong but elected central executive, an early form of nationalism, social hierarchy based on merit, and rule of law equally applied to all. A strong executive was seen as a safeguard against the kind of chaos that more republican reforms brought during the Revolution. The closest France ever came to this kind of Bonapartism was under the Second Empire, from 1852 to 1870, but we already know enough to know that it brought problems: we’ve said that the Second Empire was more or less a dictatorship, especially early on, and Hugo wrote Les Misérables from exile because of his objections to its authoritarianism. Such a regime could accomplish things, if not entirely democratically – for example, Paris was radically modernized under the Second Empire. That regime tended to emphasize nationalism, empire-building, and belief in France’s supremacy – a great deal of France’s notorious colonial expansion happened under the Second Empire, reminiscent of Napoleon I’s empire-building within Europe during his years in power early in the century. In this period, we most often see the word “démocrat,” -- “democrat” or “democratic” in the context of Bonapartism, at least in theory. The word is of course related to “democracy” in its original sense; those who called themselves “démocrat” believed in the right of the people to rule, although, when combined with bonapartism, this rule was through its choice of one powerful emperor and in referenda in which they would vote when that emperor saw fit. The Friends of the ABC object to Bonapartism because they see through this double-speak around popular power. They are not wrong, of course, because by the time Hugo creates them, he knows that in practice, Bonapartism never managed to be all that democratic. But in theory, it claimed to be, and this is why Marius can call himself a “démocrat-bonapartiste.” 

The word “libéral” -- “liberal” was something of a moving target, and could combine with many of the more centrist positions on this spectrum, but the crucial thing for us to understand, particularly if we’re coming from the environment of contemporary American politics, is that it does not mean what we think it means. Liberalism in the 19th-century European sense tended to put liberty ahead of everything, but that did not necessarily make them democratic, or pro-republic. A “libéral” didn’t want a strong central government, and tended to favor what came to be called laissez-faire economics; in this sense, they are the opposite of what we call “liberal” in the US today. In this context, the word “liberal” was the opposite of both “socialist.” A “libéral” might be a moderate Legitimist, a Bonapartist, or an Orleanist, and those of liberal bent, whose interest was often in business or industry, had growing power under the Orleanist July Monarchy (from 1830 to 1848).

Moving to still more to the left, “républicain” is another word that may look familiar to readers in today’s United States, but the resemblance of these words is also largely coincidental. In 19th century France, républicain meant, simply, pro-republic, as opposed to royalist or bonapartist. At the level of connotation, it was strongly associated with the violent Revolutionary period, which, until 1848, was France’s only experience with republic. To most people on the right half of the political spectrum, it carried fears of chaos and violence. Its central tenet, though, was government by an elected representative body. 

Socialism developed over the course of the century, and was in its early utopian infancy at the time when Les Misérables is set, but not so much at the time when it was written. We’ve mentioned before that Karl Marx was writing around the same time as Hugo. Hugo did have some socialist sympathies by the time he wrote this novel, so it’s worth keeping in mind that these ideas may, somewhat anachronistically, underlie characters’ political declarations. But from our modern perspective, it is also important to remember that this is not 20th-century socialism in the form it took under Soviet or Chinese communism, for example. Nineteenth-century socialist ideas were focused on social reform and an economy that would improve the lives of the working class. In fact, many of the reforms that were considered socialist at this time are taken for granted as desirable today – protections for workers; a social safety net for the poor, sick, and elderly; and of course, universal public education. 

The word “radical,” which you might see applied to any position that is left of center here, usually refers to methods rather than any particular belief. Radicals supported not only the changes that the Revolutionary period wanted to bring about, but the way they did so--quickly, by abrupt changes in society and law, and even violence if necessary.

In the context of all this, the Friends of the ABC fall quite far to the left. Even in their stated purpose, education, they support a kind of social change that would have seemed to associate them with socialism, and once the pun on their name is taken into account, they will tend to seem quite socialist: on the surface they are the friends of the ABC, that is, the alphabet, and the education of which it is the foundation, but ABC in French is pronounced ABC, and abaissé is a word that might be translated as something like the downtrodden. Hugo has of course put education at the center of the social problems in this book since the beginning; just three episodes ago, we were reminded of its centrality with our discussion of the gamin, but the question has been with us since the Preface, with its mention of the atrophy of children by darkness. Now, as we enter the most politically explicit section of the novel, we find it at the core of our political characters’ motivations as well. We also recognize leftist political movements in what Hugo tells us here about the two meeting places of the Friends of the ABC. I will map their approximate locations; they are adjacent to centers of Parisian life for workers and students, respectively. This alliance is an iconic one in the history of French social uprisings as youthful idealism allied with real experience of exploitation and hardship. Those familiar with more recent French history will recognize this alliance from the massive social movements of May 1968, for example, and it was already in existence in the 19th century. 

Hugo tells us from the outset here that this group is about to embark on “une aventure tragique” (p. 663) -- “a tragic adventure.” We also notice that, if we leave out the somewhat peripheral Grantaire, this is another group of 8, like the four couples that formed Fantine’s group in Paris before Tholomyès abandoned her, and the group of police officers who pursued Jean Valjean through the streets. Ill-fatedness seems to accompany this number, perhaps as a reference to the spiders that have so often represented fate hanging over our characters.

After a break, we will take a closer look at the Friends of the ABC.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

The Friends of the ABC offer us a glimpse of something we haven’t seen in this novel: political progressives who place the foundation of their opinions in ideology. We did have the Conventionist in Part 1 book 1, certainly, but since then, we have mostly seen characters who have been either apolitical, like most of our heroes, or on the ideological right. Pausing at this point to consider this fact creates a curious impression – we began our discussion with a Preface that positioned the book on the left, and then we have waited for nearly half of this considerable novel to see characters who self-consciously espouse these same ideas. Virtually all of the progressive underpinning of this story has come from the narrator and, more convincingly, from the story itself. Hugo, of course, lets his own point of view be known, but he also creates a story that makes it easy for us to sympathize with him. We don’t need left-leaning revolutionary students to help us see that an uneducated tree-pruner, when he has no work and a house full of starving children, is treated unjustly when he is sentenced to years in prison for stealing bread. Or that the burden of sexual morality falls too heavily on a poor working-class mother when she has to suffer unimaginable pain and indignity to keep herself and her child alive while the rich young man who abandoned her can simply forget them both. Or that the disconnection between parents and children, regardless of its cause, leaves children unmoored and at risk. Up to this point, we’ve been allowed to simply observe as these problems – the century’s three problems – have been demonstrated before our eyes. 

Seeing the problems for ourselves almost certainly makes for a more convincing exposition of them than a story told, say, entirely through the eyes of the Friends of the ABC. Instead, by the time we meet these characters, we feel as though we’ve been with them, in a sense, all along. We’re already in step with their assumptions and point of view. This is probably an easier sell for modern readers than it was for 19th-century ones; few if any of us today are Legitimists, for example, or opposed to universal education or representative government. But, another consistent presence since the beginning of the novel, alongside illustrations of the problems that our poorest characters face, has been a set of characters who work toward solutions to these problems while remaining politically inoffensive even to conservative 19th-century readers. The Bishop, of course, is our paradigm for this type, and we discussed that at greater length back in episode 2. But Jean Valjean both in his disguise as Madeleine and afterward might be thought of as another, along with the nuns of Petit-Picpus. These characters have made the struggle against poverty and oppression sympathetic, palatable, and so far, apolitical.

With the Friends of the ABC, that struggle takes that one more step. It does become political, but here, we see Hugo work to make these political figures, in whom readers might recognize political opponents, human, and even sympathetic. 

In fact, of the nine Friends of the ABC who are given to us by name, seven are presented via character sketches that include little or no specificity about politics. Among this group, it is Bossuet who is Marius’s first entry into the circle. He gets his nickname in the group from a series of puns based on the French word for Eagle, which was a nickname for Napoleon. It was originally a corruption of a name Bossuet’s ancestor got from being the servant responsible for the care of a wealthy man’s pack of dogs; that combined with his hometown of Meaux inspired the group to name him after the famous orator Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, 17th-century Bishop of Meaux. This, of course, suits Marius, who does not fail to make the connection to Napoleon, and to look noticeably downcast when Bossuet’s reports Professor Blondeau’s declaration that “Si vous êtes Pontmercy, vous n’êtes pas Laigle” (p. 676) -- in which Marius would have heard, thanks to a French homophone “If you’re Pontmercy, you’re not the Eagle.” Bossuet is known for generally bad luck, and often crashes at friends’ places, mostly Joly’s. So it is Courfeyrac who takes Marius in, out of little more than generosity, at their first meeting. Courfeyrac is compared, in terms of personality, to Tholomyès, but Hugo is careful to note that it is only external charisma that they have in common, the ability to draw people to them, which makes both the center of their group. But Courfeyrac is more admirable, more heroic than the author of Fantine’s struggles. Jean Prouvaire has an artist’s spirit, and seems to come to his political opinions by watching social and political life side by side with poetry and contemplation of the infinite. Feuilly is the one of them whose background is similar to the other misérables we’ve seen – he’s a working class orphan, a self-taught student of international politics in particular. Bahorel reminds us a bit of the gamin, in his spontaneity and his creativity, but he is more ready for a real fight, and he has a better budget. Joly is a medical student and a hypochondriac, but known for his positive attitude. Most of the rest of them are law students, which was something of a default course of study for young men from bourgeois families who would become social and political leaders. 

Still, Hugo bookends these humanizing descriptions with some much more political portraits. At the end of the series of brief descriptions he gives us an overview en masse of their beliefs: they all believe in Progress with a capital P, are all inheritors of the spirit of 1789, and they have become sons of the original Revolution, rather than of their conservative fathers – a self-consciously chosen paternity that creates an affinity with Marius before he even meets them. On the political spectrum we outlined in the first segment today, this would certainly put them all  to the left, among the radicals, socialists, and republicans, and Hugo pointedly tells us that Progress is their “religion” (p. 671). We see Courfeyrac rail against the Charter in chapter 4, not in the way Gillenormand would have as a crime against the legitimate king, but because he sees it as a compromise, a dilution of Revolutionary ideals. It is also worth pointing out, to file away for three weeks from now, a way that their association is figured in passing here. We see a subterranean image that will be developed quite a bit more in book 7, as the narrator says that “ils ébauchaient souterrainement l’idéal” (p. 671) -- “they were sketching out, underground, the ideal.” Much more on that coming soon to a podcast near you.

But the exception to this de-emphasizing of politics in the character sketches is, of course, to be found in those of Enjolras and Combeferre, which are the first portraits we have here. Their politics are more deeply integrated into them and we get the sense, perhaps not entirely fairly, that they are more political than the others. These two represent two ways of working for progress. Enjolras is more intense, single-minded, aggressive, ready for violence, while Combeferre is more philosophical, believing that progress is the natural state of humanity, and that it just needs to be allowed to flourish. Much of the early 19th century in France feared that any move toward republic would be of the kind that Enjolras incarnates, and would lead to violence. Enjolras’s presentation is positive – he is presented as a kind of pure, distilled substance – but Combeferre’s description feels inspired. The description starts to run away with Hugo, as if the page can’t contain it. But it’s not incoherent; its thesis is clear: education, light, good laws and a will to forward movement will, in Combeferre’s view, bring about a better world. Each of the Friends of the ABC might be seen as an avatar of Hugo himself to some extent, but Combeferre and Jean Prouvaire, I think, the philosopher and the artist, are the most reminiscent of their author.

This leaves Grantaire. He is given to us as the skeptic, the nihilist, uninterested in the group’s revolutionary ideals. He drinks too much and enjoys himself, and these are the extent of his interests – except, of course, for Enjolras. He finds Enjolras compelling because they are opposites. He becomes part of the revolutionary group at a sort of second degree – he believes in Enjolras, and Enjolras believes in the cause. We might see in this an echo of Jean Valjean’s tendency to pray not before God or religious images, but before examples of human piety, like the Bishop, or the nuns of Petit-Picpus. But the reference that Hugo makes here to Greek mythology, to Orestes and Pylades, is not to this sort of relationship, but to a legendarily close and loyal friendship. Modern readers have sometimes also read Grantaire’s affection for Enjolras as romantic. But however we might interpret its ambiguous nature, it does not seem to be entirely reciprocal. Enjolras, we’re told, “dédaign[e]” (p. 673) -- “disdains” Grantaire, and “il lui accordait un peu de pitié hautaine” (p. 673) -- “he accorded him a bit of haughty pity.” 

This is the community Marius finds when his rift with his grandfather leaves him alone in the world. Especially as modern readers and novices at the nuances of the period’s political divisions and alliances, we might expect, as he does, that he would feel quite at home among the Friends of the ABC. What he will find, though, is a combination of affinities and aversions that will offer an immediate challenge to his newfound political complexity.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

When Marius finds himself among the Friends of the ABC, it feels providential, like an obvious fit, for this young, poor, politically passionate student to find a welcoming group like himself. But wait a minute, you might say, poor? If you remember Marius’s departure from Gillenormand’s house, you may recall that Gillenormand doesn’t cut Marius off completely when he sends him away. He instructs his daughter to send him the healthy sum of 60 pistoles, or 600 francs each month. We can compare this to other sums of money we’ve seen – for example, after the Thénardiers twice raised their monthly fee for keeping Cosette and it reached a level that Fantine couldn’t pay, that level was 15 francs per month, or 1/40 of this amount. In other words, Gillenormand is still willing to support his grandson quite generously, even if he is no longer willing to live with him. 

But we soon find out Marius refuses to accept the money, even though he does not in fact have other means of support. This is a rejection of his grandfather, of course, but also a countercultural statement, a choice of principles over money. Living a meager existence in the Latin quarter was already, by the time Les Misérables appeared, a marker of anti-bourgeois counterculture, of what was coming to be called bohemian culture. Henri Murger’s novel, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, in translation as The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, was first published as a series of stories in the late 1840s. The stories in this collection were based on his own experiences in that culture just a few years earlier, so shortly after we find our characters there. The characters in Murger’s novel, which was the basis for the opera La Bohème – and for those of you who may come to Les Misérables through musical theater, for the musical Rent – were mostly apolitical, and toiled away as the original starving artists and grisettes. But such artists lived and associated closely with students like the ones Hugo shows us here. This would have been a recognizable lifestyle by the time it appeared here, and one that was, to a great extent, a rejection of middle-class political and economic values, with their desire for order and their valuing of activities and people in financial terms. So far in Les Misérables, we have often seen the economically-based values assigned to human beings portrayed in the most hideous terms. Cosette and Jean Valjean were valued for their labor potential, and so were exploited. Fantine was physically sold off piece by piece. Slavery, the most naked transformation of a human being into a commodity, has often been used as a metaphor for this way of valuing a person. We have occasionally found this somewhat incongruous, but at its heart, the assumption that human value can be expressed as economic value is what brings the situations of these misérables together. It’s what much of this novel protests, and it is what these students protest as well, at first, through their Bohemian lives, and later, in more direct ways.

As if to announce the group’s value system, Bossuet expresses a countercultural sentiment almost immediately when he meets Marius, when he claims to be delighted to have been removed from the roster at the law school. He was on the way to becoming a lawyer, to joining an upstanding, respectable, and, of course, lucrative profession, but now, thank heavens, he has been saved from that fate. He expresses distaste for it not in terms of money, exactly but in terms of the conformity that is expected in such a profession; he derides the gown and the professionalization. He also objects to its role in society, and expresses that objection in a sentence whose wordplay complicates its meaning. He says, “Je ne défendrai point la veuve et je n’attaquerai point l’orphelin” (p. 676) -- this might be translated as “I will not defend the widow and I will not attack the orphan,” using opposite actions with this classically vulnerable pair of widow and orphan to declare a kind of neutrality in the social problems that these two types represent. But “la veuve,” the widow, was also a slang term used to refer to the guillotine. What we already know about these young men makes this latter interpretation far more likely, and the resulting translation, “I will not defend the guillotine and I will not attack the orphan” makes opting out of the legal profession a necessary part of opting out of the class that creates the misère that we have seen from the beginning of this novel. By not finishing his studies, he opts not to become Tholomyès or Bamatabois, or one of the lawyers who were portrayed so unsympathetically at Champmathieu’s trial. Instead, he will work against what they helped create. 

But the bohemian lifestyle is not just a social and political stance; Hugo also chalks it up to their youth, and it is that youth and vitality that’s portrayed in chapter 4. Grantaire provides one of the novel’s long, incoherent monologues, borne of sheer drunkenness. Meanwhile, Hugo creates an atmosphere of games, merry-making, and discussions of love and poetry as well as politics. Marius in the environment of the café Musain offers a fruitful contrast with Marius in Mme de T’s salon, where he spent his childhood. There, he was surrounded by cadavers, ghosts, beings that were only half living. Here, “Toutes ces initiatives diverses le sollicitaient à la fois, et le tiraillaient. Le va-et-vient tumultueux de tous ces esprits en liberté et en travail faisait tourbillonner ses idées.” (p. 678) -- “All these diverse initiatives called to him at once, and tugged at him. The tumultuous comings and goings of all of these minds, free and at work, set his mind spinning.” He is overwhelmed by the life and energy in this place. 

But even as their youth lets Marius fall in easily with this group, they challenge him in other ways. He has only recently discovered his father’s ideas, after growing up with such limited horizons, and now he learns that Bonapartism is only the tip of the iceberg, and he is overwhelmed. He finds them disagreeing among themselves about matters adjacent to politics, including, once again, classical tragedy – that was probably fairly understandable to you by now – and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was an 18th-century thinker and writer, one of the philosophes whose ideas are often seen as influencing the French Revolution. Enjolras, we see here, reveres him. But he was also known for persuading his working-class mistress, the Thérèse who is mentioned here, to abandon the illegitimate children they had together. We discussed a few weeks ago the frequent abandonment of children, and how both poverty and stigma contributed to it; this scandal surrounding Rousseau, which was so significant that it became attached to his legacy in the way that we see here, represented that tendency. For these students – who are embodiments, each in his own way, of the novel’s ideals – Rousseau is a figure who stirs up some conflict. 

But perhaps even more astonishing for Marius is the discovery that the political world cannot simply be divided in two, that Enjolras, like Gillenormand, pronounces Buonaparte in the Italian way that emphasized his foreignness and the speaker’s distrust of him. And this astonishment becomes outright conflict when Napoleon comes up in conversation, and Enjolras calls his coup d’état a “crime.” He sees it as a betrayal of the republican ideal, and Marius cannot leave that insult unanswered. Marius’s defense centers on Napoleon the man, and as such, doesn’t really reflect the Bonapartism that was meant to outlive its founder. But the terms with which he begins it are more revelatory than the speech itself. He asks the Friends of the ABC: “qui sommes-nous? Qui êtes-vous? Qui suis-je? Expliquons-nous sur l’empereur. Je vous entends dire Buonaparte en accentuant l’u comme les royalistes [...] Je vous croyais des jeunes gens” (p. 688) -- “Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? Let’s discuss the emperor. I hear you say Buonaparte with stress on the u like the royalists do. [...]. I thought you were young.” Marius’s limited experience has only allowed his world to be divided in two – his grandfather’s team and his father’s, the old regime and the new. He’s still, in a sense, in the framework that his grandfather gave him, in which one is either royalist or not; all he thinks he’s done is switch sides. 

But Combeferre’s concisely-worded assertion that freedom is grander than any emperor leaves Marius conflicted. After this confrontation, he is described as between two religions, in a crepuscular place, between light and darkness (p. 690). We are left thinking of Jean Valjean’s Tempest in a Skull. He, too, had made a conversion, and was content with it, but it was upended, and not only his prior conversion, but the categories that that conversion was based on, crumbled before his eyes. Marius’s new political religion has now been upended as well, and he fears he may need to make another conversion. In a sense, he too is already no longer the same man, but his crisis, his epic deliberation, is interrupted by his poverty. It will take yet another competitor for Marius’s devotion, and a series of conflicts and crises in that competition, for him to work through and resolve the unease that we leave him with today.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll follow Marius deeper into his bohemian existence. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 3, book 5, “Parallel Lives.”

[/Music]

In book 5, we continue to watch Marius evolve into the image of one of the novel’s misérables, but he arrives at that state via a different path than the others we’ve seen. Last time, we talked about this period’s invention of bohemian counterculture, and Marius’s evolution through this section continues to solidify the connection between that culture and the other forms that poverty might take. But even as his bohemian life appears to reject the values of older generations, our story of Marius’s slide into bohemian poverty is punctuated by discussions of the older men who have influenced and continue to influence his development: Gillenormand and Mabeuf.

These detours appear, at first, to be mini-digressions from the main story in this book, entitled “L’Excellence du malheur” -- “The Excellence of Misfortune.” We assume that the “misfourtune” in question is Marius’s, as this seems to be his story, and he starts out, at least, in some pretty rough straits here. But when we look more closely at this word, malheur, we have reason to question that assumption. The word malheur is a combination of the words “mal” -- “bad/evil” and “heur” -- an outdated word meaning “luck,” or maybe something like “happenstance.” This is why I chose to translate it as “misfortune.” But at the same time, the word malheur has birthed two much more common words, “malheureux,” and “malheureusement” -- most commonly understood as meaning, more or less, “unhappy” and “unfortunately” respectively. A person who is malheureux feels bad, usually thanks to some circumstance or other – it is very common to say that someone is malheureux in an unpleasant workplace, for example. Malheureusement is used very much the way we use “unfortunately” in English – appended to any statement that we feel, or think we ought to feel, negatively about. That is to say, both of these words are closely related to negative feelings as well as negative circumstances, and this inflection has had an effect on the meaning of malheur as well. So, the word malheur in the sense of “misfortune” may well apply to Marius, and it is certainly in the context of his character’s growth that Hugo emphasizes its “excellence.” But Marius, after all, hasn’t really suffered hard luck; he is choosing poverty for reasons of principle. It’s much easier to see true misfortune working in the story of Mabeuf. And the unhappiness we see in this section is far more potent in Gillenormand’s story than anyone else’s.

So, I’d like to begin today by focusing on these two older men, first Gillenormand, and then Mabeuf, to try to understand their misfortune, or unhappiness, and its excellence. 

Interestingly, from Marius’s point of view, his continued separation from Gillenormand has taken on the reason that his separation from his father had before: he believes the older man does not love him. He discovered that this could not have been further from the truth about his father, and, when we look back in on Gillenormand, we find that it is untrue now as well. Marius had mistaken his grandfather’s temperament, his insults that are equal parts levity and tempestuous rage, to signal a kind of shallowness of feeling, a simplicity that cannot possibly, to the young Romantic’s way of thinking, support real love. But in fact, chapter 3 shows us the place where Gillenormand’s pride and political convictions meet his affection for his grandson, and that is a place whose complexity rivals any of the characters we have seen live in productive contradiction – from the Bishop to Jean Valjean, to Marius himself. Somewhere in the neighborhood of four or five years pass here with virtually no communication between grandfather and grandson, and in that time, Gillenormand’s feelings are summed up in contradictions. “Il exigea qu’on ne lui en parlât plus, en regrettant tout bas d’être si bien obéi. Dans les premiers temps il espéra que ce buonapartiste, ce jacobin, ce terroriste, ce septembriseur reviendrait. Mais les semaines se passèrent, les mois se passèrent, les années se passèrent; au grand désespoir de M. Gillenormand, le buveur de sang ne reparut pas” (p. 698) -- “He demanded not to be spoken to about him, while quietly regretting that he was so well obeyed. At first, he hoped that this buonapartist, this jacobin, this terrorist, this septembriseur [participant in a September 1792 massacre, committed by Revolutionaries, by the way] would come back. But the weeks passed, the months passed, the years passed; to M. Gillenormand’s great despair, the blood-drinker did not reappear.” Far from being without feeling, Gillenormand spends these years with his intense passions – his hatred for the Revolution and his love for his grandson – in deep, painful conflict, and to those around him, he seems unusually moody and erratic, even for him.

Like Marius, Mlle Gillenormand misunderstands her father’s unhappiness, taking it to be simpler than it is. She thinks he just needs a young, fresh face around, a misconception that leads to her failed attempt to substitute Théodule for Marius. We’ll recall that Mlle Gillenormand had particular affection for Théodule, Gillenormand’s great-nephew, and he was the one that she got to follow Marius on one of his mysterious out-of-town excursions that turned out to be visits to Georges Pontmercy’s grave. That mission turned out to be superfluous, and in this section, he is deployed on a cause that is just as futile. Gillenormand is indifferent to Théodule, barely even seems to notice he’s in the room for a couple of pages, then insults him even though, or perhaps because, he blindly agrees with everything his great-uncle says. Both this total acquiescence and the resulting insult resemble the relationship he had with Marius before their falling out, and this echo adds Marius to the long list of characters who have doubles – examples might include Jean Valjean with Fauchelevent and Champmathieu, or the two Thénardier daughters, whom we will see again, or any of those who come to us in groups, like the Friends of the ABC. The novel’s misérables are, for at least some of the other characters, interchangeable, lacking in individual identity. But here, Gillenormand does not fall into that category, does not see Théodule as an adequate substitute for Marius, and his similar treatment of the two young men does not mask the same affection for them.

But the visit from Théodule does remind us of the distance Marius has traveled, and it also provides us with an opportunity to look in on what’s going on in Gillenormand’s mind. He continues to place political resentment at the center of his complaints, but, for reasons we’ll discuss more fully in a few weeks, the 1830 Revolution hasn’t changed very much for him – he continues to be outraged at any and all new political developments since 1789. If anything, the fact that the Revolution of 1830 ended in the July Monarchy is proof, to him, that “le peuple n’en veut pas de ta république” (p. 711) -- “the people want no part of your republic.” Instead, the main subject of his ire here, at least on the surface, is youth, the new generation and the new era that it has ushered in, both politically and culturally. Astute listeners may have recognized the name of one of Hugo’s own plays here, when Gillenormand includes it among the subjects of his outrage, “Il y a un an, ça vous allait à Hernani” (p. 711) -- “A year ago, they were all going to see Hernani,” and repeats some of the typical criticisms of that 1830 play, and of the second French Romanticism in general. We talked about that period, and Hugo’s leadership in it, back in some of our early episodes, especially 2, 3, and 5. Those who followed Hugo’s lead in that cultural moment, who adored Hernani, constituted a kind of youth culture that met with broad disapproval from older generations, which we also saw briefly echoed by one of the lawyers in Champmathieu’s trial. These young romantics, sometimes given a name that Gillenormand mentions here, “les jeunes France,” weren’t necessarily politically radical, or political at all. And it’s worth remembering that they aren’t associated with the original French Revolution. We are now 42 years past 1789; most of the young people who have piqued Gillenormand’s anger here were not yet born during the first Revolution, and most probably have only the vaguest childhood memories of the fall of Napoleon in 1815. But Gillenormand seems to conflate everything that he sees as new and horrifying into a single phenomenon. These cultural revolutionaries are part of the problem, for him, along with political revolutionaries of any generation, and in the end, it’s not all that surprising that Gillenormand’s disgust for all things post-Revolutionary would extend to these cultural changes as well. 

The revulsion he expresses for youth culture here reinforces the generational divide that is at the foundation of Marius’s bohemian existence. We’ll remember that last time, Marius was shocked to discover political differences with his friends because, as he put it, “je vous croyais des jeunes gens” (p. 688) -- “I thought you were young.” But while Marius discovers the complexities to be found among the youth that he had long heard his grandfather disparage, Gillenormand continues here to strain against the relentless forward motion of culture. His disapproval of the politics of the younger generation, ironically, is four decades old, and, since Marius’s departure, it also seems to mask his complex pain about Marius’s political conversion. But as he also criticizes the way they dress, their conduct in love affairs, their general lack of elegance, and their taste in literature, we can’t help but wonder if he also partly blames general youthfulness for drawing Marius away from him. He has no way of having any recent information about these aspects of his grandson’s life, of course. But as we saw last time, and as we will see further later in this episode, Marius seems to have definitively left Gillenormand behind in favor of all things new and young.

In the midst of his tirade, Gillenormand declares, “il devrait être sévèrement défendu d’avoir des opinions politiques” (p. 712) -- “it should be strictly forbidden to have political opinions.” No one would be happier with that interdiction than Marius’s other major influence, Mabeuf – more on him in a moment.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Apart from Gillenormand, the other older man who gets his own chapter in Marius’s story is Mabeuf. We paused for a brief moment to notice him two weeks ago; he is the churchwarden who opened Marius’s eyes to his father’s love and set off the political revolution that drove him away from Gillenormand. At the end of chapter 4 (note: this is an error in the original audio; it should read “the end of chapter 3”)  here, the narrator clarifies that this had been entirely unintentional on Mabeuf’s part, that he had been “l’agent calme et impassible de la providence” (p. 702) -- “the calm and impartial agent of Providence.” He is said to be one of Marius’s only close friends, the other being Courfeyrac, and Marius cherishes him for the connection he provided, and continues to provide, to his father. 

Mabeuf’s intervention in Marius’s political evolution must have been unintentional because of his total disinterest in all things political and military. Mabeuf’s distaste for both politics and violence is highlighted here, with both chalked up to his tender disposition. The narrator reminds us of one of the first things he said to Marius, “Certainement, j’approuve les opinions politiques” -- “Of course, I approve of political opinions,” but now he annotates this statement, telling us that it means that “il les approuvait toutes, sans distinguer, pour qu’elles le laissassent tranquille” (p. 703) -- “he approved of all of them, without distinguishing, so that they would leave him alone.” His love of plants and books is given as sort of the opposite of an interest in politics, and the “ist” word that describes him is not royalist, bonapartist, or the like – it’s bouquiniste. Translations of this word may vary, but today it is understood to be a second-hand bookseller, especially those found selling out of stalls along the Seine in Paris. But the context here offers no sense that he sells old books, rather, just that he loves and collects them. Although the modern word bouquiniste existed in 1862, I suspect that Hugo means it in a sense that is original to this passage, as one who believes in bouquins, or old books, the way a bonapartiste is one who believes in Bonaparte. And so, as Marius discovers a vast and complex world of political opinions, as well as political violence, Mabeuf is an oasis of calm and neutrality. When hard financial times hit – related to the political violence of 1830, we should note, and to a bank failure that is beyond his control – he joins some of our other misérables on the side of town that is near the Gorbeau house where Marius now lives, and where Jean Valjean evaded Javert. 

As we get this closer look at him, we find that Mabeuf has a number of other characteristics that should be familiar to us by now. He is an older man who has never married; he doesn’t seem to have chosen not to marry, per se, simply says “j’ai oublié” (p. 704) -- “I forgot,” when someone inquires about it. As such, he engages in the activity that by now seems almost required of older men:  he is a gardener. Each of the gardeners we’ve seen so far has undertaken the hobby differently, and Mabeuf has yet another approach. He combines the ingenuity of Pontmercy and the love of the Bishop with the practicality of Jean Valjean. He works passionately, and like Pontmercy, he tends to cultivate innovation. His proudest creation is a fruit, a new variety of pear, which is of course more practical than the flowers that the Bishop grew or that Pontmercy bred and coaxed into new forms; Jean Valjean made a similar contribution to the convent, by improving the fruit yielded by their fruit trees. Hugo is careful to let us know that he understands the plants and old books that he loves not just as esthetic objects, but as the productive forces that they are: “Il se gardait fort d’être inutile; avoir des livres ne l’empêchait pas de lire, être botaniste ne l’empêchait pas d’être jardinier.” (p. 703) -- “He was very careful not to be useless; having books did not prevent him from reading, and being a botanist did not prevent him from being a gardener.” Where the Bishop had asserted that “Le beau est aussi utile que l’utile” -- “The beautiful is as useful as the useful,” Mabeuf now seems compelled to a richer understanding of both beauty and usefulness. As we have with the others, we can think of Mabeuf’s gardening in metaphorical terms as well. Both he and Pontmercy, without knowing it, participate in the careful cultivation of Marius as he too takes on new forms, becoming something both more beautiful and more useful than he was when they found him. It is in him that both men will, so to speak, bear fruit.

Mabeuf is also, like the other unmarried men in the novel, accompanied by an old woman who serves him and sees to his practical needs. He calls her la mère Plutarque for reasons that the novel doesn’t quite explain, but that we can begin to try to interpret. First the “la mère” element, literally “the mother,” is similar to the “le père,” or “father” that we saw appended to Madeleine’s name. For Madeleine, we settled on a translation something like “Old Man;” so we might translate what he calls her as “Old Lady” Plutarque. The “Plutarque” portion, on the other hand, offers a different kind of clue. Plutarch, the Greek essayist and biographer from the late first century and early second centuries AD, was known for, among other things, his Parallel Lives, biographies of well-known figures that he explicitly set in parallel in order to highlight similarities among them. This, I can’t help but think, is a kind of reading of human stories that Hugo encourages in his novel, and the reference to Plutarch, here near its midpoint, almost seems to suggest we take an intentional moment to consider this way of reading it. 

One of the more interesting adaptations of this novel does just this. It was made in 1995 by the French director Claude Lelouch, and it sets out not just to tell Hugo’s basic story, but to explore the idea that stories repeat themselves, perhaps in different forms, but that they bear more commonalities than differences. The film takes as its premise an idea from Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! that says, “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” As a meditation on that, alongside the 19th-century story that we’re coming to know, Lelouch’s Les Misérables tells an equally complex tale that follows characters across the first half of the 20th century in France, but instead of creating one-to-one equivalencies between the novel’s plots and these new ones, the stories weave in and out in a complex web; a given character might live out elements of Cosette’s story first, then Jean Valjean’s, then Marius’s, and perhaps Jean Valjean’s again – that is, a new and poignant story is woven together out of recognizable elements and yet completely different events, in a way that feels, somehow, true to the spirit of the original. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find the full film with English subtitles, at least in the US, but I will post links to a trailer and to an excerpt on the website so you can get an idea of it. 

I think this approach to adaptation feels so faithful to the original in part because Hugo engages in the same kind of story crafting. I have often, in this podcast, had occasion to talk about hearing “echoes” of one story in another: Cosette’s forced labor resembled Jean Valjean’s. Madame de T.’s salon resembled the Petit-Picpus convent. Jean Valjean’s reverential moments at both Cosette and Fantine’s bedsides resembled the one at the Bishop’s bedside. These are just a few examples; there have been many, many more than this, and with Mabeuf, in addition to the older male gardeners that he resembles so closely, we find a strong parallel with a less obvious character – Fantine. 

In this section, we see the beginning of what seems to be a descent into misère that recalls hers as he gradually sells things that make up who he is, and his quality of life gradually diminishes. But just as Fantine continued to look in her mirror, even after she sold her hair, he continues to garden, to cultivate indigo, a New World plant which he hopes to make adaptable to the climate in France, and he continues to delight in books and tales. The narrator emphasizes that he, like Fantine, is being fed to some extent by “illusions;” that he doesn’t seem to realize quite what’s happening, as can be the case for  “les cerveaux absorbés dans une sagesse, ou dans une folie, ou, ce qui arrive souvent, dans les deux à la fois” (p. 706) -- “minds that are absorbed in wisdom, or in folly, or, as often happens, in both at once.” He is continuing with habits, we might say, of which he is already no longer capable. 

But one illusion in particular that we see here speaks to the kind of strange truth that illusions can tell. As he listens to la mère Plutarque reading aloud, she pauses, and he mishears her. The sentence “La Belle bouda, et le dragon” (p. 706) -- “The beautiful girl pouted, and the dragon...,” becomes, in his mind, “Bouddha et le Dragon,” as if it were a story title, “Buddha and the Dragon.”  Based on this title, he claims to know a story in which Buddha converts a dragon who is burning up the sky. Unlike Saint George, Marius’s father’s namesake, who slayed the dragon, the Buddha that Mabeuf conjures up brings about a change in the dragon to stop his destruction. We think of the Bishop’s intended work on Jean Valjean, which it took him so long to understand, in which the “hideous convict” was to be redeemed, transformed into an honest man, not locked away or destroyed in favor of a whole new identity. And we think again of “La Fin de Satan,” “The End of Satan,” which we mentioned first in the context of Jean Valjean’s conversion, then again just a couple of weeks ago, in the context of “La Fin du Brigand,” “The End of the Brigand.” This imagined story of Buddha and the Dragon becomes a parallel tale to all of those, showing something that Mabeuf, in the “rêverie délicieuse” that ends chapter 4, seems to understand – that converting an enemy is more powerful than destroying him through violence or exclusion. The Bishop knew this, of course, but none of Marius’s other male influences seem to. Gillenormand, faced with a political adversary in his family, hid him away, and separated father from son. And that adversary, Pontmercy, became so by taking up arms in violent conflict, like Saint George against the dragon. That may be heroic, and it may even be useful, if the dragon is burning up the sky, but it is this other way that Mabeuf calls beautiful, saying, “Il n’y a pas de plus belle légende” (p. 707) -- “There is no more beautiful legend.”

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Just as we saw Mabeuf living a life in parallel to other characters, Marius does as well. 

Most of this section is dedicated to a portrait of his life in poverty, as he refuses the support of “l’homme qui avait été mal pour son père” (p. 699) -- “the man who had been mean to his father.” Marius quite consciously suffers for his father, and he does so with pleasure. He derives pleasure from imitating his father, from consciously creating a parallel with him by being “vaillant contre l’indigence comme lui avait été brave contre l’ennemi” (p. 700) -- “valiant against indigence as he had been brave against the enemy.” But at the same time, he shows resemblances to another of the novel’s father-figures as well. “il se disait avec une sorte de joie que c’était une expiation; que, -- sans cela, il eût été puni, autrement et plus tard, de son indifférence impie pour son père.” (p. 699-700) -- “He told himself with a kind of joy that it was an expiation; that -- without it, he would have been punished, later and in a different way, for his impious indifference toward his father.” This word, expiation, is of course used to describe Jean Valjean’s time in prison, as payment for crime, and it has religious overtones as well, as payment for sin – Marius is pleased to pay for the crime or sin of neglecting his father until it was too late. Part of this expiation also seems to be, as it was for Jean Valjean, the shame and disregard that comes with the appearance of poverty, only for Marius, it’s the negative opinion of young women, in particular, that concerns him. 

The same description that shows us these psychological discomforts also shows us the material discomforts of his abject poverty, and together, they bring us to what is perhaps the most fruitful comparison – like with Mabeuf, that comparison is to Fantine. We see both live a life of poverty from the inside, with a great deal of detail about how they live on so little. Fantine’s suffering also included the shame and disregard  that we saw Marius share with Jean Valjean. Fantine tried and failed to remain beautiful, and especially after she sold her teeth, we’ll remember that she threw her mirror out the window, and her efforts to keep up with personal care diminished; in her story, the only thing more desperate than feeling shame was when she stopped feeling shame, a point to which we do not see Marius descend. The novel uses a similar metaphor in both of their periods of extreme poverty, but interestingly, it is reversed. Where Fantine was devoured by those who watched her in her time of shame, Marius is said to “devour” indignities in the same way that he metaphorically “eats” his watch and his good clothes, by selling them and living off the money. “Marius apprit à dévorer tout cela, et comment ce sont souvent les seules choses qu’on ait à dévorer.” (p. 693) -- “Marius learned to devour all of that, and how those are often the only things one has to devour.” Where Fantine became prey, Marius manages to remain predator. 

We don’t see Fantine sell her belongings to live; the novel elides the period of several months between Tholomyès’s departure and her reappearance in clothing that shows her financial difficulties. But we also see that she “avait mis toute sa soie, tous ses chiffons, tous ses rubans et toutes ses dentelles sur sa fille” (p. 156) -- she “had put all her silk, all her chiffons, all her ribbons, and all her lace on her daughter.” And, we recall Cosette having participated in “consuming” Fantine, and now that we know how the mother’s story ends, we can fully appreciate the foreshadowing, medically inaccurate as it is, when the narrator tells us at the end of the same paragraph that describes Cosette receiving all Fantine’s former luxury, that “Fantine avait nourri sa fille; cela lui avait fatigué la poitrine et elle toussait un peu” (p. 156) -- “Fantine had fed her daughter, it had wearied her chest and she was coughing a bit.” We talked about that back in episode 9, if you’d like to look back. What Marius eats here, Cosette ate at the early part of Fantine’s descent. 

But they both do suffer with someone else in mind – Marius, his father, and Fantine, Cosette. Interestingly, we compared Georges to Fantine in this same way, as he imagined that he was suffering for the sake of his son, so that Marius might have an inheritance. This makes it particularly interesting to consider another way in which Marius imagines his poverty, thinking that “il n’aurait pas été juste que son père eût eu toute la souffrance, et lui rien” (p. 700) -- “it would not have been right for his father to have had all the suffering, and he none.” Marius believes he’s picking up where his father left off, now bearing the burden that his father bore before him, for his father’s sake in the name of justice. When we return to Cosette’s story, we’ll see whether or not the novel pursues this parallel between these parents and children. But we already know that both children have shared the misfortune of carrying a debt for their parents. Both, coincidentally enough, owe that debt to Thénardier, and with little chance of repaying it, albeit for different reasons – Cosette, because she is only a small child trying to work enough to satisfy Thénardier’s seemingly bottomless greed, and Marius because the innkeeper seems to have disappeared. And, of course, both debts are based on a misunderstanding of reality, of a perceived service rendered by Thénardier where in fact there was a crime. 

Suffering is also said to be purifying for both Marius and Fantine, but that purification happens in very different ways. Indeed, at the time, the effects of Fantine’s poverty seemed to be mainly corrosive; any purification that Fantine experienced seemed to have to be taken on faith when Jean Valjean declared, “cet enfer dont vous sortez est la première forme du ciel” (p. 210) -- “this hell from which you are emerging is the first form of heaven.” But after three years of poverty, the narrator can describe at length how Marius has been improved by his situation. He has become a man, and without distractions that he can’t afford, the poor young man is more aware of the subtle and important spiritual aspects of the simple life he leads. “De l’égoïsme de l’homme qui souffre, il passe à la compassion de l’homme qui médite.” (p. 700) -- “From the self-centeredness of the man who suffers, he moves on to the compassion of the man who meditates.” 

We see no hint of this kind of self-improvement in Fantine’s poverty. The narrator does recognize repeatedly that this process is one that does not succeed in all cases, as if that uncertainty can’t be helped, but we can’t help but notice a couple of concrete differences between these two characters that could well be seen to make the difference. Of course, gender is one, although it’s easy to see that the novel does not suggest that men and only men can derive this kind of salutary effect from material want. We can imagine, and we have seen and will see, men whose misfortune corrodes them, makes them brutal and bitter. And, we have seen and will see women who become saintly in harsh conditions – early on, Mlle Baptistine followed the Bishop’s lead in seeing poverty as a holy calling. The nuns of Petit-Picpus inspired Jean Valjean’s awe by living in conditions harsher than the bagne, but becoming saints, not demons. And before the novel ends, we will have occasion to examine another female character who will make an interesting contribution to this discussion.

Another, perhaps more important, difference between these characters is the ever-present matter of education – which is, of course, related to gender in that boys were far more likely to be well educated than girls, although for these specific characters, it’s their social class in childhood that’s likely a more important factor in the difference between their educations. During this time of poverty, Marius has become a lawyer and he has learned two modern languages (that’s in addition to the Latin and possibly Greek that would have been part of his classical education), so can work as a translator as well. As such, from a practical standpoint, even as his time of poverty begins, he can see the path to its end with clarity. He can also approach his situation with greater understanding, even philosophy. For example, he refuses to take on debts, whereas Fantine, unfortunately, did not know any better. Both, at the outset, lack first-hand knowledge of bad experiences with creditors, but Marius has the advantage of a clearer theoretical understanding of the practicalities of debt, as well as the ability to think of it metaphorically, as the narrator tells us he thinks, “une dette, c’est le commencement de l’esclavage” (p. 696) -- “a debt is the beginning of slavery.” For Fantine, of course, this was true, but she couldn’t see it. Or, similarly, Marius is able to consider that “l’abaissement de fortune peut mener à la bassesse d’âme” (p. 697) -- “the debasement of fortune can lead to baseness of the soul.” We talked early on, back in episode 5, about how education in this period was geared, in part, toward developing self-awareness, and so thanks to the privilege of his background, Marius would be thought to have a literal ability to self-monitor that our uneducated misérables would not have had the chance to cultivate. 

But the way he uses this education also speaks to his new, outsider status. Once he is earning a living, the “contemplation” (p. 701) that is so important to the idyllic qualities of poverty in youth begins to take priority, and he works less than he might, living a poor but somewhat more comfortable existence, in order to give his highly developed mind time to wander. In doing this, he’s choosing freedom over comfort, much as he chose freedom from his grandfather’s control over financial support. We’re reminded of that fable of the wolf and the dog, which was referenced in the early portrait of Javert – remember that in it, the wolf envies the dog’s certainty about the source of his next meal, but ultimately, sees the master’s collar and chain as too high a price for that security. By refusing a more comfortable existence in favor of freedom, even if it is a contemplative, bohemian freedom, Marius is categorizing himself, in that schema, as the wolf. This analogy is confirmed when the narrator mentions “ce goût qu’il avait de rester en dehors de tout” (p. 702) -- “the taste he had for remaining outside of everything,” the same phrase that we saw Javert use of Fantine after he arrested her. He thought of her as “une créature en dehors de tout,” (p. 200) -- “a creature outside of everything” a status which automatically subjected her to more suspicion, and less protection under the law, than Bamatabois, the “voting property-owner.” Like Bossuet, the Friend of the ABC who sacrificed his place at the Law school so Marius could keep his, Marius has refused to take on the kinds of statuses that give Bamatabois his privileged position.

Hugo offers that this kind of poverty can make the weak “infâmes” -- “odious,” but the strong become “sublimes” -- “sublime” (p. 693). This bifurcation of poverty, that its effects can be either corrosive or purifying, will become more important in the next few weeks. But before we get there, we will spend some time with another kind of contemplation that is about to take over Marius’s consciousness. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. I’m going to have some obligations that will prevent me from releasing an episode next week, but in two weeks, we’ll discover a new side of our young bohemian hero. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart. 

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 3, book 6… “Love Story?”

[/Music]

In this section, we see the plot of Les Misérables take on an arc that we expect from most novels, but, oddly, not so much from Les Misérables. Marius, the young hero of this Part 3, is in love. 

I try to avoid spoiling Hugo’s dramatic revelations in this podcast, for those who may not be familiar with the story at all, but I did decide two or three disguises ago that I would make an exception in the case of Jean Valjean, because each time he reappears, he is recognizable by consistent elements of his description, most importantly, his striking white hair. And so it is by that logic that I say this: we recognize relatively easily here that the father and daughter that are the subject of Marius’s interest, whom Courfeyrac dubs M. Leblanc and Mlle Lanoire for their white hair and black dress respectively, are Jean Valjean and Cosette. We haven’t seen them in nearly 200 pages in my edition, and now they reappear to connect the first two parts of the book to this one. If nothing else, the fact that the father of this pair not only has that striking white hair, but is named for it by Courfeyrac and, ultimately, by the narrator, should tip us off. Besides that, we have two individuals of the right ages and demeanors, and the young lady, all dressed in black as she was before entering the convent, in mourning for her mother, now has “cette mise à la fois vieille et enfantine des pensionnaires de couvent” (p. 716) -- “that style of dress that is both old and childish of convent pensioners.” If that is not sufficient, the initials U.F. on the handkerchief, which the narrator tells us belonged to the father, not the daughter as Marius so firmly believed, clearly stand for Ultime Fauchelevent, the name that Jean Valjean assumed when he became the convent’s second gardener. So where these two characters are concerned, I will not be coy, and will proceed as if that revelation has been made, and refer to them by the names we know to be their real ones. 

What I would like to do today, ultimately, is get to the bottom of why a teen romance deserves a place in a novel that has, from the beginning, oriented itself toward social problems and other matters of even grander human and spiritual importance. In order to do that, I would like to first consider the perspective this story shows us on women, then think about how Hugo wrote himself into this story in particular, and finally, think about the ways in which even this relatively frivolous story reflects the subtler characteristics of la misère that have tied the novel’s other plotlines together. Each of these questions will, I think, help us to weave this story in with the rest.

We have already seen a couple of examples of the ambiguities in this novel surrounding women. Hugo seems to have great sympathy for the particular perils and suffering to which women are vulnerable, and while his own biography does not leave his slate clean in this area, he seems to recognize this in the nuances of the story he presents. On the other hand, he presents the femininity that women are supposed to aspire to, if they are free of society’s burdens and injustices, in a way that prescribes women the specific, confining roles of maiden and daughter, then wife and mother. It is not hard to read Fantine’s story as showing us that the consequences of non-conformity to these roles are excessively harsh – she was a beautiful and modest young woman, but nobody’s daughter, and so she was not marriage material for Tholomyès, who made her a mother, but not a wife, a state that cost her everything. But at the same time, Hugo remains a man of his time, and it seems as if he can’t help but advance this typical nineteenth-century ideal of womanhood.

Cosette doesn’t seem to have to work at attaining this ideal; it seems to come to her even without her knowing it. In this passage, we only see her from Marius’s point of view, and perhaps to some extent from the narrator’s, but never from her own. Still, even though her transformation seems so thorough that she is described using the familiar phrase “plus la même fille” (p. 717) -- “no longer the same girl,” she is also “une âme qui ne se connaît pas encore” (p. 719) -- “a soul who does not yet know itself,” and her profound and dangerous second glance at Marius is “un piége que l’innocence tend à son insu où elle prend des cœurs sans le vouloir et sans le savoir” (p. 720) -- “a trap that innocence unknowingly sets, where it catches hearts without will or knowledge.” Even without seeing this brief encounter from her point of view, we know that she is in the middle of a transformation that has one thing in common with others we’ve seen in the novel – she is acting on her world without knowing it, doing a thing of which she is not yet capable. But after a bit of time passes, in the two weeks Marius spends haunting their walks in the garden, she seems much more in control of her new-found capacities. She is able to chat nonchalantly with her father while turning toward Marius “toutes les rêveries d’un œil virginal et passionné” (p. 727) -- “all the dreams of a virginal and passionate eye.” But even this is presented as her birthright as a woman, as it is an “Antique et immémorial manège qu’Eve savait dès le premier jour du monde et que toute femme sait dès le premier jour de la vie!” (p. 727) -- “Ancient and immemorial stratagem that Eve knew on the first day of the world and that all women know from the first day of their lives!”

But before this transformation, she shares another characteristic with the female misérables we’ve seen, as she is portrayed as lacking any femininity of consequence. When she appears to be a child, she is one of only two females who doesn’t trigger Marius’s habitual shyness around women; she is so unlike the women that intimidate him that, like the old woman who works in his building, she is barely a woman at all. “À la vérité, on l’eût fort étonné si on lui eût dit que c’étaient des femmes.” (p. 715) -- “In truth, he would have been quite surprised to be told that they were women.” In a sense, it is strange to suggest, even by negation, that Marius would see a child, even one on the old side as Cosette is at 13 or 14, as a woman. But the suggestion is made, I think, in narrative anticipation of what is to come, and that is the development of a womanhood that is, on the contrary, quite recognizable, even paradigmatic.

By the summer of 1831, Cosette has matured physically, and the new portrait of her is one of flawless grace and beauty. Her demeanor has also changed, and now reflects a stereotypical feminine ideal, that emphasizes her lowered eyes, and the corresponding modesty. This portrait shares with the portrait of her mother early in the novel a kind of idealized beauty that rests on certain assumptions about femininity – in a word, that it required delicacy, modesty, and joy. When Marius first saw her in the garden, her eyes were perhaps pretty, but were “toujours levés avec une sorte d’assurance déplaisante” (p. 716) -- “always raised with a kind of displeasing assertiveness.” In childhood, when Cosette was nervous and unhappy, the nuns predicted that she would grow up to be ugly, and in her awkward early adolescence, she is shown, albeit briefly, to be contented and confident, but that, too, is unattractive. It is only when the best feature of her childhood, her eyes, are lowered and veiled by her eyelashes “pénétrés d’ombre et de pudeur” (p. 718) -- “penetrated by shadow and modesty” that she becomes truly beautiful.

And even with modesty as an integral part of it, Hugo portrays this beauty as dangerous. He describes the transition from late childhood into adolescence in a way that seems to be very much from a 19th-century father’s perspective, his own, or Jean Valjean’s: “Hier, on les a laissées enfants, aujourd’hui, on les retrouve inquiétantes.” (p. 718) -- “Yesterday, you left them as children, and today, you find them worrisome.” In other words, leaving childhood behind, even in the early, tentative way that Cosette has done in chapter 2 here, brings new worries to the father of daughters. Then, in chapter 3, when her glance at Marius has transformed from “le regard d’un enfant” (p. 719) -- “the gaze of a child” to “un gouffre mystérieux” (p. 719) -- “a mysterious abyss,” the narrator’s reflection on the perils associated with it intensifies as well: “Il y a un jour où toute jeune fille regarde ainsi. Malheur à qui se trouve là!” (p. 719) -- “There is a day when each young woman casts such a gaze. Woe to the one who finds himself there!” A bit later, after Marius is well and truly smitten, the narrator compares getting caught in a woman’s gaze to getting caught in a piece of machinery (p. 726), an image of danger that would have been quite vivid in a recently industrialized France. 

The vision of womanhood that we see in this description of Cosette’s gaze – as something dangerous that must be veiled and controlled – of course smacks of some of the worst sorts of misogyny, one that has led, in many cultures and contexts, to women’s systematic oppression. I think we know enough about Hugo’s principles by now to guess, with some justification, that this would not be his intent. But it is also important to recognize that our modern ideas about gender equality, about the sources and causes of women’s unequal treatment, or about female empowerment, largely did not exist in nineteenth century France. There are many ways in which Hugo was ahead of his time in his social thought, but feminism is not one of them – in thinking about women, he was very much of his historical moment, and that was a time of clearly differentiated and defined gender roles that relegated respectable women to the domestic sphere, to submission, and to modest purity. We know that Hugo was sympathetic to forms of suffering in misère that affected women in particular, but he portrayed deviation from this respectable bourgeois ideal as an aspect of that suffering – for which he arguably deserves credit, since in an environment as conformist as this mid-nineteenth-century France, failing to conform was often portrayed as the sin for which misère was the punishment; seeing Fantine’s story, for example, as worthy of pity was already quite generous. Hugo did not seem to consider, as many do today, that the expectation of ideal womanhood might create its own kind of suffering.

Meanwhile, Marius seems to have as much appreciation for this model of womanhood as Hugo does. When we return, we’ll have a closer look at Marius in particular, and his resemblance to his author. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So we’ve said that the relatively sharp turn that the novel takes in this section – one that readers may either love or hate – feels somewhat out of place in a novel like the one we’ve seen so far. It is, I think, more closely tied to the novel’s subtler themes than it initially feels. But, in order to paint a clearer picture of why, I think we should take a moment to consider the character of Marius from a point of view that we have only touched on up to this point – his resemblance to his author. 

The physical portrait of Marius at this age, which is about 21, resembles a young Hugo; I’ll post an early portrait of Hugo on the website for you to compare. And although it may not immediately jump out in the portrait, the reference to “cette douceur germanique qui a pénétré dans la physionomie française par l’Alsace et la Lorraine” (p. 714) -- “that Germanic softness that worked its way into the French physiognomy through Alsace and Lorraine,” recalls an unproven genealogical link to that region that Hugo liked to claim, as well as the Romantics’ affinity for Northern Europe. The description of Marius’s existence during this time of deepest poverty resembles Hugo’s at around the same age too. We’ve also mentioned that certain aspects of Hugo’s intellectual and political biography correspond to Marius’s: Hugo inherited a royalist bent on his mother’s side, and a republican and bonapartist one on his father’s. There was considerable strife between his parents, although it mostly didn’t have its root in their political differences; their class backgrounds, personalities, tastes, and investment in each other were all different, and led to distance. When he was young, Hugo had a great deal more exposure to his mother, as one might expect, especially with General Hugo away at war. So, like Marius, his intellectual development was at first heavily influenced by her family’s royalist leanings, and Hugo’s earliest political writings as a young man are strongly Legitimist. But also like Marius, he warmed to his father, and to more modern political ideas, as time went on. 

The main difference to note between Hugo and what it is nearly fair to call his fictional avatar is that the author’s evolution happened much more slowly. Marius, of course, drops his royalist positions in favor of what he calls a “démocrate-bonapartiste” -- “democratic Bonapartist” position in a matter of weeks. Hugo’s reconciliation with his own Bonapartist father took place in his mid-twenties, and shows up in his work around the same time as a greater willingness to glorify Napoleon, which was of course read by others as a political shift away from Legitimism. Hugo’s political identification, on the other hand, tended to lag behind his stances on specific questions, and some have argued that it was his early opposition to the death penalty, which was recognizable in his work in the early 1830s, that would shake him out of his conservative tendencies and begin his slow migration to the left. But even in 1848, when he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the Second Republic, he sat with the conservatives, and expressed doubt, not about the abstract idea of republic, but about whether or not France was ready and able to create a well-founded, well ordered one. Over the course of the subsequent few years, though, he would find himself pressed by debates on specific issues – public education, freedom of the press, universal suffrage, and, of course, the death penalty – to ally himself more and more often with those to his political left. Once he went into exile, perhaps because he was freed of the trappings of political ambition by standing in opposition to the Second Empire, he became more explicitly and consistently republican and progressive. As he was writing Les Misérables, it may be that Hugo looked back at his own political evolution and wished it had gone as Marius’s did, that he had seen the connections in 1830 that were obvious by 1860, and arrived at his mature positions more quickly. 

And those mature positions include a kind of transcendence of politics that Hugo presents with about equal parts admiration and skepticism here – because, naturally, he also attributes them to Marius. In book 5, Marius’s evolution after his falling out with the political positions of the Friends of the ABC resembles Hugo’s political posture much later in life, closer to the time of the composition of Les Misérables. For Marius, Hugo connects the softening of his political passions to the Revolution of 1830. We’ll discuss that in more detail in a few weeks, but for the moment, suffice to say that that event was seen by many, including those who thought as the Friends of the ABC did, as a step in the right direction, perhaps, but a tiny and insufficient one. But for Marius, it is sufficient, and his opinions are reduced to “sympathies.” His general political orientation is broader, less pragmatic, we might even say more spiritual. He is now “du parti de l’humanité” (p. 708) -- “of the party of humanity,” and he has particular pity for women, both characteristics that any reader of Les Misérables recognizes as belonging to Hugo as well. 

In other words, Marius has drifted into a phase of life where daydreams are his priority. Once he has earned enough money to survive, he would rather spend his time wandering in the Luxembourg gardens and contemplating his surroundings than earning any more than what is required for subsistence. On the one hand, this feels like productive contemplation, like a step toward a more spiritual, less material existence, one that causes the narrator to remark on the “pureté de cette âme” (p. 708) -- “the purity of this soul.” And this sort of contemplation is given as authentic, more so than more intentionally crafted ideas, political or otherwise. But our more experienced Hugo knows that the bare minimum of a day’s existence is not all a person has to worry about, and he hints that Marius’s material living is still too precarious. And more perilously still, spending his days in contemplation seems to leave Marius detached from the critically important concerns of his fellow human beings. He is not behind the walls of a cloister as the nuns of Petit-Picpus are, but his constant contemplation of the beyond has separated him from the world in a similar way, and Hugo’s opinion of this detachment is presented with the same ambivalence – the contemplation is good, nourishing for the soul and for spiritual life, but to be cut off from the world is to be cut off from life. And it to some extent reflects Hugo’s life in exile, with time and space for the contemplation of which this complex novel is born, and at the same time seeking connection and relevance to a social life that seems far from his Look-Out at Hauteville House.

Much of Marius’s behavior in book 6 is presented to us with a similar kind of ambivalence, but it more often manifests here as a tone of affectionate mocking, by an older and wiser Hugo looking back with a mix of nostalgia and embarrassment at the passions of his youth. Marius is quite silly for much of book 6, and we can laugh at him in the same way that Hugo does – knowing that we’ve all been there. That relatability makes him somewhat unique among the novel’s characters, who are vividly sketched, but not always what we might call relatable, exactly. They have, for the most part, been living through experiences that are extreme and uncommon, and much of the value of this book lies precisely in bringing the extreme to life in ways that most of us will likely never experience ourselves. We’ve talked about how, in creating his characters, Hugo doesn’t prioritize realism – he doesn’t set out to create nuanced sketches of characters who might believably be real, but instead, he creates emblems, embodiments of this or that abstract concept or type of experience. It is, and is meant to be, difficult to relate to the Law in human form as Javert, or its archetypal victim as Jean Valjean. When they arrive, those moments when we do relate to them as human beings are powerful indeed, precisely because we have found ourselves in something much larger and more abstract than another individual person. But Marius, as we have him here, is different. Perhaps because Hugo drew so deeply on his own autobiography to create him, or perhaps because his life experiences have been less extreme overall, we arrive, in this section, at a character that we can join in the strange agony of this nearly universal experience.

Much of his specific behavior in love is also at least partly autobiographical, either in the general sense in which most people have experienced what Marius is experiencing, or, in some cases, because specific elements of Hugo’s early romance with his wife Adèle are incorporated in recognizable form. 

When we return, we’ll look at some examples of that, and try to understand how in the world they fit into the rest of Les Misérables.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Before the break, we said that much about Marius resembles Hugo, and that includes the jealousy of his young love. The best example of Hugo’s own experiences showing up in Marius’s is his jealous grumpiness at Cosette when the wind catches her skirt. Similarly, the young Victor scolded his future wife Adèle, documented in a letter he wrote her in 1822 (4 March) when they were courting, for lifting her skirt too high as she stepped over puddles – the 20-year-old Hugo was of the opinion that she should have more concern for her modesty than for a bit of mud on the hem of her dress. But it is worth noting the differences Hugo incorporates in the novelized version of this lovers’ spat. First, where Adèle was lifting her own skirt higher than Victor would have preferred, Cosette is utterly passive; she did not intend and could not have prevented the indiscretion that makes Marius so jealous of any man who might hypothetically be nearby, even though none seem to be. This, of course, accentuates the irrationality of that jealousy – both young men, real and the fictional, go a bit overboard in their response, but Marius in particular defies reason.

Second, it is worth mentioning about this first so-called argument between Marius and Cosette, as well as about their entire relationship, that it is taking place entirely via looks and glances; the couple has never communicated verbally. We’ve talked a bit about the way Cosette’s gaze is portrayed here, but we can also think back, where the work of eyes is concerned, to the destructive role that has been attributed to curiosity and voyeurism. We’ll remember that the Bishop, out of compassion, tried to avoid idle curiosity, and Fantine’s story showed us why – the curiosity of the people of Montreuil-sur-mer irrevocably damaged her reputation, and later, we were told that “voir, c’est dévorer” -- “to see is to devour.” When it comes to the role of seeing in this early-stage romance, understanding vision in this way lends a new and different sensuality to their fleeting glances, but also, a danger. If another man had seen Cosette’s “jambe charmante” (p. 729) -- “charming leg,” then for Marius, not only has that man gained access nearly equal to his own, but he has partaken of the same visual banquet. We can see the beginning of Fantine’s fate in this risk of being visually devoured by a stranger – we’ll remember that, motivated by the modesty that she would eventually lose, Fantine refused to take a turn on the swing during her idyllic country outing with Tholomyès and her friends, for fear that her skirt would fly up and show her legs. But from Marius’s point of view, the more important issue is that another man who saw what he did would be an uninvited guest at a meal that should, so far as he’s concerned, have been Marius’s alone and that, like his literal nourishment, is meager. 

But still, no matter how much we might try to understand Marius’s jealousy, we cannot escape the silly pettiness of it. Hugo couldn’t either; he introduces this incident with the irony-drenched phrase “un grief très sérieux,” (p. 728) -- “a very serious grievance.” But we chuckle at this phrase, and the many others like it here, because the seriousness of it is one that most of us, particularly of a certain… level of experience, have seen from both sides. Feeling one’s entire mind and personality taken over by love like a demon possession is an experience that we can relate to just like Hugo can, but we can also understand the feeling that comes later from looking back with regret, embarrassment, or puzzlement at how we could possibly have behaved as we did. 

But at the same time, I have to admit that my reaction, when I come to this part of the novel is always – really, a love story in the middle of all this? An adolescent crush seems to do a disservice to the moral dilemmas of Jean Valjean, to the cosmic scope of Waterloo, to the crushing heartbreak of Fantine’s death, even to the heroic tone of Marius’s own reverence for his father. Does Hugo really believe that the story of two kids making moon-eyes at each other in the park belongs in this book? 

In a word, yes, he does. Even as he gives the narration a wistful and somewhat mocking tone, he still takes the pain of love terribly seriously, including the separation imposed by Cosette’s “father” in chapter 9. In the course of this section, we see a few different connections to the other themes and types of misère that the novel has already considered. The first of these is social isolation. As Marius’s first foray into love, this visual romance breaks with the tendency that he has had up to this point to avoid the company of young ladies. This sets him apart from his friends, who seem to participate in the tradition that we’ve seen before of Parisian students enjoying the company of the capital's working-class girls. Marius’s friends notice his solitude in this regard, and Courfeyrac jokingly calls him “monsieur l’abbé” (p. 715) -- or “abbott,” to highlight his apparent vow of celibacy. Courfeyrac similarly, now only half jokingly sums up one way in which questions of love attach to the rest of the story – avoiding this part of social life, like any kind of social isolation, limits life. As Courfeyrac puts it, “Tu t’abrutiras” (p. 715) -- This might be translated as “you will get overwhelmed,” but the context suggests a different translation. The notion that it comes from fleeing women out of embarrassment, an activity that isn’t overwhelming in any obvious way, points to the word’s other sense of deadening, or making a person stupid. Literally, it might make him “brut,” less refined, a word related to brutal – the same word that was used of Jean Valjean when he was first released from prison. Marius’s self-imposed social isolation, in a strange way, is the same as that imposed by a monastic vow of celibacy, or even by the bagne.

Also like others we’ve seen, Marius’s isolation is borne of poverty, specifically, shame that he can’t be well-dressed for young women. This is of course a less drastic consequence of the stigma of poverty than Jean Valjean’s assumed criminality, or Fantine’s tragic descent into prostitution, but it nonetheless contains an implicit social critique that we will recognize. Marius is presented as such a thoughtful, kind, gentle, attractive, sensitive young man, he’d be quite a catch, and yet, we find him disqualifying himself from this essential part of social life solely on the basis of his poverty. Once again, and in a way that is perhaps less consequential, but more recognizable, we are asked to reckon with the role that wealth has been allowed to play in social life, including in love. There is a tacit critique, once again, of human value being reduced to money, in Marius’s avoidance of girls.

Separation from a specific beloved is pain of a different sort than this, and we’ll see more about that in future weeks. But for the moment, we can observe that his shame of his poverty becomes especially intense, and more complicated, once his eyes meet the transformed Cosette’s. Although shame is not pleasant, he was not unhappy, exactly, to avoid women out of shame up to this point – that avoidance was a satisfactory solution to his problem. But now, he feels contradictory impulses where Cosette is concerned. Even dressed up in his one suit of good clothes, he approaches the bench where he expects to find her as if “il était à la fois forcé et empêché d’y aller” (p. 721) -- “as if he were at once forced and prevented from going.” As if it’s part of his inheritance from his father, the courage that this requires is expressed in military metaphors, as he “marcha sur le banc” with a “velléité de conquête” (p. 721) -- “marched on the bench” with a “vague desire for conquest,” and it requires “un effort viril et violent” (p. 722) -- “virile and violent effort.” The metaphor of conquest in matters of love is of course not Hugo’s invention, but he deploys it slightly differently here, emphasizing the fear that love provokes and the courage necessary to overcome that fear.

But at the same time, even as he is prey to all of these violent experiences, he is not consciously aware of the change in his feelings. Curiously, this is a state we have seen primarily in our less-educated misérables, but here, Marius shares their conflictedness and their unawareness of self, their inability to fully process or manage their conflict. Even as he musters the courage to approach the end of the alley that she seems to fill with blue light, he is thinking about other things, and doesn’t quite understand why he hesitates and doubles back. He is “machinal” (p. 721) -- “mechanical” just as Jean Valjean was when he stole the coin from Petit-Gervais, but at the same time, he blushes, then turns pale, as he makes two nervous passes in front of the bench. (p. 721). He becomes like Jean Valjean then, and like other misérables we’ve seen, as his self-awareness fails him and he seems to do a thing of which he is already no longer capable, or perhaps of which he is not yet capable. This goes on for two weeks, with Marius going each and every day to the Luxembourg gardens to sit on the same bench, half an alley away from this girl, and the text is specific in telling us that he does not know why he does so. This is astonishing, and may even seem a bit implausible. But Hugo seems to be suggesting that love is like any of the other shocks that our characters have faced in that it sets him out of phase with himself. In fact, it causes him to remain in this disconnected state for far longer than any of our other characters have. 

It seems to be the second time their eyes meet that brings him back to himself, cures him of the “grande maladie” -- “major illness” of the chapter 4 title, and sets loose a new version of him. His friends recognize the situation as “sérieux” (p. 726) -- “serious,” and in the coming weeks, we will see why. 

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll turn our attention to yet another new form that misère can take. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 3, book 7 chapter 1 through book 8 chapter 4, “Miners’ Tools.”

[/Music]

Since our very first episode, when we explored the meaning of the title of this novel, we have acknowledged an ambiguity, a kind of double meaning of the word misérable. On the one hand, it refers to someone living in a state of want, of deprivation, and on the other, it carries a more pejorative sense of someone who inspires disdain or distrust. We have occasionally returned to the idea of these two meanings of the word, usually with the sense that Hugo was using his stories to draw a clearer distinction between them. Although he only occasionally addresses the matter explicitly, we are left, at this midpoint of our journey through Les Misérables, with the sense that poverty needn’t inspire disdain or distrust, and when the less privileged do become criminal or dangerous, as Jean Valjean did, we should look to our own laws and customs, and the social damnation that they create, as the cause. 

Hugo’s focus has been on that social damnation as he has offered us a network of images that provided a kind of geography of la misère. Early on, we had the image of the man overboard, introduced to demonstrate  Jean Valjean’s predicament when he was first arrested and sent to prison, which figured society as a ship, and the misérable as a person who had fallen from it, who was still living, watching the world he knew leave him behind, but utterly without hope of rejoining it. He was in the water, struggling to keep his head above the surface, with most of his body below it. When he disappears completely below that surface, death follows directly. That image has been recalled repeatedly since then, serving to connect various moments to that central condition of living death in misère. When we were getting to know the character of Javert, we found another way of showing this state, as the police inspector was presented as placing a river Styx at the bottom of society, with his firm belief in the Law’s power to identify those who belonged on the other side of it, and in his own duty to act as Cerberus, the guard dog who would prevent them from ever crossing back. More abstractly, but related to both of these, we have seen darkness, and separation from the fullness of life and society as features of the lives of our misérables, in particular when they turn up in less obvious places than among the explicitly poor and suffering. The nuns of Petit-Picpus, for example, or Georges Pontmercy or the Conventionist, or even the privileged ultras who frequent Mme. de T’s Salon, might be seen as misérables in this more extended understanding. Even the exiled Hugo himself might be among the novel’s misérables from this point of view, with its focus on the question of inclusion or exclusion in what he calls society – social, political, familial, and intellectual life and consideration.

Today, that imagery takes on a new dimension. In part 3 book 7, especially in its first paragraph, asks us to begin to think about this category – the category of the misérable, the exile, the outsider, or modern theoretical parlance might simply say the “other” – in a new way. He starts with an image of separation that’s familiar, if slightly transformed, in which “le sol social” (p. 733) -- “the social ground” or “floor,” with these mines beneath, becomes a surface like that of the water, with a distinct above and below, or a boundary like the Styx, which clearly separates a world and an underworld. On the website, I will gift the internet with a drawing of my own, a version of what normally winds up on the board in class to illustrate how this new image runs parallel to those others. Hugo is clear here that “we” create this boundary, beneath which there is an “obsucr sous-sol qui s’effondre parfois sous la civilisation, et que notre indifférence et notre insouciance foulent aux pieds” (p. 733) -- “a dark cellar that collapses sometimes beneath civilization, and that our indifference and carelessness trample underfoot.” Thanks to the expectations that we have developed up to this point in the novel, a description like this one makes us think of our main characters – not only because of the resemblance to those other images of society, but because of the responsibility for their exclusion that he places with the privileged. Who was more trampled underfoot than Jean Valjean or Fantine? Even as he suggests, in the first sentences, that both good and evil exist in this underground, we are still inclined to connect it to what we already know about what the novel has shown us beneath this social floor – Jean Valjean’s former self, the one who arrived at the Bishop’s house full of ill intent, is there, but then so is the new Jean Valjean, the one who rescued the child of a prostitute out of reverence for her mother and for the grace of a Bishop.

But in this first chapter, this underground suddenly becomes more complicated. Immediately after the sentence I cited a moment ago, he begins the next one by saying “L’Encyclopédie, au siècle dernier, était une mine presque à ciel ouvert.” (p. 733) -- “The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine that was almost open to above.” This reference is to the vast 18th-century project edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, with contributions from many of the best-known Enlightenment philosophers. It was an Encyclopedia, similar in form to how we imagine that today; however, it is known not only for collecting human knowledge, but also for giving many of its entries a distinctively Enlightenment flavor, with critique [of] superstition and application of critical reason to subjects where this sort of thought could, in some cases, be subversive. I will link to a few examples on the website. Its goal was, simply put, Enlightenment, the furtherance of knowledge, reason, and philosophy, and it is among the texts of that period that was seen, in hindsight, as promoting ideas that led to the French Revolution. The next example of this underground that he gives is also counterintuitive, but at the same time, deeply embedded in what we’ve read so far, and that is the early Christian Church, living literally underground to hide from Roman persecution, awaiting its moment to remake the ancient world. 

So this pair, Enlightenment and Church, is pretty different from Jean Valjean, or Fantine, or anyone that the novel has made emblematic of that world beneath the surface up to this point. But if it feels vaguely familiar, there is a good reason for that – the Enlightenment and the Church, in idealized but human form, have met in this novel before, way back in Part 1 book 1, when the Bishop paid a visit to the dying Conventionist. We remember that each went into the conversation seeing the other as enemy, but by the time the Conventionist died, the Bishop had come to realize that they had the same goals. Even in their conflict, they were both part of what Hugo calls here “la tension de toutes ces énergies vers le but et la vaste activité simultanée, qui va et vient, monte, descend et remonte dans ces obscurités, et qui transforme lentement le dessus par le dessous et le dehors par le dedans” (p. 733) -- “the tension of all these energies toward the goal and the vast simultaneous activity that comes and goes, rises, falls, and rises again in this darkness, and that slowly transforms what is above via what is below, and what is outside via what is inside.” This first paragraph is extraordinary because in just a few sentences, it upends our understanding of the misérable by both expanding it, and taking it back to its roots. Les misérables, the inhabitants of this world beneath the ground of our social lives, are not just outcasts, victims of injustices and prejudices, but revolutionaries who are outside society in protest against it. In these lesser depths of this mine, he places, for example John Hus, an early reformer in the Catholic church who was burned at the stake for heresy in 1415 and is often considered a precursor to Martin Luther. He is there along with Luther himself, and the philosophers Descartes and Voltaire

But just as we saw in the conversation between the Bishop and the Conventionist, Hugo acknowledges, even insists upon, the ambiguity of this revolutionary work. He is still describing the work of those who extract “l’avenir” (p. 734) -- “the future” from their mines when he says that, “À une certaine profondeur, les excavations ne sont plus pénétrables à l’esprit de civilisation, la limite respirable à l’homme est dépassée; un commencement de monstres est possible” (p. 734) -- “At a certain depth, the excavations are no longer penetrable to civilized intelligence, the air is no longer breathable for humanity; and there may begin to be monsters.” In these lower depths, in the regions where the miners’ work is “douteux et mixte” (p. 734) -- “questionable and mixed” if not “terrible” -- “dreadful,” he places the French revolutionaries Condorcet, Robespierre, Marat, and Babeuf, in that order, each more radical and more ruthless, and lower in the mine, than the last. 

But even as he expresses ambivalence about the occupants of these lower mines, he does not suggest that they are anything other than co-laborers for the cause of progress. “Tous ces travailleurs, depuis le plus haut jusqu’au plus nocturne, depuis le plus sage jusqu’au plus fou, ont une similitude, et la voici: le désintéressement. [...] Ils ont un regard, et ce regard cherche l’absolu. [...] Vénérez, quoi qu’il fasse, quiconque a ce signe, la prunelle étoile.” (p. 734-735) -- “All of these workers, from the highest to the most nocturnal, from the wisest to the most mad, have one similarity, and it is this: selflessness. [...]. They have an eye that seeks the absolute. [...]. Venerate, no matter what he does, whoever bears this sign: starry eyes.” This qualification is a critical one as Hugo begins to answer the question that he has not quite asked yet at the end of the first chapter of book 7. He has, up to this point, held in tension a few different ideas about the misérables that he has been describing, but he has not really worked through their relationships to each other. The virtuous and humble misérable, the misérable driven to crime by desperation, the misérable who has been denatured and degraded by injustice to the point of bitterness and ill-will, the untrustworthy and criminal misérable, and now the revolutionary and possibly even violent misérable – we have a sense that, like the mines he describes here, they are all connected, but not all the same, that there are distinctions to be made as well as points of intersection to be studied. Now, Hugo gives us a clear principle, if still a bit of an abstract one, that we can apply in order to make any necessary distinctions among misérables: the distinction between selfishness and sacrifice, between one’s own interests and the interests of others. 

After a break, we’ll see what happens when we dig past the point where selflessness ends.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

The word mine in French, “mine,” which provides the title for the first chapter of book 7, is a bit of a complicated one, and its translation into English is a bit trickier than it might first appear. Some of what is interesting about this section is based on that nuance though, so I’m going to ask you to bear with just a bit of grammar. As a noun, the French word mine can signify what it usually does in this chapter: an underground structure, like a tunnel, from which something of value is extracted. A different, but related sense, as in English, is that of a landmine, or, related to both of these, a tunnel that is created under a structure for the purpose of setting explosives. As a verb, however, this word does not do what it does in English: in English, we talk about “mining” as an activity -- one can mine for gold or coal, what have you. But the French verb miner, is better translated “to undermine” than “to mine;” it only carries the destructive sense of weakening the ground beneath something so that it might collapse, or the placing of landmines or explosives. To talk about the digging of tunnels for productive reasons, such as the extraction of valuable minerals, in French, one would use verbs like “extract” or “work” a mine, or even perhaps exploiter -- meaning, literally, to exploit, but when it applies to something inanimate, the word doesn’t carry the negative connotations that it does in English. We might expect the word mineur, or miner, to be etymologically related to the verb – just like the English “miner,” a mineur is a person who does that activity, who mines. Being based on the verb, we might expect the French word mineur to be someone who only does the destructive sort of mining, but that is not the case: a mineur refers to a worker in either sort of mine. So a miner might work in a mine for either the extraction of something good and useful or for the purposes of destruction. The chapter 1 title here, “Les Mines et les Mineurs,” -- “Mines and Miners,” refers to the places and people, the nouns, and uses these two more ambiguous words. But the verb form of the same word – the activity, without emphasis on its subject or object – is understood only as destruction.

Where selflessness ends and selfishness begins, we enter what Hugo calls “le bas-fond,” (chapter 2 title, p. 735) -- “the lowest depths,” or the “troisième dessous,” (p. 733) -- an expression borrowed, as he says, from the theater, where there were multiple underground floors to accommodate the technical and mechanical needs of the productions, and this expression, literally the third level below, referred to the lowest of them. It became, first, a metaphor for the failure of a particular production – a play that was unsuccessful was said to fall into the troisième dessous. From there it became a metaphor for the lowest point to which one could sink in other ways, often financially. But here, it seems to be the lowest possible level of moral life, “plus bas, beaucoup plus bas, et sans relation aucune avec les étages supérieurs” (p. 735) -- “lower, much lower, and without any relationship with the higher levels.” In entering this lowest place, Hugo insists upon the distinction between selfishness and selflessness, so much so that he claims that there’s no connection between the upper mines here and the lower ones. From the point of view of his readers, who are likely to be relatively comfortable bourgeois with the time, energy, and education for a novel like this, the visible distinction, the obvious one, is the one that was familiar to us before this chapter, the one between society and its outsiders, the one that Javert makes and maintains, that Hugo has named social damnation and seen at the root of much of what our characters so far have suffered. 

But here, as he is about to introduce a group of new characters who will be a criminal gang, he understands that his readers may still harbor a tendency to assimilate them with the novel’s other misérables, despite everything he has tried to do to dispel that prejudice. After all, there are those two distinct meanings for the single word misérable. By the way, lest you think that that’s unique to French, the word “wretch” and “wretched” work similarly in English, and we sometimes even see the word “miserable” paired with “wretch” as an insult. So where the word for two things is the same, there is often a tendency to associate those things. Hugo showed us this tendency almost immediately when we started the novel, as Jean Valjean arrived in Digne and he was distrusted because he looked poor. And, of course, we have seen similar patterns repeat throughout the first half of our story. Now, these new characters, who will not deserve to be idealized as Jean Valjean and others have been, will bear resemblances to them. They are relatively poor. They have weak familial connections, or none at all. Their names are unofficial and changeable. They may or may not have educations. They have had run-ins with the law. But if Hugo has done the job that he seems to have set out to do in the last few hundred pages, we have learned to at least question these markers of misère. A criminal record might be a sign of unjust laws, as it was for Jean Valjean. A family that has been ripped apart is a tragedy, as Fantine shows us that it is not a sign that poor mothers love their children less than wealthier ones. And of course, a lack of education for the poor has consistently been Hugo’s clearest accusation made against his society.

So when it comes to the first sort of misérable, those who are very poor, we have come to a new perspective on some of the characteristics that we find in many of the characters who inhabit this underworld. What the novel has tended not to do so far, though, is devote much attention to the misérables of the second, untrustworthy sort – who do, in fact, exist. We have seen the Thénardiers, and much was made of the untrustworthiness of Monsieur Thénardier in particular, but unlike most characters, he was not given as an example of a phenomenon. On the contrary, he is consistently described by negatives, quite unlike anything the narrator could think to compare him to. He wasn’t a peasant, a bourgeois, or a soldier, and, although we know he had problems with debt and have heard rumors that he’s gone bankrupt since, when last we saw him, he owned a business. He isn’t particularly poor or particularly wealthy – in fact, the only thing he is for sure is greedy and selfish, and destructive as a result. 

And as such, now that Hugo has given us a clear and easy way to distinguish between the upper mine and the lower one, Thénardier becomes, after the fact, the first inhabitant we know of this lower mine. Looking back, we see striking resemblances between his portrait and the description of this lower mine’s occupants. In part 2, book 3, chapter 2, we’re told that “il en voulait au genre humain tout entier, [...] il avait en lui une profonde fournaise de haine, [...] il était de ces gens qui se vengent perpétuellement” (p. 394) -- “he held a grudge against the whole human race, [...] he had a deep inferno of hate, [...] he was one of those people who take perpetual revenge.” This sounds very much like the way Hugo describes the lower mine here, as “la haine sans exception” (p. 736) -- “hate without exception.” Thénardier, we’re told, “n’avait qu’une pensée: s’enrichir” (p. 396) -- “had only one thought: to get rich,” and the inhabitants of the lower mine “n’ont souci que de l’assouvissement individuel” (p. 735) -- “care only about individual satisfaction.” He has been a foretaste of what we will continue to see in the Patron-Minette gang.

This group of characters will reappear after we meet them in book 7, and we’ll have occasion to discuss their activities, but there are a few details of this first introduction worth noting. First, like the four students who were lovers of Fantine and her friends, they are presented as a core group of four. We have seen some of the associations with this number, and with its double, eight, and none of them has been any more positive than we expect them to be here. Second, we can notice a resemblance between Babet, in particular, and Thénardier. He is small, thin, seems weak, and is dangerous. His asset seems to be his intelligence, particularly alongside his larger, stronger companion – for Babet, that’s the physically intimidating Guelemer, for Thénardier, it’s his wife. And Babet reminds us of the suffering that Thénardier inflicted indirectly on Fantine, as he too purchases teeth. Claquesous resembles Thénardier’s more abstract characteristics, his mystery and unknowability, and we might see him as an allegory for criminality itself – he only appears at night, disguised in appearance and voice, and he disappears in the daytime into a secret hideout. Montparnasse, on the other hand, seems almost to be a criminal version of Marius, or at least, a criminalized manifestation of many of the same characteristics of a young man with his eyes on love. 

We can see why Hugo insists that this mine has no connection to the other, for the sake of sparing his selfless and revolutionary characters the tarnish of association with these criminals. But even as he does so, it is not difficult to find such a connection. The inhabitants of this mine “ont deux mères, l’ignorance et la misère” (p. 735) -- “have two mothers, ignorance and deprivation,” the same forces that we recognize from way back in the preface as giving this book – this whole book, not just the portion we’re beginning here – its usefulness. Indeed, ignorance and deprivation have been part of the stories of most of our characters in one way or another. But it has not been true for all of them, as it is for these characters, that “de la souffrance, ces larves passent au crime” (p. 735) -- “from suffering, these larvae turn to crime,” or that “Avoir faim, avoir soif, c’est le point de départ; être Satan, c’est le point d’arrivée” (p. 736) -- “Being hungry and being thirsty are the point of departure, being Satan is the point of arrival.” Deep poverty and suffering have affected our characters in a range of different ways, but most have not become the selfish, hateful, voracious demons that Hugo describes here. Indeed, all of book 5, just a few pages ago, was titled for the positive effect of poverty on Marius. When we discussed that section two episodes ago, we focused on the question of education, especially as it contributed to the difference between Marius’s experience of extreme poverty and Fantine’s. And here, of course, we see that it is deprivation combined with ignorance that Hugo finds to blame for the creation of the social troisième dessous. But Marius’s purification in extreme poverty is also attributed to his innate character. Poverty is said to be an “Admirable et terrible épreuve dont les faibles sortent infâmes, dont les forts sortent sublimes.” (p. 693) -- an “Admirable and dreadful test from which the weak emerge odious, and the strong emerge sublime.” Marius is given to be an exception, as “la misère, presque toujours marâtre, est quelquefois mère” (p. 694) -- “deprivation, almost always a cruel mother, is sometimes a nurturing mother.”

And we have seen the moment of truth, the decision point between these two mines. As Jean Valjean stood at the Bishop’s bedside, gazing upon the saintly image of his trusting, peaceful sleep, having received his first kindness after 19 years of harsh punishment for a small crime borne of poverty, we were told that he seemed “prêt à briser ce crâne ou à baiser cette main” (p. 109) -- “ready to crush that skull or kiss that hand.” If your memory is good, you may recall that the danger and tension of the moment were increased by the fact that he held an iron bar in his hand; when a similar scene was repeated at Fantine’s bedside, Hugo managed to repeat this element of it as well, with a bar from a broken piece of furniture nearby. It seemed an insignificant detail at the time, but that bar at the Bishop’s bedside was one that he had managed to keep after his forced work in the quarries near Toulon, and it was called a “chandelier de mineur” (p. 106) -- perhaps translated as something like a miner’s spike, but literally, the French word for it means “miner’s candlestick.” Now, hundreds of pages later, we understand this object more fully. Jean Valjean’s 19 years in prison left him with the ambiguous tools and skills of the metaphorical miners that book 7 sketches for us; his criminal status relegated him to this complex space below the surface that divides the world from the underworld. But, once he is armed with that miner’s candlestick – a candlestick in name only, that produces no light at all – what he will do with it remains uncertain. He may come to occupy any of the array of tunnels that Hugo describes here, to work for self-interest or for the common good. His next action, stealing the Bishop’s silver, certainly seems to point in the direction of self-interest, if not as powerfully as what he might have done with the miner’s candlestick. But his story takes an unusual turn when the Bishop adds his own candlesticks, his own light. For all the others like him, for the vast excluded class that he represents, each decision like this, for good or evil, for self or other, often made by the limited light available to them, digs further into these tunnels, adding to their complexity and, perhaps, their danger.

After a break, we’ll look at the first few chapters of book 8, to begin to consider the drama that will stretch over the next couple of weeks. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

After book 7’s theoretical exploration of the dark depths of the criminal underworld, the title of book 8, “Le Mauvais Pauvre,” -- maybe translated as something like “The Wicked Poor Man” --  clearly situates the character who will be introduced here, Jondrette, in the schema that has just been sketched out. We do not need to wait for his character to develop to know that he will not figure among our admirable poor, suffering in dignity and selflessness. He, along with Patron-Minette, is the immediate reason why the digression on those metaphorical mines and miners was included: to resolve the contradiction created by the presence of such a despicable character in a novel meant to advocate for society’s outsiders. We will learn much more about the Jondrette family over the next few weeks, but for the moment, I would like to highlight just a few of the tidbits that we find in these first few chapters.

We discover Jondrette, up to this point, almost exclusively through the letters that Marius comes to possess, first by finding a packet of four of them in the street, and then, when a fifth is delivered to him by the elder of the family’s two daughters. The four letters that he finds are all signed with different names, but when taken together, are obviously written by the same hand, on the same paper, with the same difficulties in spelling and grammar. Even before we see the fifth letter, which provides the real – or, at least, slightly more real – identity of the author, we learn a lot about him from these first four. The paper, which is of poor quality and yellowed and smells of tobacco, betrays poverty and hints at vice. Although he is able to write, and even to make attempts at variations in style, his inaccuracies in spelling and grammar – which may be conveyed differently in different translations – suggest an incomplete education. But perhaps most importantly, he practices the art of deception for a living, assuming different identities in all four letters, presumably in the hope of best positioning himself to appeal to different possible donors. This is of course suspicious on its own, but even without yet providing any certainty as to the selfishness or altruism of his intent, it symbolically associates him with the lower mine, the troisième dessous of book 7, in a few different respects. First, like the four central members of Patron-Minette, Jondrette adopts disguises and aliases, intentionally creating what the novel’s misérables always seem to come to in one way or another: confusion and uncertainty about their identities. What’s more, two of his four personae here work in the theater – Genflot is a playwright, and Fabantou is a “dramatic artist” – harkening back to the theater metaphor that was applied, in book 7 chapter 4, to the complex robberies and ambushes in which Patron-Minette specialized, with the help of their “troupe.” And these letters constitute yet another appearance of the number four with all its negative associations, which is reiterated in the chapter title “Quadrifons” – literally, “four-faced,” – such that we might be inclined to fear that Jondrette, on his own, is as menacing as Guelemer, Babet, Claquesous, and  Montparnasse all together.

And, of course, we learn that Jondrette has children, specifically, two daughters and a younger son. The two daughters are the only family members that we meet face to face here, with a particular focus on the eldest, who mentions a younger brother while she’s in Marius’s room. As with Jondrette himself, we have a lot more to learn about these children, but there are a few comments worth making at this point. We’re now in the month of February 1832, and for six months or so, Marius has been in a sort of depression – a word that is a bit anachronistic, as it was a psychiatric concept that did not exist in in the mid 19th century, but is nonetheless precisely what Hugo describes. This period of melancholy began when he spooked Jean Valjean by following him and Cosette to their house, only to discover later that they had moved, and would stop spending time in the Luxembourg gardens. Presenting the two Jondrette girls to us through Marius’s point of view in this context makes them a kind of grotesque replacement for Cosette, as Marius reflects, a bit solipsistically, “Les jeunes filles m’apparaissent toujours. Seulement autrefois c’était les anges; maintenant ce sont les goules.” (p. 745) -- “Girls still appear to me. Only before they were angels, now they’re ghouls.” The two girls in the street also, pointedly, inspire Marius to think about the tragedy of a poor mother who must watch her child live in misère. 

We have not yet seen these girls’ mother, but we do have a sense of the parent-child relationship in the Jondrette family, and it is grim. Marius can clearly see that the girl before him lives in the most abject poverty: she is thin and sickly looking, has only thin clothes in the depth of winter, is missing teeth, and her voice has a hoarseness that seems to come from strong drink. In fact, the physical description of this young woman, who seems to be about 16, is hauntingly like the description of Fantine in her hospital bed in the last days of her life – the descriptions are too long to compare here in detail, but the description of Fantine that I have in mind is in Part I, book 7, chapter 6, entitled “La Sœur Simplice mise à l’épreuve” -- perhaps something like “Sister Simplice Put to the Test,” if you’d like to look back. The feature of that chapter, which we discussed a bit out of order in episode 14, was how Fantine’s proximity to death made her appear old, even though she was not yet 30 when she died. Here, the precariousness of the Jondrette daughter’s existence is signaled immediately by her resemblance to that other young woman. 

These two daughters, it seems, are charged with doing most of the leg-work in their father’s money-making scheme; they deliver letters and wait for donations from the recipients, or, in some cases, invite the recipients to follow them back to the Jondrette residence. She tells Marius that failure at this mission – if, for example, they had admitted to losing the letters that he found – would be punished with a beating. But, at the same time, she affirms that she has her own motivations for participating in her father’s ruse, as she too hopes that a donation from one of the letters’ addressees will provide the family’s first meal in three days. They also seem to be engaged in other activities that cause an encounter with the police, and make that encounter worth fleeing, as their conversation during Marius’s first glimpse of them suggests. 

By keeping the narrative restricted to Marius’s relatively innocent point of view, Hugo manages to respect 19th-century taboos and make only oblique references to these darker aspects of the girls’ lives. But what he does allow us to see nonetheless points to the horrifying suggestion of a father willing to prostitute his daughters. Far from having Cosette’s innocent childlike gaze, or even her newly-discovered capacities for innocent seduction, this oldest Jondrette girl’s eyes suggest a childhood that is long since gone. Her eyes are described with the strange combination of adjectives “terne, hardi et bas” (p. 750) -- “vacant, brazen, and base” and she is said to have “le regard d’une vieille femme corrompue” (p. 750) -- “the gaze of a corrupt old woman.” She enters Marius’s room as if it is not the first man’s bedroom she has seen, “regardant avec une sorte d’assurance qui serrait le cœur toute la chambre et le lit défait” (p. 751) -- “looking with a sort of heartbreaking confidence at the room and the unmade bed.” Even Marius concludes that the girls must be engaged in “on ne sait quels métiers sombres” (p. 752) -- “who knows what dark trades” thanks to the fact that “ce père en était là qu’il risquait ses filles” (p. 752) -- “this father was to the point of risking his daughters.” This conclusion on Marius’s part is supported by a closer look at the four letters that he found: two of them, the two addressed to male recipients, draw attention to the fact that they are being delivered by his daughter, carrying what may be the same implication that we find in the PS of the letter to Marius, “Ma fille attendra vos ordres” (p. 751) -- “My daughter will await your orders.” When she compliments Marius, perhaps sincerely, or perhaps in the hope that a full or even partial seduction might further loosen his purse strings, we’re told that “il leur vint à tous les deux la même pensée, qui la fit sourire et qui le fit rougir” (p. 754) -- “the same thought came to both of them, which made her smile, and made him blush.” These girls’ experiences have made them less bashful about matters of love and sex than a boy several years their senior; given what we know about 19th-century sexual mores and taboos and the social consequences of female promiscuity, real or perceived, we don’t need Hugo to tell us that Jondrette is acting selfishly by “risking his daughters.”

What is not yet clear about the Jondrette girls, though, is whether they are full participants in the criminal world to which their father is initiating them, whether they are truly and willingly part of that sinister lower mine. It is unclear whether it is Marius’s thought or Hugo’s own, but we read that they are “espèces de monstres impurs et innocents produits par la misère. / Tristes créatures sans nom, sans âge, sans sexe, auxquelles ni le bien, ni le mal ne sont plus possibles, et qui, en sortant de l’enfance, n’ont déjà plus rien dans ce monde, ni la liberté, ni la vertu, ni la responsabilité.” (p. 752) -- they are “a kind of impure and innocent monster produced by la misère. / Sad creatures with no name, no age, and no sex, for whom neither good nor evil is any longer possible, and who, just emerging from childhood, already have nothing left in this world, not liberty, virtue, or responsibility.” Growing up with both material want and moral bankruptcy, with both ignorance and deprivation, have left them in the odd position of having been corrupted without having made any corrupt choices, of participating in the activities of this troisième dessous, even doing so enthusiastically when it provides them a way to eat that day, but still having their real choice between selfishness and selflessness before them. They are both the tools that their father uses in his own activities and potential actors in their own right. For now, they stand, in a sense, where Jean Valjean stood at the Bishop’s bedside, the miner’s candlestick in hand, acquired through labor that they did not choose, waiting to act on their own behalf.

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll peer more deeply into the Jondrettes’ grim world. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 3, book 8, chapters 5 through 15, “Judas.”

[/Music]

This section revolves around what Marius sees when, his curiosity piqued by the visit from the older Jondrette girl that we saw last time, he peers through the hole in the wall that he shares with her family. This act itself is heavy with meaning, so, to start off today, I’d like to spend a moment focusing on that act, before we delve into what he sees on the other side, and how he reacts to it.

When Marius makes the decision to cast his gaze on his neighbors – necessarily a deliberate act, since he has to climb up on his dresser to do it – the hole he peers through is called, in French, a “judas.” Translations here may vary, but this is a common word in French for a spyhole or a peephole, including as they are installed in modern doors. It is derived, as you may have guessed, from the name of Judas Iscariot the apostle who, in the Gospels, betrayed – or revealed – Jesus to those who arrested him and sent him to his death. This name probably came to be applied to this common everyday object because it betrays, or reveals, the person on the other side of the door or wall, allows them to be seen without seeing the person who is seeing them. The term “judas hole” does, apparently exist in English, but so far as I can tell, it is not as familiar to most speakers, at least most American speakers – I learned it in the context of researching possible translations of this chapter title. It’s a dilemma for a translator: to translate this using the more common word in English makes this chapter title more transparent (so to speak) but loses the richer biblical reference, whereas retaining the “judas” element of the word makes the incident seem more extraordinary than it does in French. Different translators will handle this differently, making it more or less easy to follow the themes that the word “judas” suggests in the original across the story that follows.

But however it is translated, Marius peers through the “judas” out of curiosity, an impulse that has gotten relatively negative press to this point in Les Misérables. We’ll remember that the Bishop made it a point of morality to avoid idle curiosity, and we have often referred to the declaration made about those who watched the low moment in Fantine’s descent when she got into the street altercation with Bamatabois and was arrested, “La curiosité est une gourmandise. Voir, c’est dévorer.” (p. 199) -- “Curiosity is a kind of gluttony. To see is to devour.” Hugo, we’ll recall, drew the story about Fantine where he placed this prohibition against curiosity from an experience where he himself had been in the crowd of onlookers, but decided that what he saw – namely, the woman’s innocence and the man’s guilt – compelled him to speak up in her favor. So considering all of this, we might say that seeing la misère, coming to knowledge of it, is only moral if it is in the service of alleviating it – this was Hugo’s conclusion on that night in 1841, and it was suggested through the Bishop who did make one exception to his personal prohibition against curiosity contains an exception if that curiosity had “sa source dans la sympathie” (p. 41) -- “its source in sympathy.” And Hugo impresses this distinction about the morality of curiosity upon us as well, as readers of a book that puts us in the same position, with the choice to be simple voyeurs or to intervene.

But Marius has just discovered that failure to see others’ suffering, turning a blind eye to it, is just as harmful as idle curiosity, and just as immoral. Hugo tells here that “La commisération a et doit avoir sa curiosité” (p. 759) -- “Commiseration has, and must have, its curiosity.” It’s easy to see that the word “commiseration,” nearly the same word in French, has a close etymological link to the word misère; the prefix “com” that is added to it here means “with.” It literally means to share others’ misère, to be with them in it. And we might be inclined to think that Marius, in his relative poverty, already does share in the Jondrettes’ misère, but the visit from the Jondrette girl has shown him otherwise. 

As Marius reflects on her visit, he makes a connection between these two meanings of the word misérable that the novel has not made quite so clearly up to this point. Thinking of Jondrette, he sees the place in the depths of misère that we have seen before, where difficult circumstances leave no moral option, where simple poverty begins to corrupt. “Quand l’homme est arrivé aux dernières extrémités, il arrive en même temps aux dernières ressources.” (p. 757) -- “When a man has come to extreme circumstances, he also resorts to extreme measures.” But the Jondrette family shows another danger embedded in this formula--the one posed to the vulnerable members of a group--as Marius’s reflection continues, “Malheur aux êtres sans défense qui l’entourent!” (p. 757) -- “Woe to the defenseless creatures around him!” Jondrette’s daughters, as adolescent girls, are on the precipice between the misère of the child and the misère of the woman, both of which, according to Marius’s reflection here, are more severe than the misère of a man because they are vulnerable to the men around them. As our last episode’s reflection on what book 7 called the lower mine suggested, when those who are trampled underfoot beneath the “sol social” -- the “social ground,” are in this selfish, destructive, lower mine, their selfishness creates victims, of which the Jondrette daughters are examples for Marius and for us. Meanwhile, we’ve seen over the last few weeks how Marius’s poverty resulted in an elevation of his character. That, combined with his solitude and the good fortune he has in being a single and able-bodied young man with an education, has prevented him from falling into the deep suffering of the Jondrette daughter or into her father’s moral degeneracy. In order to really commiserate with them, he needs to know more than his own experience can teach him.

But Marius’s reflection on the Jondrette girl’s visit takes him beyond simply understanding that their suffering is different from his, to the sudden realization of the novel’s central thesis. Through her, he understands much of what Hugo has demonstrated to us up to this point. We see him, as we have just discussed, reference the vulnerability of women and children particularly and the unique positions of men, women, and children in this misère that we have seen since the preface. He comes to a conclusion that reminds us of the Bishop, even using a word that takes us back to Jean Valjean’s first appearance in the novel, when to many who met him, he would not have seemed all that different from Jondrette here: “est-ce que ce n’est pas quand la chute est plus profonde que la charité doit être plus grande?” (p. 758) -- “is it not when the fall is deeper that charity must be greater?” Meanwhile, he recognizes, just as the Bishop did, the unity of the different ways in which he might see this mandate of a connection to others, taking the language of Christian charity of his youth and the language of social conscience of his current friends as synonyms: the Jondrette family are “ses frères en Jésus-Christ, ses frères dans le peuple” (p. 758) -- “his brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the people.” He even goes so far as to see the complexity of this connection that has only been emphasized more recently in the novel, reflected in the first part of book 7 and in the title of book 8, in which the existence of true destructiveness among society’s excluded coexists with their misfortune. He recognizes that desperation drives men to acts they would otherwise not commit, and he understands that the depravity of someone like Jondrette has its root in poverty. As he holds this complexity in its unavoidable tension, Hugo attributes to his reflection a question that is, to my mind, the best, most concise summary of the novel that it offers us: “il y a un point où les infortunés et les infâmes se mêlent et se confondent dans un seul mot, mot fatal, les misérables; de qui est-ce la faute?” (p. 758) -- “There is a point where the unfortunate and the despicable mingle and merge in a single, fatal word, les misérables; whose fault is it?” 

And, finally, Marius echoes some of the reproaches that the narrator, and we, have made of his behavior over the last few weeks. His detachment from his fellow human beings, his dissipation in reverie, and his girl troubles have distracted him from the distress that has been playing out right next door. His silly love story did seem out of place, and now, with his new realizations, he comes into line with the rest of the novel, and positions himself philosophically to come to the Jondrettes’ rescue, even to become for Jondrette what the Bishop was for Jean Valjean. In order to understand or alleviate distress, one must first see it, and that may require effort, as it does for Marius, as he steps up onto his dresser to peer through the “judas.”

It may even require something that looks like betrayal, as the narrator returns to the double meaning of the word “judas” to say, “Il est permis de regarder l’infortune en traître pour le secourir.” (p. 759) -- This means approximately, “It is permitted to spy on misfortune in order to rescue it,” but translation does another injustice to the metaphor here – what I have translated as the word “spy” is actually a phrase, literally “regarder en traître” -- “to look at like a traitor would.” English doesn’t have, so far as I know, a word that both describes what Marius is doing and preserves the relationship to the lexical field of betrayal. But as we consider Marius’s compassionate intentions, it’s worth remembering that the odor of betrayal persists throughout his choice of voyeurism. Like that most notorious act of Judas Iscariot, Marius’s curiosity here contains both a kind of betrayal and the hidden potential to bring salvation. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

What Marius sees when he peers through his “judas” is not entirely surprising, unless it is in how extreme the depth of this family’s poverty is. So far in this novel, we have seen a great deal of suffering from deprivation of all sorts, but what we see here is some of the most disturbing, and for Marius, who provides our only point of view, it is a shocking revelation of profound misère.

We see, for the first time, Jondrette’s wife and younger daughter. Both show signs of misère that we recognize easily by now, that have often been signals of the way extreme poverty denatures its victims. Jondrette’s wife “pouvait avoir quarante ans ou cent ans” (p. 762) -- “might have been forty years old or a hundred,” and a similar ambiguity of the daughter’s age is caught up in what seems to be a permanent proximity to death. She looks younger than she is, but the narrator explains that there is a type of female misérable in particular for whom this is a sign of a shorter life, not a longer one: “À quinze ans, elles en paraissent douze, à seize ans, elles en paraissent vingt. [...]. On dirait qu’elles enjambent la vie, pour avoir fini plus vite.” (p. 762) -- “At fifteen, they look twelve, at sixteen, they look twenty. It’s as if they take long steps over life, to get it finished more quickly.” Everyone in this place seems to be between life and death, in a suspended state less peaceful than death, but not more alive, figured as the antechamber of the sepulcher. The younger daughter is described as “n’ayant l’air ni d’écouter, ni de voir, ni de vivre” (p. 762) -- “seeming neither to listen, nor to see, nor to live.” The room is, to Marius’s eyes, “plus effrayant que l’intérieur d’une tombe, car on y sentait remuer l’âme humaine et palpiter la vie” (p. 762) -- “more frightening than the inside of a tomb, for one could feel the human soul move there, and life quiver.”

The insalubrity of the room enhances this impression, because it deepens its darkness. But of particular note is the window; it lets in very little light, such that even at the moment when Marius first looks into their hovel, in the morning, “une face d’homme parût une face de fantôme” (p. 759) -- “a human face looked like the face of a ghost.” And this lack of light, of which the metaphorical significance is clear, is enhanced by the fact that spider webs block the windows. We have discussed the significance of spider webs before; in Hugo’s work, their symbolism originates in his 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris. Back in episode 16, we retraced how the spider and its web came to symbolize fate, or the inevitable, in Hugo’s work, and I linked to the chapter of that novel where the symbol originates; I will add those links to this week’s extras as well. If you read that chapter of Notre-Dame de Paris, you will find a combination between a spider web and a window that creates a doubly inevitable doom for the fly, who faces two separate insurmountable obstacles as she tries to reach the light outside. This same combination, repeated here, makes the spider webs that we see in the Jondrettes’ room especially menacing. But later, when the most immediate danger is posed not to the Jondrettes, but by them, when Marius has discovered their plot against M. Leblanc, they themselves are compared to spiders, and the ambush that Marius believes they are preparing becomes a spider web; as he decides he must go to the police, he reflects, “il fallait déjouer les combinaisons hideuses des Jondrette et rompre la toile de ces araignées” (p. 784) -- “he had to foil the Jondrettes’ hideous schemes and break these spiders’ web.” At first blush, it seems a bit strange, even hypocritical, to see the Jondrettes as both the flies, hopelessly seeking a light that insurmountable obstacles prevent them from reaching, and the spiders, preying on the naiveté of others. But for Hugo, this metaphor has been mutable in precisely this way since Notre-Dame de Paris; Frollo, too, as he contemplated the spider with the fly in its web in his window, cast himself into both roles to contemplate his position in that novel’s plot. The fate that the spider represents is larger than any one person, and hangs over all, making everyone victim and perpetrator in turns. 

But in the midst of this, Hugo has Jondrette pronounce social critiques that are reasonable and in the spirit of the book, even though we already know that the character himself is despicable, and hardly a desirable mouthpiece for what we’ve come to understand as Hugo’s message. For example, the first thing we hear from him in this section is the observation that, in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, the rich have better grounds for their burials than the poor, that “il n’y a pas d’égalité, même quand on est mort!” (p. 761) -- “there is no equality, even when you’re dead!” He thinks they put the poor in the lower, wetter ground “pour qu’ils soient plus vite gâtés” (p. 761) -- “so they’ll spoil quicker,” and so that their loved ones can’t go see their graves “sans enfoncer dans la terre” (p. 761) -- “without sinking into the ground” themselves. Later, he laments the inverse of the strange accelerated aging of the poor as well, when he says that Jean Valjean, after the several years since Jondrette last saw him, is “à peine plus vieux, il y a des gens qui ne vieillissent pas, je ne sais pas comment ils font” (p. 779) -- “barely older, some people don’t age, I don’t know how they do it.” It is more than a little surprising to see Hugo allow a character such as this one to echo his own often-repeated idea that misérables live closer to death, and the rich live better preserved. But this is another way in which we see Hugo challenge us to see the complexity, particularly in these characters whom we judge the most harshly. Even when those judgments seem justified, we must hold in tension the fact that these characters are living in the same environment of injustice as those who seem to be unjustly condemned. Jondrette has as much reason to despair as any of our poor characters do when, for example, he sees that inequalities even persist after death. A few pages later, he rails against that timeless worry of those who might otherwise be generous, that monetary donations to the poor might be misused. He rages at the idea that the rich think “que nous sommes des ivrognes et des fainéants!” (p. 768) -- “that we’re drunks and do-nothings!” We’ve seen this concern challenged from a source that could not be more different--the Bishop. His last act in the novel was not only to give generously to Jean Valjean, but to relinquish control over how that gift was used – for all he knew the money from the sale of his silver was put to no better use than the five-franc pieces that the Jondrettes receive here. But even as he falls strangely in line with much of what the novel has shown us so far, Jondrette’s tirades also demonstrate what chapter 2 of book 7 described: a general hatred, a rage against anyone and everyone, “la haine sans exception” (p. 736) -- “hatred without exception.” When he slams his fist against the table and shouts, “Je mangerais le monde!” (p. 762) -- “I would eat the world!” we can’t be sure whether this is a simple expression of hunger from a man who hasn’t eaten for two days, or the cry of a predator to whom anyone might become prey.

Both of these ways of seeing Jondrette are accurate and justifiable, as becomes clear when his spider web shows signs of catching a fly. At the news of the arrival of “the Philanthropist,” the recipient of the fourth letter that Marius read, Jondrette sets to making the environment even more horrific, in ways that contribute permanently to diminished living conditions for all of them. The text compares this to a kind of perverse investment. It also compares him in this moment to a general preparing for battle. But we might add a third comparison to this: the persona who was supposed to have written the letter, Fabantou, the dramatic artist. The preparations he makes dress the set for his coming performance, but there are no special effects. The damage is real: he extinguishes the small fire that they have, breaks the caning on their one chair, makes his youngest daughter break a window pane, which cuts her hand and forces him to tear his shirt for a bandage. For Jondrette, even the profound destitution that had shocked Marius when he first saw it was not sufficient; his performance requires an attention to detail in its staging that takes his family from having little to having nothing, not only using his poverty, but enhancing it, for dramatic purposes. And his behavior when his guest is there smacks of a stage performance as well, complete with asides to his wife and daughter that Jean Valjean and Cosette, perhaps implausibly at times, do not seem to hear. Understanding Jondrette as a dangerous distortion of a dramatic artist allows us to anticipate the discovery that we make soon after this: that he is associated with Patron-Minette, specifically, the member of the so-called “troupe” that was listed first in the cast of minor players in book 7 chapter 4, Panchaud. The success of his dramatic artist persona in this ruse, along with the air of performance in this first meeting, continues the theater metaphor from the chapter that introduced that gang. We’re then reminded of it again in book 8, chapter 14, when Javert continues it, figuring the criminals’ secrecy by saying that Patron-Minette have stage fright, and won’t “perform” if they know they have an audience. (p. 788)

Generally speaking, keeping us locked inside Marius’s point of view throughout this episode contributes a great deal to the suspense that will continue to build through the end of book 8. In particular, as Jondrette tries to jog his wife’s memory about who he believes his philanthropist to be and begins to develop his plan, Marius, in his devastation at once again watching Cosette slip through his fingers, misses key information. But even with nothing but the disconnected tidbits of information that we see through Marius’s eyes, you may well have a guess at how Jondrette thinks he knows these two; we’ll talk much more about that next time.

In our remaining time today, we will think some more about Marius’s choice to take what he learns through his “judas” to the police.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

After a bit of time spent peering through his “judas,” Marius’s various discoveries drive him to an act that brings this name to even greater fruition – he goes to the police to report on what he believes to be impending criminal activity by Jondrette. In Chapter 14 here, we may well recognize Javert before his name is revealed to us; if not, a glance back at his description compared to the one when he is first introduced in Part 1, book 5, chapter 5 will reveal their similarity. We’re also back in the same neighborhood where Javert followed Jean Valjean to the Petit-Picpus convent 8 years earlier; this is the same Gorbeau house and the same police station that are mentioned in Part 2, book 5. So Javert has remained in the same jurisdiction since then, and we pick up with him more or less where we left him.

Marius’s decision to go to the police is worthy of discussion in part for its timing. Before he ever looked in on the Jondrettes, he knew that their head of household was dangerous and immoral. He knew that he practiced deception to live off unsuspecting benefactors under false pretenses – essentially stealing from them. He strongly suspected that he victimized his own daughters, prostituting them and/or putting them in danger of altercations with the law and with others who might take advantage of them. 

What he did not know, until just before he decided to go to the police with it, was that his neighbor posed an immediate danger to his beloved Ursule and M. Leblanc, that is, Cosette and Jean Valjean. If Marius betrays his first intent, to learn more about this family in order to help them, it is in service of helping someone else, someone more innocent and more dear to him – and, as it happens, less disconcertingly misérable. 

And it is his Ursule’s lack of misère, in this section, that is particularly striking. This extreme contrast of Cosette’s appearance in this environment is enhanced by Marius’s point of view, of course, but it is perceptible to everyone. For example, “La Jondrette aînée s’était retirée derrière la porte et regardait d’un œil sombre ce chapeau de velours, cette mante de soie, et ce charmant visage heureux.” (p. 769) -- “The older Jondrette girl had stepped back behind the door and gazed gloomily at that velvet hat, that silk mantle, and that charming happy face.” This sentence is very nearly obscured by what surrounds it, just like the poor girl who is its subject. But it is worth pausing to reflect that she, too, despite her bravado, is aware of the difference between herself and this other girl her own age. We think back to another half-obscured moment, when she was in Marius’s room. She showed him that she could write, and then explained, “Nous n’avons pas toujours été comme nous sommes. Nous n’étions pas faites….” (p. 754) -- “We weren’t always like we are. We weren’t made….” Then, she stopped herself and burst out laughing. We cannot know what alternate fate she might have been imagining, but this somber gaze at Cosette suggests this elegance, luxury, and happiness might once have been in the Jondrette girls’ experience, or their imagined future. 

And the discrepancy between what might have been and what is becomes that much more poignant when declarations about his girls’ virtue and upbringing become part of Jondrette’s performance for his benefactor. He claims to be taking great pains to raise them in piety and virtue, saying, “Elles ont un père. Ce ne sont pas de ces malheureuses qui commencent par n’avoir pas de famille et qui finissent par épouser le public.” (p. 771) “They have a father. They’re not like those poor girls who start out with no family and end up marrying the public.” Given what we know, or suspect, at least, about the various ways in which the older Jondrette girl has been encouraged to earn money for the family, and her wistful hints of regret, this must be a particularly painful part of her father’s performance for her to watch. And, of course, Jean Valjean knows that the story he tells here is that of Cosette’s mother, and the one from which he likely saved Cosette herself. So, the way Cosette’s beauty and elegance steal the scene here, if you will, provides contrast to both the real and fabricated stories in the room, and others in the novel. Hers may be, as we said a couple of weeks ago, an extremely conventional femininity, but every alternative to that conventionality that we have seen in the novel has amounted to unthinkable suffering. 

In any event, when Marius allies with Javert, it is in defense of this conventional femininity, and her apparent father’s seemingly conventional respectability. There is a bit of wordplay in the title of chapter 14, which, once again, different translators may have handled differently. The title on its own suggests that the police officer is going to give two “coups de poing” -- punches -- to a lawyer, and allows us to imagine that Marius is going to enter into some kind of conflict with law enforcement over this brewing plan. In fact, what Javert gives him is two small pistols of a style that was nicknamed “coups de poing” -- literally, hits of the fist, which is why the phrase is translated with the English word “punches.” These pistols got this nickname, probably, because they were quite small, and fit nearly completely in the hand – I’ll link from our website to a page with some images of a similar pistol, for those who might be interested.

But the wordplay in this chapter title isn’t just a cute pun on what would likely have been a recognizable style of pistol for contemporary readers. The way the story transforms the title’s surface image of conflict with law enforcement into an image of complicity with, of all possible officers, Javert, is emblematic of Marius’s action here. He began this section, we’ll recall, with a subtle reflection on his own poverty and that of his neighbors, with feelings of humility provoked by the far greater and more desperate suffering of the Jondrette girls at the hands of their own parents, and with consideration of the forces that might explain, if not excuse, even tactics as dangerous as theirs in extreme circumstances. But by the end of chapter 15, Marius has joined forces with those who do not make these sorts of distinctions, who don’t understand, or, perhaps, simply don’t care, that ignorance and deprivation are at the root of Jondrette’s activities. And, of course, it is a decision that we as readers can understand – if we’re honest, we would probably, in the same circumstances, make the same choice ourselves, because it is a choice to protect innocent people against those who would do them harm. At the same moment when the novel shows its readers the sort of dangerous misérable that they had always feared, it also shows them a familiar solution to that misérable’s existence, a solution in which they’re accustomed to relying – but it is in the person of the Inspector Javert, who has, to this point, often played the villain.

And then, if that weren’t enough, we as readers know that the situation is even more complicated than this, because we can anticipate the problems that may arise should Javert find himself in a room with this M. Leblanc, that is, Jean Valjean. Entirely unbeknownst to Marius, Jean Valjean, as an outlaw and escaped convict who has devoted his life to good, inhabits the upper mine of last episode’s metaphor, along with everyone Marius admires – his friends, his father, even, perhaps, Marius himself. He does not know that, by invoking society’s guard dog, he has allied with a force that does not distinguish between the upper mine and the lower mine, between them and Jondrette, between those exiles who work to improve society and those who seek to undermine it. 

When Courfeyrac and Bossuet see Marius as he returns from the police station, they don’t stop to talk to him because of “la mine qu’il a” (p. 790) -- “the look he has about him.” The word for this in French, “mine” is one that we recognize – it just so happens to be the same word as “mine,” as an underground tunnel. The two words are identical, but they are unrelated in both meaning and derivation – one comes from Latin, one from Breton. Given his position at the time when they see him – acting on Javert’s behalf, carrying his pistols, and following a man that he intends to help him seize – it is with a great deal of irony that Hugo allows us to hear them say that Marius “a une mine” -- “has a look” but also, “a mine.” He is not, in that moment, working for either of those metaphorical mines, but for the social forces that created them.  

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll discuss the conclusion of the dramatic events in the Gorbeau house. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 3, book 8, chapters 16 through 22, “Dilemmas.”

[/Music]

Last week, as Marius looked in on the Jondrette family and discovered his neighbors’ destitution and dangerous scheming, we discovered the theatricality of the family’s patriarch in particular – only one of the many reasons why you may not have been surprised to discover that Jondrette is Thénardier, whose theatricality we had already discussed back in episode 18. From his costuming himself in varying identities in his letters, to his setting the stage of his family’s misère before his potential benefactor’s arrival, from his performance during this first visit, to his association with the perilous troupe that is Patron-Minette, he lived up to the identity that had gotten Jean Valjean and Cosette in the room: Fabantou, dramatic artist. Now, the section for today sees one of the more theatrically dramatic moments in the novel, framed by its author’s eye for stagecraft – it leads us to suspect that Hugo drew heavily on his experience as a playwright for these scenes, in which Marius, and we, are the audience, watching with bated breath. Revelations of secret identities, long monologues about characters’ internal, and otherwise invisible, motivations, dramatic entrances and exits, all of these were staples in the theater in the Romantic and post-Romantic eras, and all were and are reasons why we might quite reasonably associate chapters like this one in Les Misérables with melodrama, the crowd-pleasing but often intellectually thin style that was growing in popularity when Les Misérables first appeared. People generally have some combination of two different reactions to this sort of scene: either they are swept along in the wave of dramatic moments and the emotions they evoke, or they find them overwrought, excessive, and bombastic. This is actually a fairly frequent feature of Hugo’s writing, and is not the first such scene we have come across; these scenes tend to separate those who love this book at a first go from those who, well, don’t.

But there is, thank goodness, more to these scenes than their melodramatic plot. On the esthetic level, the lighting in these scenes participates to a great extent in this overall impression of melodrama, as early in the series of chapters that take place after sunset here, it is established that the heavenly-looking white light from a full moon is coming in the windows of both rooms, but that in the Thénardiers’ room, as much or more illumination is coming from the hot coals in the portable stove they are using to heat a metal chisel, presumably for planned acts of torture. This stove is compared to the mouth of hell, and the red light that it emits, competing with the white moonlight, only enhances the sinister impression that Thénardier is a demon. At one point Marius is able to hide in plain sight thanks to the moonlight falling in a beam that creates dark corners, and later, this same moonbeam reminds Marius of the paper that Éponine had written on, and shows him his way out of his dilemma. This use of light feels theatrical, especially to us as modern readers, but it is actually more visionary than that; technology in the 19th century would not have permitted lighting design this complex for the stage, and so what we see here is an example of Hugo’s remarkable visual imagination, part of the reason that he is often seen as anticipating cinema. If it seems a bit dramatic to us, that is in part thanks to extensive exposure to lighting used in this way on film. But Hugo, we should remember, did it first, and imagined it without ever having seen it.   

But there is another, more important element to this culmination of the story of Marius and the Thénardiers in the Gorbeau house that gets obscured, if you will, by the drama and the bombast, and that is the more complex set of questions it raises about the characters it portrays. This whole arc in the novel’s plot, from the beginning of book 7 until now, has asked us to contend with greater complexity among the novel’s misérables than we have up to this point, and here, that challenge comes to a head. With the revelation that Jondrette is Thénardier, we find ourselves in a position to reckon with the fullness of this character, and to sort through all the implications of the existence of this sort of misérable. 

We will do this later in the episode. But first, I would like to look at what this revelation means to this production’s closest spectator, Marius. At the same time as we have our new set of questions raised by this revelation, we also see the story through Marius’s eyes, and he faces a dilemma of his own. Marius goes into the tense situation of the ambush knowing that it will be a challenging evening, but the alliance with Javert that we saw him make last time gives him a measure of certainty that he will bring those who wish to harm his “M. Leblanc” to justice. Things, however, prove much more complicated than that. And he may also hope, going into the evening, that he will discover something about “his Ursule.” On that front, if anything, he loses ground: he learns that Thénardier calls her l’Alouette, the Lark (p. 822), but at the same time, discovers the supposed origin of the initials UF from his beloved handkerchief – what is in fact another pseudonym for Jean Valjean, Urbain Fabre – and realizes that her name has never been “Ursule.” Ursule, the Lark, or simply She (p. 824) – he loses the one clue that he had, her initials, and no longer has even this meager connection to the girl he adores.  

But his more immediate and, probably more important crisis is the one he is cast into when the name of Thénadier echoes forth from the holy document bequeathed to him by his father, and he must question whether or not to condemn the criminal activity that he sees before him. We’ll recall that last time we observed that his neighbors’ probable criminal activity hadn’t driven him to the police at first, and when he first saw the girl we now know to be Éponine, and later looked through his “judas” into their room, his main reaction was pity. But his pity for the Jondrettes was undermined by their victimization of M. Leblanc, and “his Ursule,” specifically; he went to the police in response to that specific and imminent danger. But now, when he realizes that this is Thénardier is the man he’s been searching for in order to fulfill his father’s final wishes, Marius’s loyalty is divided. This question is different from the one he faced last time – that was a matter of mercy and pity, of who deserved protection on a scale that considered life’s advantages and disadvantages alongside innocence and guilt. Now, his dilemma is a matter, primarily, of loyalty.

But even as questions of loyalty now come to the fore, the logic of poverty as an extenuating circumstance also makes a reappearance to help excuse Thénardier. What Marius thinks he knows about what Thénardier used to be – a heroic Sergeant who survived the horrors at Waterloo and brought his father back from the brink of death – casts the tragedy of his current state into new relief. It is reasonable, given what Marius knows, for him to think that the discrepancy between this man’s state in 1815 and 1832 is proof of how dire his circumstances must have been. What his father told him about Thénardier is proof, for Marius, that this man can be different than he is, and it confirms the ravages of poverty and injustice that Marius had been inclined to see before he was blinded to all else by the appearance of “his Ursule.” Believing that this is the man his father told him to protect also makes him more inclined to be persuaded by the suspicions that Thénardier himself raises about Jean Valjean, in particular the strangely calm and quiet reaction he has to the ambush, mitigating, at least, his willingness to protect M. Leblanc. He is not blinded to the horror of what Thénardier is, but he sees in him simultaneously, “quelque chose qui était hideux comme le mal et poignant comme le vrai” (p. 813) -- “something that was hideous like evil and poignant like truth,” and, pressed by his father’s wishes, he can’t quite take the action against him that he had promised Javert.  

His dilemma has an antecedent in French literature, which we have had occasion to discuss here before, and it comes, perhaps appropriately, from the theater: the iconic choice between love and duty of Rodrigue in Pierre Corneille’s play Le Cid, the canonical French play from two centuries earlier, which we mentioned back in episode 11. Then, we compared it to Jean Valjean’s dilemma as he decided whether to turn himself in and save Champmathieu or to remain in Montreuil-sur-mer and continue to support Fantine, her child, and the rest of the town’s prosperity. The close parallel between that scene and the deliberation scene from Le Cid was in the back-and-forth reasoning, and yet, that reasoning did not lead to a neat conclusion here the way it does for Rodrigue. Now, it is less the reasoning than the situation itself that is in close parallel: in Le Cid, the father of the woman Rodrigue loves has insulted his own father, and he must choose to defend his father’s honor and his own by challenging her father to a duel, or to remain faithful to his love by letting the offense stand, and betraying his family’s honor. In other words, like Marius, he must choose between loyalty to his own father and loyalty to the father of the woman he loves. But once again, in Les Misérables, the dilemma is not so easily resolved; Rodrigue concludes in the space of six stanzas that sacrificing his honor will make him unworthy of his love anyway, and so chooses loyalty to his father. But Marius remains in indecision for so long that, by the time he finds his solution and tosses the paper Éponine wrote through the hole in the wall, it is too late to save Thénardier from Javert. Even with this much closer parallel, Les Misérables leaves us in a world that resists the easy resolution of moral questions. 

With our more complete information, this situation may seem, at first, to have a much more obvious solution than it seems to Marius. But after a break, we will dig more deeply into what the revelation of Jondrette’s true identity means to us, and will think about the questions it raises. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

For us, the revelation that this is Thénardier is different than it was for Marius. We know what Marius does not – that Thénardier has never been heroic, or even innocent, that even before sinking into destitution, he was greedy, selfish, dangerous, and destructive. Our dilemma, seeing this sort of poverty, is how we should understand the causes, not of poverty itself, but of this sort of criminality and destructiveness. In his reflection last week, we saw Marius ask: “il y a un point où les infortunés et les infâmes se mêlent et se confondent dans un seul mot, mot fatal, les misérables; de qui est-ce la faute?” (p. 758) -- “There is a point where the unfortunate and the despicable mingle and merge in a single, fatal word, les misérables; whose fault is it?” We saw Marius reason his way to the charitable posture of the character at the book’s genesis, the Bishop, based on this fundamental principle, of which the importance to the novel is suggested by the way it dramatically frames a definition of its title. The Bishop we remember, expressed this idea by saying, “Cette âme est pleine d’ombre, le péché s’y commet. Le coupable n’est pas celui qui fait le péché, mais celui qui [y a] fait l’ombre.” (p. 16) -- “A soul is full of darkness, and sin is committed there. The guilty party is not the one who sins, but the one who creates the darkness.” But now, this question of who is at fault becomes not rhetorical, but real. We have said since his first appearance that we have no way to assign blame for Thénardier’s moral depravity; his earliest appearance in the novel chronologically is at Waterloo, where he is already pillaging corpses. This character, who in our last episode was the basis of what seemed to be a renewed social conscience for Marius, who seemed to illustrate to him what this novel is meant to illustrate to its readers, in fact provides a much murkier picture.

Last time, we saw that Hugo put some of his own critiques of society in the mouth of the man we now know to be Thénardier, and that continues here, to even greater confounding effect. During the ambush, Thénardier’s rage is unleashed, and it is difficult to tell where his acting ends and real anger begins. His justification for this anger is in the past encounter that the two men shared – he claims that in taking Cosette, Jean Valjean had taken away his living, which is of course nonsensical; Part 2, book 3, chapter 9 will confirm that if your memory is fuzzy. His rage, simply put, is at Jean Valjean’s wealth, and even his very existence. He is angry at Jean Valjean because he is angry at the world. But while his justification for it is utterly irrational, the existence of his rage feels sort of justified, particularly in the portion of his tirade that follows Jean Valjean calling him a bandit. The offense he takes at this word is closely linked in this tirade to the discrepancy between the comfort of the rich and the material lack and suffering of the poor; that is, at the root of his offense is a questioning, also posed by the rest of the novel, of the right of those who have never known desperation to judge the poor’s desperate choices. He articulates all of this in a moment when he seems as threatening as he ever has, in practically the same breath as he uses to shout at Jean Valjean, “Nous vous mangerons!” (p. 812) -- “We will eat you!” with none of the ambiguity of his “I would eat the world!” from last time. So what can we make of this? Why does Hugo seem to insist on expressing these ideas, which were clearly quite important to him, in the least credible voice possible?  

It seems to me that it’s related to Hugo’s insistence, which began in earnest in book 7, that we allow ourselves to see and grapple with the tension between compassion for the less fortunate and the existence of those whose desperation might make them dangerous. By this point in the novel, when so many of our poor and desperate characters have been deeply sympathetic, we are in danger of seeing the posture toward the poor that the Bishop modeled at the outset – an utter rejection of prejudice, charity to the point of sacrifice and even risk of personal harm – as less than radical. We might even begin to misinterpret the novel, thinking it encouraged a posture like the Bishop’s on the grounds that this idea of a malevolent poor person was a myth cooked up by bourgeois prejudice, that the people we take to be “very dangerous men” merely suffer from some combination of bad luck and social rejection, and would undergo miraculous conversions like Jean Valjean’s if only someone were kind to them. But through Thénardier, Hugo insists on a more complicated message than that. He insists that dangerous people do exist, including (but not exclusively) among les misérables, and that even in their presence, compassion for misfortune is still required. If we forget about the novel’s Thénardiers, we risk forgetting just how radical the Bishop was on that night that served as the novel’s genesis, when he invited the man with the yellow passport declaring him a very dangerous man into his home.

In other words, Thénardier doesn’t negate the morality of the Bishop, but instead, he reinforces and refines it. In the absence of Thénardier in this novel, it would be easy to dismiss Hugo’s image of the poor and criminal as idealized, unrealistic, or romanticized. But here, Hugo looks head-on at true criminality, the kind that has no one to blame but itself, and he allows for its existence. But that existence must be taken alongside – literally, here in the Gorbeau house – that of Jean Valjean, who resorted to criminal activity only to survive and to ensure others’ survival; that of Fantine, whose mistakes, however they might be evaluated morally, were borne of ignorance and illusion; and that of the young woman we now know to be Éponine, whose upbringing never showed her anything other than depravity, cruelty, and selfishness. The lives and activities of les misérables are complex, and they raise questions that do not have easy answers. But including a character like Thénardier in this novel seems to be a kind of insistence upon generosity even knowing that the least deserving people we can imagine might be real.

This dilemma, faced by the reader alongside Marius’s, highlights the importance of the distinctions laid out in book 7, between the different sorts of outlaws, between the selfless, progress-seeking upper mine and the selfish, destructive lower mine. Books 7 and 8 together, in addition to continuing to slake his original audience’s thirst for action, drama, and crime, offer a philosophical approach and a kind of laboratory exercise in reconciling our conflicting feelings about the possibility of criminal misérables like Thénardier. We can return to that central principle that Hugo offered us and consider Thénardier’s destructive selfishness, his vision that did not look beyond his desire to get his turn at being a millionaire, no matter who might have to pay, as reason enough to be satisfied seeing him fall into Javert’s clutches. His long history of selfish predation, the destruction he brought upon Fantine, Cosette, his daughters, his wife, and his son, these do seem to justify the sort of intervention that the legal system is likely to make in his life. 

Of course, selfishness and mistreatment of these people will not be the charges that Javert puts in his report. Our satisfaction at seeing Thénardier caught runs parallel to another sort of satisfaction, and that is the more conventional satisfaction of seeing the forces of order triumph over the forces of crime at the end of a police novel. In episode 19, we discussed the public’s developing taste in this period for stories about crime and policing, and Javert’s triumphal entry here certainly reads like the heroic end of such a story. As their lower-mine selfishness sets the members of the gang to arguing about who will get out the window first, they descend into buffoonery, and Javert has time to surprise them. We’ll remember that he has a prodigious ability to observe, sense criminal activity, and pounce like a predator, and his instincts make Marius’s signal and the crisis he suffers about whether or not to send it, superfluous. This is followed by Javert’s utter dominance of the scene in the room, in a way that seems almost supernatural. Even before his large backup squad enters the room, he commands it by simply being present. He practically dares Thénardier to shoot at him at point blank range, after Bigrenaille seems afraid to for reasons that remain unclear and have an odor of superstition; Javert predicts that he will miss, which he does. He nonchalantly ducks the huge paving stone thrown by the group’s last holdout, the massive and ferocious Madame Thénardier, and subdues her and her husband each with one hand. This creates a strange shift in our perception of Javert, who enters a hero here, rather than a villain. He appears in the doorway much as he did in Montreuil-sur-mer, in the moments that preceded, and provoked, Fantine’s death, and he is in the same house from which he forced Jean Valjean to flee, ending his idyllic first winter as Cosette’s caretaker. But now, he saves the day. 

But the last time we saw this resemblance to a crime or police novel, in Javert’s pursuit of Jean Valjean from this house to the Petit-Picpus convent, we also said that the reassuring narrative of order triumphing over chaos was undermined by its broader context in Les Misérables. Here we find the same thing, but in a way that is a great deal less clear-cut. In the immediate environment of all of Thénardier’s recriminations against the system that Javert has represented from the beginning, and continues to represent, the one that keeps les misérables in eternal exile from the rest of society, we may feel – perhaps should feel – quite conflicted about this outcome. There is no question that the gang’s activities were destructive and needed to be intercepted; Jean Valjean’s life was fairly imminently at stake. But on the other hand, haven’t we learned to listen to objections like the ones Thénardier makes here – against prejudices, against leaving the poor to wallow in the depths of misère, against harsh judgments passed on the choices people make when they have few choices left? In chapter 22, we see Gavroche: the gamin who began part 3, who was also the neglected baby crying in the Thénardiers’ inn, and who is now, it seems, definitively abandoned. His appearance hammers home the ambiguity of this conventional end of a story of policing. His parents were no great shakes, but he is now, thanks to their arrest, alone in the world. Which was worse? Cursory summaries of this novel often cast Javert and Thénardier both as villains, and at the end of this incident, it may give pause to watch the triumph of the villain who represents the harshness of absolute law.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

Recognizing that Jondrette is Thénardier, of course, means that we know a bit more about his children as well. In particular, the older daughter, the one who comes to Marius’s room a second time in this section, is, as we’ve said, Éponine, the one whom Madame Thénardier noted was approximately Cosette’s age when Fantine first left her at the inn, and the other is Azelma, about a year younger. 

With that fact comes an opportunity for us to consider the current state of things in the broader context of these girls’ history together. At this point, our clearest memory of their childhood together is probably the unequal treatment that they received as children, as the limits on Madame Thénardier’s capacity for nurturing were enhanced by the appearance, false as it was, that Cosette had been thrust upon them and abandoned in the inn in Montfermeil. We saw this mistreatment of the child Cosette in Part 1 book 4 chapter 3, then in more detail in Part 2, book 3. In episodes 8, 16, and 17, we read her forced labor as analogous to Jean Valjean’s, with the miniature society of childhood in that environment of limited kindness and unlimited cruelty as a metaphor for the larger society outside of the inn’s walls. All of the favor in that small world fell upon Éponine and Azelma, and Cosette absorbed all the punishment due to all of them. But if we think back even farther, we’ll remember that it was not always so. At these girls’ first appearance in the novel, they and Cosette were on equal footing, so much so, in fact, that it was the affinity that Fantine saw between her child and these children that drew her to the Thénardiers as Cosette’s guardian. For her, they were “une vision de joie” (p. 157) -- “a vision of joy,” and she concludes, upon seeing them, that “La présence des anges annonce le paradis” (p. 157) -- “The presence of angels is a sign of Heaven.” But even in that moment, Fantine’s fatal flaw, illusion, prevented her from seeing what we can now understand as a terrible foreshadowing of the girls’ future. When she first saw them, we’ll remember, their mother had created a sort of swing for them by strapping them onto a chain that hung from the massive, broken-down vehicle in front of their inn. The chain was described as “digne de Goliath forçat” (p. 153) -- “worthy of Goliath as a prisoner” and the narrator says that “elle avait un air de bagne, mais de bagne cyclopéen et surhumain” (p. 153) -- “it smacked of the bagne, but of a cyclopean and superhuman bagne.” But the girls themselves, we’ll remember, were dressed with care and at some expense for as long as their mother could afford it, and even though her judgment is called into question by the fact that she “avait vu cette effroyable chaîne, et avait dit: Tiens! Voilà un joujou pour mes enfants.” (p. 153) -- she “had seen that terrible chain and had said, ‘Look, there’s a toy for my children,” they were “deux roses dans de la ferraille” (p. 153) -- “two roses in iron.” Then, before Fantine left Cosette with them, Madame Thénardier released them from this makeshift swing, and the three girls played as equals; it’s only after Cosette was left behind by her mother that the Thénardier girls took on the role of her social superiors, with the freedom, warm clothing, and dolls that Cosette was denied. 

And so in this context, that moment we saw last time, when Éponine watched Cosette’s elegance and grace from the literal shadows of the room’s corner and the figurative shadows of what her life had become, it was all the more poignant. We don’t know if Éponine recognizes Jean Valjean and Cosette as her father does; she gives no indication of doing so, and is sent out of the room for most of the conversation where Thénardier is recalling them to his wife’s memory. Even Madame Thénardier, though – who seems to have interacted with Cosette the most, and with both of them much more than the children did, and was of course an adult at the time – even she doesn’t seem to recognize them, as material comforts have transformed them. So we can presume that Éponine doesn’t see what we now do: that the sort of zero-sum link between these girls’ destinies in childhood, persisted after Cosette was rescued, and now, the girls’ fortunes have been exchanged. The foreshadowing of that horrible chain is now fulfilled, after being delayed a bit while Cosette was made to work like a prisoner in the bagne when she was in the Thénardiers’ so-called care. The burden of that chain has now been returned to the girls who had originally been given it as their toy.

At the same time, we can read this shift in the girls’ destinies as Éponine and Azelma now taking on Fantine’s legacy that might otherwise have belonged to Cosette. We see Éponine here in that familiar depth of female poverty, suffering from hunger, missing teeth, and with hints of prostitution. And, in this section, when she visits Marius’s room while he hides under the bed, she repeats a gesture that was important to Fantine in the early part of her descent: she looks at herself in the mirror. We’ll recall that, in the section we read for last time, she remarked that Marius had a mirror, a luxury item that the Thénardier family can presumably no longer afford. But then, the text never said she made use of his mirror. Here, believing herself to be alone in the room, she goes directly to the mirror and, while she shouts to her father that she’s doing a thorough search for Marius, she is in fact fixing her hair, and considering her own reflection. For Fantine, this was a way of nourishing herself against the negative, devouring view of others. In episode 9, we saw that contemplating her beauty in her mirror was a kind of solace for her, a way of asserting her own self-definition. She did this until there was too little of her beauty left, and she literally threw her mirror out the window. Here, that same gesture for Eponine coincides with an act of defiance against her father, as she lies to him about her part in his criminal plan. The mirror, of course, is not her own, but Marius’s, and her rejection of the use her father wants to make of her is fleeting, but it may just be a sign of things to come. 

But more generally, this resemblance between Éponine and Fantine, and the apparently closed system of exchange of good fortune and suffering between these two and Cosette, hints at something more abstract, and more troubling. Just as Madame Thénardier made the child Cosette absorb any punishment she felt the need to mete out regardless of who was the actual guilty party, it seems that the fate that she represented, the fatalité that was figured by the same spider and spider web imagery that she was, operates by similar laws. It seems, in other words, that life in this world has a limited quantity of good fortune to hand out, and, at the same time, that a measure of misère will always be the lot that falls to some. As much as Thénardier tries here, the connection between losing Cosette and falling into destitution cannot be made in logical, real-world causes and effects. But it nonetheless seems that in saving Cosette, Jean Valjean created a void into which the other girls would fall, as if by some supernatural force. We think of Madeleine and Champmathieu, for example--they were in a similar situation, where there was a space in the bagne with Jean Valjean’s name on it that one or the other of them had to fill. But there, it was clearly the penal system that had created that void. Here, the persistent void among les misérables, that, it seems, one of these women must always fill, has its source in something larger, more essential. The Thénardiers’ moral bankruptcy determines the form of their suffering to some extent, but they don’t seem to be its ultimate cause, and crucially, none of these women, not even their daughters, ever really escapes misère thanks to anything they do. Rather, this inevitable suffering seems to come from fate itself. Or, perhaps, we might say it comes from the world, in the sense that, way back in Episode 1, we saw that the phrase in that Preface that is usually translated as “the century’s problems” might also be understood as “the world’s problems” – the intractable problems of the mortal coil, of every century. And so here, as we’ve discovered the dark side of the misérables who have given us our heroes up to this point, we also discover the impotence of the solutions to his century’s problems that Hugo has seemed to be suggesting. As he indicts the fate imposed by law, something larger, but just as unavoidable, seems also to be at work.  

[Music]

That’s all for this episode of “The Les Misérables Reading Companion.” Thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll take a pause in the story to look at the July Revolution and the new regime that followed. In the meantime, read with your mind, and read with your heart.

[Music]

Hi, and welcome to “The Les Misérables Reading Companion,” the podcast about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I’m Briana Lewis, French Professor at Allegheny College, and every week, I’ll invite you to read a section of the novel with me, and then share with you my thoughts on a portion of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. Today, Part 4, book 1, chapters 1-6, “Threshold.”

[/Music]

When we began Part 3 of Les Misérables, I mentioned that the rest of the novel would feel very different from parts 1 and 2, and I think that prediction has borne out. Part 3 mostly obscured the two main protagonists who survived the first two parts, Jean Valjean and Cosette, focusing instead on its title character, Marius. It left behind the deepest of its religious feeling and took on, instead, the various political doctrines that were available for devotion in the late [the] 1820s and early 1830s. It left the French countryside and developed the intimacy of the novel’s relationship to the city of Paris. And, perhaps most importantly, it greatly upped the complexity of the definition it asks us to hold in our minds of its title and central question: now, les misérables might be, as we saw them in the first two parts, the poor who have fallen on desperate times and may have resorted to desperate measures, but they might also be countercultural visionaries and revolutionaries, selfish and despicable monsters, or anything in between. The beginning of part 4 marks another threshold, and it does so in two different ways. The first is something of a continuation of the development that we saw at the beginning of part 3, and we will discuss that in the third part of today’s episode. But the other is more straightforward: the threshold that is the Revolution of 1830.

At last, as we advance in this novel that has manifested more than a little interest in the politics of the first half of the 19th century, an increasingly gaping hole is filled in. It’s been some time since we definitively crossed this important threshold in French history in the plot’s chronology, but so far, we have done so more or less without fanfare. The year 1830, of course, saw another Revolution in France, usually called the July Revolution, which brought an end to the Bourbon Restoration that began once in 1814, and then again after Waterloo in 1815, when Napoleon was finally defeated. We’ve mentioned the July Revolution in passing, but it has, up to this point, remained in the background of our story. 1830 came and went while Marius was fighting his way from abject poverty to subsistence and while he was not yet noticing an awkward fifteen-year-old girl in the park. We saw Gillenormand more or less unchanged, reacting to news cycles on both sides of the July Revolution in pretty similar ways, and we’ve seen the Friends of the ABC fix their eyes on goals far loftier than what the July Revolution produced. Here, beginning the fourth consecutive part of his novel with something that passes for a digression, Hugo dedicates some time to this moment in the nation’s history. But he still does so by putting it in the shadow of what he portrays as the two extraordinary years that followed it, and by extension of the first decade of the July Monarchy. So first today, I would like to try to sort through why he takes the posture he does toward the events of 1830. 

In order to do that, of course, we need to understand those events. The period of the Restoration, from 1814 to 1830, saw two Kings on the throne of France: Louis XVIII and Charles X. Both were younger brothers of Louis XVI, who had been guillotined during the original Revolution. Louis XVIII is portrayed as quite reactionary by Hugo here, and in one sense, that is fair – all of the Bourbon kings believed, as one might expect, in the divine right of kings, specifically in the divine right of Kings of France from their family, and thought that his absolute power over the nation was ordained by God. The word “absolute” here is important; those who held these opinions – that is, any of the legitimists that we discussed back in Episode 27, including Gillenormand – believed that the King’s subjects were entitled to nothing that he did not grant them, including legal and political rights, land, a means to make a living, even life itself. Hugo begins chapter 1 here by discussing a distinction between what these kings felt they “granted” in agreeing to have their powers hemmed in by the Charter of 1814, and what the people possessed by natural right. This difference – the difference between the King giving rights to the people and those rights naturally belonging to the people, is what Hugo places at the root of the Bourbons’ inability to rule in the 19th century. The original Revolution had discovered that the people’s rights were not the king’s to give or take away, and try as they might, the Restoration kings could not put that genie back in the bottle. 

But Louis XVIII was, at least, politically astute enough to recognize that acceptance of the King’s divine right in France was no longer assured, that “granting” or accepting the charter, depending on your point of view, was likely to be the best way for him to maintain peace and control and avoid further Revolutionary activity. But the second Restoration King, Charles X, was crowned when his older brother died in 1824, and he was not so patient with the idea of constitutional monarchy. As his reign wore on, he was often accused by opponents of overstepping his bounds. He was less interested in national unity and maintaining peace than his brother had been, and throughout his years on the throne, he was given to actions that seemed to be attempts to return to absolute rule. With all but his most loyal legitimist supporters objecting to this at one time or another, he was quite unpopular, and rumors swirled that a royal coup was brewing. Then, in 1830, at the end of an ongoing feud between the King and the Chamber of Deputies, the legislative body where there was a persistent liberal majority, the King issued a document called the July Ordinances. These would have severely curtailed the rights and powers of the Chamber of Deputies and the middle class that tended to dominate it, that is, the only ordinary citizens with any power at all in government. The July Ordinances are the document of which Hugo says in chapter 1 here, “Un matin [la restoration] se dressa en face de la France, et, élevant la voix, elle contesta le titre collectif et le titre individuel, à la nation la souveraineté, au citoyen la liberté.” (p. 840) -- “One morning, [the restoration] stood up before France, and, raising its voice, it contested the collective right and the individual right, the nation’s sovereignty and the individual’s liberty.” Specifically, these ordinances dissolved the Chamber of Deputies, set a date for the election of new deputies, and raised property tax requirements for voting in those elections – thus limiting the right to vote to France’s wealthiest, and generally most conservative, citizens. And, perhaps providing the most fuel to the fires of Revolution in the coming days, the ordinances suspended freedom of the press. Charles X signed this document on July 25, it was published on July 26th, and the uprisings began by that evening. 

The July Revolution is known for the “Trois Glorieuses,” the Three Glorious Days of popular insurrection on the 27th through the 29th of July. In chapter 1 here, Hugo praises them for being moderate, for removing a king who needed to be removed, but for avoiding the violent excesses of the Terror and remaining “douce” (p. 842) -- “gentle.” Of course, there was fighting in the streets in those three days, but the scale was small compared to four decades earlier, and casualties were counted in hundreds, not tens of thousands. In addition to popular uprisings and barricades in the streets in Paris, these three days saw formal resistance in the press – which was, after all, not only ideologically but financially implicated in the revocation of its freedom – and behind-the-scenes maneuvering by France’s bourgeois elites, some of the wealthy bankers and businessmen who had been left-leaning Deputies before the Chamber was dissolved. This last group is the one that comes off so poorly in chapter 2 here; many involved in the street fighting would have preferred to see the Restoration replaced by a republic, but the powerful and mostly Orleanist bourgeoisie, savvier and better funded and organized, directed the volatile situation toward the installation of Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, of the cadet branch of the royal family, as King in a new constitutional monarchy. They saw this as a compromise, peace-keeping position – republic, we’ll remember, still made some people nervous, thanks to the Terror in the 1790s – although Hugo was not alone in seeing it as the privilege of the economically sated to choose, as he puts it here, rest over progress. Hugo’s position here is related to part of what he said about Waterloo: there, we remember, he argued that any change, even a setback like that massive defeat and the return of the Bourbons, was part of a broader push-pull that led, inevitably, to progress in the long term. The role in which he casts the bourgeoisie here is that of arresting this progress, of stopping potentially productive strife in the name of order. He does give this same bourgeoisie credit for rising more thoroughly to the occasion in 1848; that event is largely out of the scope of Les Misérables, and more complex than 1830, so I will simply identify it as the end of the July Monarchy and the beginning of the short-lived Second Republic. That was when this powerful bourgeois class allowed, in Hugo’s estimation, for progress to pick up where it left off in 1830. But in 1830, after the Three Glorious Days, Charles X abdicated, Louis-Philippe was installed, and thus began a slightly different constitutional monarchy, the July Monarchy. 

What I’ve said here makes a much more complex story extremely short; if you are interested in more detail, I will make a recommendation here that I have made on a few occasions on the website for Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast; he has a series of manageable length on this revolution, series 6, as well as a much longer one on the original French Revolution, series 3, and others. If you would like more detail about the historical context here, that is a great, accessible place for fans of this genre to get a LOT of that detail. 

But for the purposes of a basic understanding of Les Misérables, we will let that really rough sketch do for now. When we return, we’ll talk a bit more about the July Monarchy that the July Revolution ushered in, and the way Hugo begins in these chapters to frame the opposition to it.

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast you might also enjoy our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, where we have the full audio file and extras, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter at @readlesmispod. It’s always exciting when this book that I know and love takes on a whole new dimension thanks to someone else’s insight, so come share your thoughts, your favorite moments, or any questions you might have. And, while you’re in sharing mode, help others find us by giving us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you!

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

So only a week after Charles X signed those explosive July Ordinances, he was out of power and on his way to exile in England, and Louis-Philippe was King.

The July Monarchy was sometimes called the “bourgeois” monarchy; King Louis-Philippe was said to have bourgeois values, despite being from one of the most elite noble families in France, closely related to the one that had been on the throne since the 16th century, with only a relatively brief interruption during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic years. The political change brought about by the July Revolution, as we’ve said, was disappointing to many, but the July Monarchy gave a great deal more power to the bourgeoisie and to former Bonapartists – generally, the political center – than the Restoration had. And, unlike the Restoration Kings, Louis-Philippe manifested full belief in the Constitutional limits on his power. From the point of view of style, though, the change was much clearer. Hugo provides, in chapter 3, a number of examples of the little ways in which Louis-Philippe presented himself as more modern, and more like a regular person, than the Bourbon kings, such as avoiding the traditional Royal hunting trips, and carrying his own umbrella. He adopted the blue, white, and red tricolore that is France’s flag to this day, but that was initially associated with the Revolution and outlawed by the Restoration. He was called the “Citizen King,” and called himself “King of the French,” symbolically rooting his power in the people, rather than “King of France,” a feudal-sounding domination of the land on which a king generously allowed the whole country to live. The people in whom his power was actually rooted, though, that is to say the voters, were still only those who paid a minimum property tax – this minimum was lower than it had been under the restoration, so the number of possible voters was larger, but his power was still rooted only in the French of some means. Plus, it’s not as if they elected him – they elected the legislature with whom he agreed, more willingly than his predecessors at least, to work. He was not exempt from many of the same misdeeds as the previous regime, at home and abroad, despite his more modern aesthetic. But he respected the Charter and kept the wealthy voting bourgeoisie happy, and stayed in power for 18 years.

In reading about Louis-Philippe the man here, we do hear quite a bit of affection, and to understand that, it’s worth remembering Hugo’s personal history. As he is writing Les Misérables, Hugo is pro-Republic all the way, but he came to this relatively late; even in 1848, when he was elected to the National Assembly, he sat with the Conservatives, that is, he was still a monarchist. Over the course of that three-year republic Hugo moved to the left, and and then, during the coup d’état in which its President, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, made himself head of the Second Empire, Hugo stood in opposition, in favor of the dying Second Republic. This stand, for which he went into exile, did a great deal to cement his republican position. But back during the July Monarchy, we’ll recall that Hugo had been not only a recovering legitimist, but a Peer of France and a member of the Académie Française; he ran in the most elite circles and knew the King personally. In chapter 3, when he mentions an anonymous but utterly reliable source for a couple of his anecdotes about Louis-Philippe, that source is Hugo himself, offering first-hand accounts. He appreciated Louis-Philippe’s sincere distaste for the death penalty, for example – an issue of consistent importance for Hugo – and, even as in hindsight he cannot support his royal power, he also cannot help but respect him personally.

But in the broader place that the July Revolution occupies in Les Misérables, its incompleteness is what carries the day. This, I think, is why relatively little case is made of the July Revolution by the politically minded characters in Les Misérables: for ultra-royalists like Gillenormand, this was a step away from the absolute monarchy of nostalgia, but was at least still a monarchy, and for those who hoped for a republic, like Hugo did by the time he was writing Les Misérables, passage from one constitutional monarchy to another, with power concentrated in a new class of wealthy elites rather than the older nobility, was at best unimpressive. Many believed that the bourgeoisie betrayed the revolutionary cause in 1830, leveraging the menace of popular revolt and scary memories of 1793 to install a King who would be favorable to their interests, using the amount of chaos they needed for their own ends, then arresting progress in favor of stability. Republican revolutionaries, and some remaining legitimists, continued to agitate against this regime for the first decade, especially, of its 18 years in power. Hugo describes this in chapter 4 here – distinguishing, of course, between what he sees as the “right” sort of resistance and the “wrong” sort. He paints the continued push for republic, for popular sovereignty, and for the rights of the people, in both the political and philosophical realms, as part of the upper mine that he described back in part 3 book 7. Hugo’s discussion of this progressive resistance also slides, in chapter 4, into a brief overview of some of the socialist ideas that he supported by the time he was writing Les Misérables – it’s a fairly moderate socialism, by 20th-century standards. But it’s worth repeating, as we’ve said before, that these ideas would have been in their infancy in 1832. The Friends of the ABC, as Hugo sketches them here, would certainly have supported the socialism that developed later in the 19th century, but it’s still just a bit anachronistic to imagine the uprisings against the July Monarchy in the early 1830s as a fully-fledged socialist movement. In their own minds, they were more inheritors of the Revolution and the First Republic four decades earlier than precursors of anything like the 1871 Paris Commune four decades later, although hindsight reveals connections in both directions. But key to understanding Hugo’s connection between the republican revolutionaries of the first half of the 19th century and socialists of the second half of the century is the fact that, for Hugo, their political ideas were intimately connected. Political power and economic power were inseparable, and neither, according to Hugo’s way of thinking, should be left for a few elites to concentrate for their own purposes. In other words, a moderate socialism, one that prevents “ces deux extrêmes: opulence monstrueuse, misère monstrueuse” (p. 857) -- “those two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous poverty,” is an extension of representative government rooted in the people’s sovereignty. The Friends of the ABC, in working toward republic, are working toward more economic equality as well. 

It is of this republican resistance to the July Monarchy that Les Misérables will show us an example. In the final two chapters here, Hugo focuses on the spring of 1832, where our story will linger for quite some time. Chapter 5 portrays the sense of discontent of this period, in a way that feels right, even if some of its details are, let’s say, adjusted, or outright fictional. He centers this feeling in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, which I will map. By the spring of 1832, it was becoming apparent that the July Monarchy would have less in common with republicanism than many had hoped. There had been a perceptible shift to the right among government ministers, and this included the departure from the head of the National Guard of an old hand at revolution whose name will be familiar to history buffs and, lately, to Broadway fans: the marquis de Lafayette. He was, by now, an old man, but still interested in advancing the ideals of republic, albeit cautiously. General economic conditions were also jangling people’s nerves, and then in the spring of 1832, a cholera epidemic arrived in France, and it would end up killing thousands in the city of Paris alone before it was over. As is often the case with epidemic disease, and cholera in particular, the poor were hit especially hard, and that, combined with other frustrations, led to unfounded conspiracy theories that wells had been intentionally poisoned. Things, in a word, were tense.

Hugo leaves us in that tense moment of the spring of 1832 for now, and so will I. Chapter 6 transitions us smoothly back from historical generality to the fictional and specific, to the Friends of the ABC, making the same sorts of overt preparations for rebellion as Paris generally was in Chapter 5. They will be our main entry point into this historical moment from here on.

But after a break, we’ll shift gears a bit, to take a broader perspective on where we are at this point in the novel. 

[Music] 

If you’re enjoying this podcast and would like to support this work financially, I heartily invite you to visit our website at readlesmis.com, that’s R-E-A-D-L-E-S-M-I-S.com, and click “Donate.” I do not do this to make a living, or even a profit, but there are costs associated with bringing you this content, and anything you can contribute will help. If listener generosity outpaces costs, I will from time to time donate the surplus to modern-day charities related to the social issues addressed in Les Misérables, and will keep a record of those charities and donations updated on our website as well.

[/Music]

I’m Briana Lewis, and this is “The Les Misérables Reading Companion”

For the third part of today’s episode, I would like to take a step back from our usual way of proceeding, and take a break from commenting on specific portions of the text to take stock of our discussion so far. This seems like a good moment for this, in part, because we have a natural pause in the action with this digression about the July Revolution and Monarchy. But the moment also seems auspicious because we currently find ourselves on another sort of threshold, that of the novel’s culminating conflict followed by its dénouement. Where we have traversed the period from 1815 to 1832 so far, with flashbacks into the 1790s, the rest of the plot will occupy about a year’s time, but will be, in some senses, grander and more complex. It will involve more characters at once, and weave together threads that the novel has, up to this point, mostly spun separately, of not only plot and character, but of more abstract elements of the book like themes and recurring images. So before we embark on all that, it seems to be to our advantage to try to find a way to assemble as many of those threads as we can reasonably and coherently do in this format, in the hope that, when they appear as part of this more complex tapestry, it will be easier and more fruitful to trace them across their path through this vast work.

So even saying that, I’m overwhelmed, and I know there is no way to do it comprehensively. But the best way to have a go at it, it seems to me, is to think about the main questions this novel has asked, and to some extent answered, from the beginning to now. There are four questions in particular that strike me as important:

First: Who are les misérables?

This question is posed by the title itself, more for non-French speakers than for French-speakers, I’ll grant, but as we discussed in our first episode, even in French its meaning is ambiguous. From the outset, we have been contending with this word’s double meaning, where one is pejorative, an insult applied to a person of low character, and the other is simply a description of a person living with extreme deprivation, usually poverty and material lack. Early on, it seemed that Hugo’s argument surrounding these two meanings would be relatively simple, as we watched our innocent, sympathetic protagonists bear the burden of others’ prejudices about poverty, and as we saw signs of misère – visible poverty in things like clothing, a lack of education and cultivation, separation from family, social isolation, and physical deterioration – be unfairly taken as indicators of immorality and criminality. Hugo began by separating these ideas, by showing us examples of the good, honest poor, and the corrupt, destructive rich. But more recently, we have seen him complicate this notion by re-admitting the idea that, he seems to assume, was the one that his reader began the novel with: that someone who looks like the Thénardier we find in the Gorbeau house is unworthy of trust – which, of course, he was. After Jean Valjean’s story, and Fantine’s, and Thénardier’s and Éponine’s, we have no choice but to accept that someone who appears to be living in abject poverty might be either predator or prey, spider or fly, or, sometimes, both at once. They are unified only by having fallen, like the man overboard in that foundational image we saw early in the novel, from the ship of society into the sea from which there is no hope of return. But Hugo has also complicated his definition by hinting at another affinity with this group we’re calling les misérables, one that will become more important as we move through part 4, and that’s with society’s revolutionaries, those who live apart from society not because it’s rejected them, but because they have rejected it. Ultimately, he divides les misérables not into the categories of poor, criminal, and revolutionary, but into the selfish and the unselfish, the distinction between egoism and altruism being, it seems, the only one that matters.

This is intimately tied to the second question that seems central to the plot of the novel: How do les misérables become misérables?

This question was introduced by the Bishop even before we met Jean Valjean, and it is older still in Hugo’s work, dating from at least the 1830s. And its answer, too, seems simple at first: the Bishop, just like Hugo in those earlier works, asks us to look for guilt beyond the person who suffers the poverty or commits the sin or crime, not to assume that the causes for misère of either type begin and end with the misérable. Jean Valjean and Fantine’s stories show us that a person may be poor because there are no opportunities for work, because that work is discriminatory or poorly paid, or because of some unfair but unavoidable expense that squeezes them dry. Even if a misérable commits a crime, maybe especially then, we are encouraged to ask: was this person desperate, ignorant, simply trying to survive in the only obvious way? Might this have been prevented with education, or by a society with fewer prejudices and an eye to fairness? Could it be society’s boundaries themselves, the ones policed by the forces that Javert embodies, that creates criminals by identifying them?

But then, this principle is also made more complex as the novel progresses, chiefly as we wrestle with the events at the end of book 3, where we see the most malevolent and dangerous character we’ve encountered yet, one who is also very poor, but without any explanation, backstory, or extenuating circumstance. In other words, as with the first question, that of who les misérables are, this question of how they got that way is also answered first with a challenge to the prevailing bourgeois idea, but later, with an acquiescence to it. The novel’s most prominent social problems – lack of education, the excesses of the legal and penal systems, the impunity of some alongside the presumption of guilt for others, the absence of protections for the poor, the sick, the aged, and for children – these problems explain some but, conspicuously not all, of the novel’s misérables.

And at the same time, there has seemed to be something larger at work in creating some of the misère that we see, something beyond blame that we might place with each individual misérable or with the social world in which they live – something like fate itself. In the Preface, Hugo acknowledged two guiding forces in the world, human inevitability and divine destiny, and only the human one of these was subject to critique and change. We have begun to sense, lately, that suffering may not be avoidable, that like Napoleon’s loss at Waterloo, some catastrophes are destined.