by David Bellos
Cabs did not venture beyond the gates of Paris. What took people to the suburbs were slow-moving one-horse jalopies painted yellow, with up to six inside seats and space for several more on the roof and the rear. There were as many as 500 of these coucous in service before the railways came. Like collective taxis in Israel nowadays, they left their ranks only when full. As a result it was hard to guess when you would get to places like Saint-Cloud or Montfermeil.
Public transport between towns came in several forms. The speediest was the four-horse malle-poste, or mail coach, with passenger seats only half-protected from wind and rain. A seat inside a fully enclosed diligence was more comfortable, but you could also travel for a lesser fare on the roof. That’s how Marius travels to Vernon to find his father, whereas his swanky cousin Théodule snoozes inside.54
Along with the several different bone-shakers that Madeleine hires to get him from Montreuil to Arras in time for his trial, these are all the forms of vehicular transport that arise in Les Misérables. The only other ways of getting around were on foot or on the back of a horse.
Many people in London and Paris rode horses around town, and riding was even more common in the countryside. Poor folk, however, did not have the opportunity to learn how to ride. It is presumably to express solidarity with his flock that Bishop Myriel uses a donkey or an ass but never a horse to reach remote parishes in his mountainous diocese.55 Hugo’s readers must have taken it as obvious that all Madeleine’s tribulations on the road to Arras (the tilbury rented from Maître Scaufflaire loses two spokes, the swingle-bar of the wicker cariole hired from an old lady in Hesdin breaks) would have been avoided had he ridden a horse all the way. It’s true that he asks the innkeeper at Hesdin if there’s a horse to be bought or hired (I.7.v, 224), but despite being the mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer, M. Madeleine is still Jean Valjean, and people of that class just don’t have horses to ride. The unnatural absence of horse-riding from the whole of Les Misérables except in the Waterloo scenes is a transparent, perhaps provocative but now almost invisible way of demonstrating what it meant to be among the misérables.
For all other purposes everyone walks, and walks to a degree it is hard to credit nowadays. In Great Expectations, Pip walks from London to Putney just for dinner; David Copperfield, for his part, walks from London to the coast of Kent; in The Old Curiosity Shop, a stunted teenage girl and her half-demented grandfather walk from London to the dark satanic mills of the North. Jean Valjean beats even those sturdy English striders. He walks all the 200 kilometres from Toulon to Digne, covering fifty-eight of them (twelve leagues) in a single day, across hilly terrain.56 From Digne to Montreuil-sur-Mer is another 900 kilometres, and he walked all the way.
‘There is no trivial fact in the affairs of man, no trivial leaf in the vegetable world,’ Hugo writes as if to excuse himself from the strange hodgepodge of facts he recalls from his youth (I.3.i, 112). But if history perhaps legitimately neglects some of the details provided in ‘The Year 1817’, it should not leave aside the colours, coins and carriages of Les Misérables, which tell us even more than Hugo could have guessed about the world that his novel depicts.
PART TWO
Treasure Islands
4.
The Money Plot
Fantine’s daughter Cosette has an unpromising start in life. The orphaned child of a destitute mother, she is exploited by harsh foster-parents who aren’t likely to provide her with education, employment or any prospect of economic advancement later on. She would surely grow up to be a nameless member of the mass of misérables but for Jean Valjean, who rescues her from the Thénardiers and gives her a life of a different kind. By the age of eighteen, she is the wife of a prosperous lawyer and has a substantial fortune in her own name. The ‘happy ending’ of Les Misérables may be a miracle from Cosette’s point of view, but Hugo doesn’t simply pull it out of a hat. The combination of assets and income in the hands of M. and Mme Marius Pontmercy after their marriage in 1833 results from a mostly plausible sequence of economic steps that show how money can be made and lost, kept safe and poured down the drain. The plot of Les Misérables is constructed on the basis of a wide grasp of the economic realities of nineteenth-century France – which are significantly different from our own.
One big difference is inflation. It isn’t mentioned in Les Misérables because it didn’t happen in the real world either. The fortune Jean Valjean made at Montreuil-sur-Mer lost none of its value when it was hidden in a hole in the ground for ten years. Had Cosette kept her dowry intact and left it to grandchildren at the end of the nineteenth century, it would still have been worth the same as the wad of banknotes Valjean drew from the Bank of Laffitte in December 1823. Thanks to the bimetallic system introduced by Napoleon, France enjoyed a century of monetary calm.
Valjean’s fortune comes from a factory making cheap black beads. It’s a strange business to choose as the foundation stone of a novel seeking to present the social history of the nineteenth century. Madeleine’s enterprise isn’t typical of the new industries from which great fortunes were made at that time – it is not based on coal, iron or steam, it is not related to transport or textiles, and it is not an application of new technology. It is an obscure industrial niche that could have been carved out at almost any time, since the raw materials, the process and the product were all available before 1816 and are just as available now.
However, when Les Misérables appeared in 1862, Valjean looked like a business genius. A few weeks before publication date, the Royal Consort, Prince Albert, died. Queen Victoria vowed to wear mourning apparel for the rest of her life – not just black dresses and robes, but black jewels too. Regal diamonds and pearls were shut away and replaced with black gems. Jet, the only true gemstone that is entirely black, became very precious, and black glass, which looks very similar but costs a fraction of the price, was manufactured in great quantities to allow others to follow style. Black glass could in turn be simulated by even cheaper materials, and decorative items that looked more or less like jet could be sold by the shipload in 1862. For the first readers of Les Misérables, it stood to reason that Hugo’s ex-convict would make a fortune in no time at all, because what he made in his factory at Montreuil-sur-Mer was imitation fake jet. Among all the harsh criticisms made of the novel by newspaper critics at that time, not one took aim at the story of how Madeleine’s fortune was made. But fake black gemstones weren’t hot products in 1845, when Victor Hugo first invented his story of Valjean’s transformation from a pauper into an industrial entrepreneur; nor were they in 1816, when the story of the black bead factory is set. The basis of the main money plot of Les Misérables goes deeper than that.
Jean Valjean travels to Montreuil-sur-Mer after a transformative encounter with the bishop of Digne. Thanks to the priest’s generosity he has a set of silver plates in his sack, and they provide him with initial capital. It cannot have been very much: as a gram of silver was worth four sous (see p. 59 above), 1,000 francs was equivalent to 5kg of silver at the official price, and a set of six even quite substantial plates can’t have weighed much more than that. The silver could not have supplied all the working capital needed to build premises, hire workers, lay in machinery and raw materials for a business large enough to generate millions within a short space of time. Actual entrepreneurs of the day would have been financed by their families or by a loan from a bank. But there is not a word about Valjean borrowing money in Les Misérables. There is a reason for that. Implausible as it is, the story of a fortune made without recourse to credit corresponds to a belief laid out at great length in the rest of the novel, namely, that borrowing leads not to the creation of wealth but to a downward spiral of debt.
The fall of Fantine, for example, which mirrors and parallels Valjean’s rise between 1815 and 1823, is mapped out by the progression of her debts. She leaves Paris in 1817 with eighty francs to her name. At Montfermeil, she pays the Thénardiers fifty-seven francs in advance for the care of Cosette and arrives in M
ontreuil-sur-Mer with just a pittance in hand.1 She gets a job straight away at M. Madeleine’s bead factory, which allows her to borrow money for rent in advance and to furnish her room. Her outgoings rise as the Thénardiers demand ever higher charges for the upkeep of Cosette, so she falls behind in repayments for the furniture and then with her rent. Her descent into debtor’s hell starts even before she is sacked, but it accelerates thereafter as piecework rates fall. Physically, Fantine dies of a chest complaint, but the sale of her furniture, her hair, her teeth and ‘the rest’ are the fatal consequences of her spending money she did not have.
Marius, on the other hand, avoids the trap. He leaves his grandfather’s home with no immediate prospects and just fifteen francs in his pocket, but when his new friend Courfeyrac asks him if he would like a loan, he gives a simple reply: Never! Marius manages to get by from selling his smart clothes and gold watch, then from fees for translating from German and English (languages he learns on the job, so to speak). He is a bit of a prig, and a lucky young man as well, but it’s important to realize that he is the carrier of the novel’s economic morality. Despite having a tiny budget for a couple of years, he never gets into debt. Why does he avoid forward financing so strictly? Because in his mind, and Hugo’s too, debt is ‘the beginning of slavery’ (III.4.vi, 611 and III.5.ii, 616).
It is also the beginning of crime. Thénardier haggles fifty-seven francs out of Fantine in 1817 as down payment for the care of Cosette, but they go straight out the window to pay a bill falling due the next day for 110 francs. But the respite doesn’t really help. When Valjean comes to the inn to rescue Cosette six years later, Thénardier’s immediate debts have increased to 1,500 francs. In the end, he loses the business entirely to ‘a squalid puddle of petty debts’ and moves on to outright crime. When he crosses the path of Valjean once again in the Gorbeau tenement, he doesn’t have a penny to his name, he is behind with the rent and scrapes by on scams and who knows what other paltry resources the underworld provides. His ingenious rapacity as master of the house at Montfermeil had got him nowhere, and his bid to extort a fortune from Valjean results only in his arrest. Thénardier’s legal and illegal business careers are serial disasters. What drives him to crime is the fact that he can’t pay his debts. What made him borrow in the first place is the fact that he was a crook from the start. Debt and crime in Hugo’s book are two sides of the same coin.2
Madeleine’s factory is therefore established without recourse to credit so as to avoid a contradiction in the novel’s economic morality. But what of the morality of the business itself?
By comparison with most industrial products and processes of the early nineteenth century, making small trinkets out of fake black glass must have seemed utterly benign. Beads do no harm, and their manufacture doesn’t send men underground or produce palls of smoke or piles of slag. Madeleine’s factory is a model that stands as a reproach to dark satanic mills such as those denounced in Dickens’s Hard Times. But it is not a fairy-tale.
Madeleine did not invent the idea of simulating black glass, he only found (or borrowed) a new way of doing it. Previously, imitation black glass masquerading as jet had been made from tree resin diluted with alcohol. Madeleine substituted shellac for tree resin and turpentine for distilled spirit. The switch of raw materials lowered production costs, cut the wholesale price, increased the market and allowed handsome profits to be made.
Shellac is excreted by kerria lacca, a bug native to the forests of South-east Asia.3 It is scraped off the trees where the bugs feed, then processed into flaky sheets that may be amber, red or pure black in colour, depending on the host. When diluted with a solvent and warmed, shellac forms a putty suitable for moulding and pressing, and as it cools it turns rock-hard. It has had many uses since the days of M. Madeleine: early gramophone records, oil pipelines, paste jewellery and so on. In liquid form, shellac is the main ingredient of many varnishes and lacquers.
The reason why Madeleine’s beads are cheaper than others is that in place of a home-sourced raw material, namely tree resin, he uses a colonial product; and in place of a manufactured solvent, he uses a natural one, turpentine, which is distilled from the sap of the terebinth tree. Both of his raw materials were easy to obtain since wholesalers stocked shellac as an ingredient of sealing wax and turpentine as one of the constituents of household paint. But there is a problem about handling them together. When mixed with shellac and warmed, turpentine gives off noxious vapours that damage the respiratory tract; and until it is cool, turpentine-shellac putty is a major fire hazard. ‘When these materials ignite,’ a standard work on glassmaking states, ‘it is hardly possible to extinguish them. If water is poured on them, they explode like gunpowder, and can easily set fire to everything within range.’4 The only fire that occurs at Montreuil-sur-Mer is burning hard when Valjean first arrives there.5 He must have devised a very stringent safety routine, because none occur over the following six years when tons of highly flammable material are processed under his eyes.
In the draft novel written between 1845 and 1848 no explanation is given for the financial success of the bead business, but in passages written on Guernsey in 1861, Hugo has Valjean give Cosette and Marius a fuller account of how he had earned the money that is now theirs. He tells them that his unit cost for manufacturing one gross (that’s to say, a dozen dozen, or 144) fake jet earrings was ten francs, for a wholesale price of sixty.6 That is a huge margin of profit, and it helps to explain why Valjean grew rich. (Because there were no taxes on income, profits or sales, gross margins were net.) What remains to be explained is why such a large mark-up could be had.
Beads of real jet, glass beads painted black to look like jet, and various non-precious stones that have a black or near-black sheen have been prestige objects for millennia. Egyptian mummies are decorated with black beads, and Viking warriors were buried with black glass beads beside them. In more modern times, black beads were used as trim on the mantillas of Spanish dueñas, and it is to Spanish buyers that Madeleine sells ‘immense quantities’ each year. But could Spain have consumed a million or more beads from Montreuil every year just to trim its ladies’ apparel? That seems unlikely: the country was bankrupt after 1815 and sank into such turmoil that France decided to invade it in 1823, at the time when Madeleine’s business was at its peak. Hugo reminds us of this indirectly in his criticism of the Spanish invasion, and again when Valjean pretends to be a rentier reduced to poverty in the Gorbeau tenement by the collapse of Spanish government bonds.7 The ‘immense quantities’ of black beads shipped to Spanish ports were probably not intended for resale in the country, but destined to travel further on.
Bilbao, San Sebastian and Cadiz were regular ports of call for ships en route to West Africa to pick up wood, ivory and human cargo from Arab and African middlemen. With what currency? Mostly, black beads. Also called trade beads, or slave beads. Like cowrie shells, they were used as tokens of exchange across the continent. Germany and England manufactured trade beads in great quantities, and it’s reasonable to suppose that Madeleine’s cheaper knock-offs were picked up in Cadiz to fill the pacotillas or ‘small packets’ that were taken on to Africa and used in exchange. There too the mark-up was outrageous. One slave purchased on the African coast for a sixty-franc bag of beads would fetch $1,000 when landed in Virginia on the second leg of the infamous Triangular Trade. Perhaps Victor Hugo knew without knowing that the rapid accumulation of wealth in Europe was connected with the horrors of colonial trade, and that Madeleine’s laudable relief of poverty in Montreuil-sur-Mer was part of a global network responsible for the most wretched form of human life at that time.
Had Madeleine been an ordinary member of the French middle class, even a philanthropic one, he would have put most or all of his personal savings into French government bonds, which gave a return of around 4 per cent. That was the standard way to acquire an income safe from commercial and political risks and to join the class of rentiers. Hugo himself put his savings into gover
nment stock and tried to live on the income they produced. But Madeleine could not do that.
Nominally, the French state did not pay interest on treasury bonds because its debts were held to be unredeemable loans. This fiction had few practical consequences, except that instead of buying bonds from brokers, investors had their names ‘written down in the Great Book’ and were ‘granted a pension’ in return. Such pensions, called rentes, could be awarded only to named individuals with documented identities. Despite being the mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer, Madeleine had no identity document under that borrowed name, so the path to rentier status was closed to him. He had lots of cash, but he was an outcast nonetheless.
His solution was to put his savings into an open account with the bank of Laffitte. It’s not a fictional institution, but an important part of the economic and political history of France. Jacques Laffitte was a carpenter’s son who started out as a bank clerk and ended up being the main financier of Napoleon Bonaparte and governor of the national bank. After the Restoration he continued to run one of the main French competitors to the Rothschild Bank (which had made a fortune out of Waterloo) and made many major investments in new industries. That’s why Madeleine goes to Laffitte rather than another bank for assistance in keeping his profits safe. But Laffitte got into politics too. In 1830 he headed the coterie that brought King Louis-Philippe to power, who made him his first prime minister in return. Politics proved ruinous to his business, however, and by 1831, Banque Perregaux, Laffitte et Cie was on the brink of liquidation. It’s lucky that Valjean withdrew his savings in 1823. He might have had nothing to pass on to Cosette ten years later had he left it in the bank of Jacques Laffitte.
Madeleine withdraws the cash immediately after owning up at the courthouse in Arras to being the wanted runaway ex-convict Valjean. After making his statement, he says he has ‘several things to do’ (I.7.xi, 256) and walks out. In an exploit worthy of Sue’s Prince Rudolph of Gerolstein, he stays free for three days before handing himself over to serve his second sentence in jail. He knows his bank account would soon be seized by the authorities because it was held under a false name. So Valjean’s main task at that point is to get to Paris, draw his money from the bank and put it in an even safer place.