by David Bellos
He could have drawn it in coin, which would have saved some of the trouble he runs into later on. He can’t do that, of course, because 630,000 francs in silver weighed more than three tons, and he would have needed a wagon train to take it away. Even in gold coin, Valjean’s nest egg came to 211 kilograms, more than even a strong man could deal with discreetly. Valjean has no choice but to take out his life savings in paper money. Six hundred and thirty 1,000-franc banknotes of that era make a package the size of a large dictionary that could plausibly be hidden in a chest and quickly buried under a few spades of earth.
But what was easy to handle was not easy to use.
Nineteenth-century France was allergic to paper money. The first French republic that arose from the Revolution of 1789 inherited empty coffers, and it tried to keep going by issuing paper money secured not against gold but against the assets it had seized from the church. However, the authorities did not limit the issue of these promissory notes, called assignats, to the presumed value of the assets. Between 1789 and 1796, revolutionary governments printed all the money they needed to fund the state, and the result was inflation of almost Zimbabwean proportions. In the west of France, the Catholic resistance to the revolutionary regime also issued paper money, which similarly became worthless in no time at all. This history is commemorated in Les Misérables by the counter-revolutionary assignat pasted on the wall of Fauchelevent’s hut in the garden of the convent where he works and by Enjolras’s alcoholic side-kick Grantaire asserting his political credentials by keeping a revolutionary assignat in his desk drawer.8 These souvenirs remind the reader why post-Napoleonic France was reluctant to use banknotes. But as Valjean has no choice but to use them, they are also tiny threads in the finely-wrought web of Les Misérables.
After his Batman-like escape from the Orion, Valjean makes his way back to Montfermeil, takes some of his money out of the buried chest where he has hidden it, rescues Cosette from the Thénardiers and settles in a squalid apartment in a poor part of central Paris. Now and then he goes back to Montfermeil to draw another 1,000-franc note. He sews it into the lining of his coat before returning to town. When he needs to use the money, he unstitches his coat lining in an unoccupied room in the tenement, out of sight of Cosette, but he does not realize that the landlady is spying on him. She sees him extract from the opening he’s made in his coat ‘a yellowish piece of paper that he unfolded’. ‘She realized with alarm that it was a one thousand franc banknote. It was the second or third such thing she’d seen in her life. She fled in great fright’ (II.4.iv, 400).
She’s scared because it means her tenant is not what he seems – he must be a crook, or else a millionaire. Valjean compounds the drama by asking her to take it to the Banque de France to get it changed into coin, with the feeble excuse that the banknote is his quarterly rente (if that is what it was, then he could have changed it on the spot when he’d drawn it at the same bank). The landlady naturally gossips about this extraordinary event, and soon the whole street knows there’s a mysterious millionaire living as a pauper in the Gorbeau tenement. The rumour comes to the ears of the police, and that is why Javert sets the trap that obliges Valjean and Cosette to flee to the convent of Petit-Picpus. At bottom, the banknote – with the fear that it inspires – is the narrative prompt for a major turn in the plot of Les Misérables.
* * *
Valjean’s cash is nonetheless kept safe for ten years and provides a substantial dowry for Cosette, but her marriage is not quite the end of the money plot. Thénardier catches sight of Cosette and Marius on their way home from the wedding when their carriage is stuck in the Mardi Gras parade, then inveigles his way into the new household to put a proposal to the young lawyer. He believes that the mysterious father of Cosette who had made Marius rich was an ex-convict (he is right about that) who had stolen the fortune from a man called Madeleine (wrong). He’s willing to destroy what he believes is proof of the crime in return for a slice of the dowry. Like Balzac’s arch-criminal Vautrin, Thénardier believes that ‘the secret of great fortunes with no apparent source is a forgotten crime’9 – but he’s wrong again, and Marius knows it. Valjean has told his adoptive son-in-law who he really is and has explained the origin of the wealth he handed on. But the irremediably crooked Thénardier with his half-baked scams remains a blot on the landscape, and Paris would surely be better off without him. Marius gives him part of what he wants – not in coin, but in the form of a promissory note drawn on a bank in New York. That’s where Thénardier wants to go – to become a trader in slaves.
Hugo’s villain is wrong yet again, because the State of New York had freed its last remaining slaves in 1827. Six years later, after the wedding of Marius and Cosette, the now comical villain of Les Misérables leaves the scene planning a new career in a business that no longer exists. For him, at least, crime will never pay.
In its first composition of 1845–8, Les Misères tells the story of an ex-convict’s transformation into a prosperous manufacturer of black beads who despite great obstacles preserves 630,000 francs in banknotes hidden in the ground. However, all the more intricate details of the money plot were added during the second period of composition of Les Misérables between January and June 1861.
On 15 April 1861, the first shots rang out in the American Civil War. The plot of Les Misérables may not venture outside of France, but the story of a fortune begun in 1845 and completed seventeen years later takes us from the unspoken end-use of trade beads in Africa to the nightmare it unleashed in the New World.
In between those dates Hugo’s own fortune had taken a battering. How it was restored is part of the story of the making of Les Misérables.
* * *
In the 1840s Victor Hugo lived in a large rented apartment in a grandiose square in a run-down part of central Paris that was predominantly working class. He lived on the product of his writing, the most profitable part of which was his work for the theatre, and he was doing very well. He spent lavishly on antiques but held back substantial sums that he put into government bonds. In the first days of the revolution in February 1848, when Hugo was dashing back and forth to the Chambre des pairs, his opulent apartment was a sitting target for the rioting mob, which broke in when he was out of the house. Angry men were on the brink of ransacking it when one of them noticed a petition lying on top of a paper pile. It was a call for clemency for mutineers in the fleet at Le Havre. Hugo’s bold signature at the foot of the page persuaded the invaders that the great poet was a true friend of the people, so they turned around and left the place intact. That was a close shave for Victor Hugo and for us. The paper pile beneath the petition was the whole of Les Misères.
Four years later, Hugo was a banished man living in exile in Brussels. He had lost access to his investments in France and had no way of retrieving the treasures at Place des Vosges. As he had stopped paying rent for the apartment, its contents were seized and sold off. This sentimental, aesthetic and financial blow was softened a little by friends who bid for some of Hugo’s objects at the auction with the aim of returning them to the poet one day. However, no manuscripts came up for sale. Every scrap of Hugo’s writings had been piled into a trunk in December 1851 and taken over the border to Brussels.
In Paris, Louis-Napoléon had the army, police, the middle class, prisons, money and guns. In Brussels, all Hugo had was his pen. But he would make it spit fire! The first salvo was an incendiary pamphlet titled by the same quip that caused such an uproar in Paris in 1850: Napoléon le Petit, ‘Napoleon the Small’. It is vindictive, insulting and over the top, and that was the point: to use rhetoric as a weapon of war, to rally the masses and bring down the illegitimate dictator of France. It could not be published or printed in France, of course, but that was not a problem. Belgium had a thriving book industry based on the production of unlicensed material for smuggling into France. Many tens of thousands of copies of Napoléon le Petit were circulated in this way, and it was quite foreseeable that Paris would soon ask Brus
sels to clamp down on the trade and on the man who had produced such a severe irritant to the new regime. Hugo did not wait for the order to leave, which was sure to come. He moved on as soon as he could, like a man on the run. Money was one problem, of course, but the main one was finding a place to go.
England was the obvious choice. It had no immigration laws and was notoriously tolerant of firebrands and refugees from abroad. (That’s why Karl Marx found safe haven in the British Library at that time.) But London was expensive, especially for a man who had a wife, two sons, a daughter and his beloved Juliette to care for and no certain source of future income. In addition, the whole city was an affront to a French patriot: the very names of Trafalgar Square and Waterloo Station were reminders of national humiliation. Worse still, almost everyone spoke English.
America would have welcomed him, but it was largely English-speaking too. Portugal was tempting because it was cheap and warm; Spain too, and it had the advantage of speaking a language that Hugo knew from the year he had spent in Madrid as a child. But they were too far away. Hugo still hoped that Louis-Napoléon’s detestable regime would not be tolerated by French citizens for very long. He wanted to be close by when it fell, perhaps even to be the tool of its richly deserved collapse. Some political refugees (such as Eugène Sue) crossed into the Kingdom of Savoy (the area around Annecy and Chambéry, which was not yet part of France); others went to Baden-Baden in Germany, and yet others followed the path of Voltaire and Madame de Staël by moving to the Republic of Geneva. Hugo stumbled on an even better idea.
The Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey belong to the British Crown, but they are not part of England or of the United Kingdom and have never been part of the European Union. They have been inhabited since prehistoric times, but their modern population descends from the Normans who also conquered England in 1066. When King John gave up his claim to the continental part of Normandy in 1204, he retained ownership of the islands in the Channel (with the exception of Chaussey), which have been ‘particulars’ of the British Crown ever since. These charming islands are all that’s left of the once-great Duchy of Normandy. They are self-governing and make their own laws, which are written in French. In the nineteenth century educated Channel Islanders spoke standard French (with some local variations), and that meant that Hugo would not have to learn another tongue. The farmers and fishermen who made up most of the islands’ population still used a dialect directly descended from the Franco-Norman language spoken by William the Conqueror ten centuries before.
Hugo heard of the Channel Islands because small groups of political exiles from Italy, Hungary and Germany had already found refuge there. So with his wife, his children, his lover and his manuscript trunk, he travelled by coach, train and boat via Ostend, Dover, London and Southampton and landed at St Helier on 5 August 1852. He soon found a large house to rent on Marine Terrace, next door to where an eccentric utopian, Pierre Leroux, lived. Other proscrits followed Hugo’s lead and formed a community that saw itself as a vanguard of moral and verbal resistance to Louis-Napoléon. Some among them even saw St Helier as a base for real action, since Jersey lies only a few miles from the coast of France. However, the only invasion Victor Hugo imagined would be led not by guns but by words.
The first thing Hugo did on Jersey was to turn the angry prose of Napoléon le Petit into the biting verse of Les Châtiments (Chastisements). The poetry collection has a broader sweep, and its vicious rhymes swat not just the ‘little man’ at the top but all the scoundrels, turncoats and money-grubbing careerists who had helped put him there and were keeping his cardboard castle standing up. Hundreds of thousands of copies were printed outside France and got over the border inside crates of fruit and ladies’ boots, stuffed into linings and stitched into cloaks, landed on beaches by fishermen and hauled over passes on carts. Les Châtiments were read by thousands, and Hugo was right to think a large part of the nation was with him. But Louis-Napoléon’s regime, now renamed the Second Empire, kept on failing to fall apart.
Les Misères had been on the shelf for five years but had not been forgotten. Hugo had read excerpts to relatives and friends in 1847 in the drawing room of his apartment, raising expectations that the work would soon be finished. On 31 July 1848, Hugo’s sons used the first issue of their newspaper to declare that ‘in 1848, we shall have Les Misères’.10 The year passed, then another, and another, without any sign that work on the novel had resumed, let alone been completed. In the summer of 1851, ‘three years and seven months after being interrupted by a revolution’, Hugo did at last appear to be ready to return to work on his novel. In October, he consulted the Muse about what he should do next, and she shouted back at him: ‘Finish Your Book!’11 However, the confiscation of the Second Republic by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte on December 2 got in the way of even her plans.
These largely involuntary deferrals allowed a change to take place in the back of Hugo’s mind. It came to light in 1853 on the back panel of the first printing of Les Châtiments, in the customary list of the author’s ‘forthcoming works’. Among them would be a new novel ‘entirely unconnected to contemporary political issues’ that would constitute ‘in dramatic and novelistic mode a kind of social epic of poverty’.12 The title to which that description was attached was no longer Les Misères, but Les Misérables. However, the new and definitive title was not quite a key to the gate to the book. Hugo had many more troubles and trials to overcome before he could open it up.
At Marine Terrace a stream of visitors from France brought news, gifts, friendship, even a few curios saved from the liquidation sale. One among them brought to the island a new American craze that was sweeping through Paris and that allowed you to communicate with the deceased. All it took to talk to the other world was a wooden-top table with three metal legs. Intense concentration was needed, but once you got the hang of the thing you could talk to the past.
Hugo was fascinated and learned how to speak through the ‘turning table’ with a host of old friends, among them Moses, Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, who had most conveniently learned French in the ample leisure they had had in the beyond. Participants in these spiritist séances sat around the ‘turning table’ and asked it if anyone was there. The table responded with taps on the ground apparently made by one of its legs. One tap for yes, two for no; for longer messages, one for A, two for B, three for C, in a kind of celestial Morse. Delphine de Girardin, who had brought the idea to Jersey, soon went back to the mainland, but the Hugos carried on calling up absent spirits almost every night for more than a year. Adèle II wrote down what they said, and her transcriptions allow us to follow the strangest of all the adventures of Hugo’s mind.
Even in the shadow-world, Hugo did not forget what he still had to do. When he asked the Spirit of Civilization what his task was in the years that remained, the answer came straight from the shoulder, in a rather long sequence of taps: ‘Great Man, finish Les Misérables!’13
The ‘table-turning’ phase of Hugo’s Jersey years has persuaded some people that the writer was out of his mind. If so, then millions of other members of the European middle class were just as insane. From 1853 until the end of the century, communication with the other side was a common pursuit in parlours far and wide. Competent scientists tried to explain away talkative ghosts, but they made barely a dent in the Victorian preference for mystical gurus who claimed that souls live on and also come back. Hugo had plenty of company in his wish to believe that he could have conversations with the deceased.
He was nonetheless wary of being thought foolish by readers of a rational bent. There are plenty of ‘spectres’ and ‘ghouls’ mentioned in Les Misérables, but almost all of them arise as metaphors and are not intended to be taken literally. Nonetheless, the return from their graves of all the leading characters to sing the finale in the musical that has been made from the book isn’t entirely false to the beliefs and wishes of Victor Hugo. Many of the things that Boublil and Schönberg did to the story of Les Misérable
s might have had the author storming out of the theatre in rage, but if he managed to wait until the finale his view of the show might have softened. For he does bring a revenant into the room in the last act of his hero’s life.
Jean Valjean is on his death-bed in his bare apartment in Rue de l’Homme-Armé. The doctor can see there is nothing he can do and asks the patient if he wants him to call a priest to say last rites. Valjean says no. This would have been a mildly shocking refusal in nineteenth-century France, except for the follow-up. Waving his hand towards the mantelpiece, where two silver candlesticks stand, Valjean says he has a priest already. The narrator comments: ‘It is likely that the bishop was indeed present at this hour of death’ (V.9.v, 1,301). As the charitable bishop who had made a gift of the candlesticks had been dead for many years, the priest in the room at the close of the novel can only be the ghost of Monseigneur Bienvenu.
When he was not entertaining guests, holding séances or walking on the beach, Hugo was a busy man. He was the most prominent member of the exile community, its principal spokesman in relations with island officials, and the only person of authority who could maintain some degree of cohesion and order among a fractious and often desperate bunch of men. Friction between the islanders and the refugees had several causes. The least tractable was the ancient hostility these strict Protestants felt for the predominantly Catholic French. Their rigid observance of the Sabbath irritated continentals used to a more relaxed regime, but it was so important to the islanders that it overruled even loyalty to the British Crown. When Queen Victoria made a state visit and came ashore on a Sunday, all the islanders turned out to watch her carriage process – but not one in ten men took off his cap, in silent protest at Her Majesty’s failure to respect the Lord’s Day. The queen smiled graciously at the few who did acknowledge her as she passed, but it’s not likely she ever learned that one of them was Victor Hugo.