by David Bellos
Hugo does not say that the cause of the Thénardiers’ depravity and corruption is poverty, though many readers project that meaning on to this passage. He does not say directly that uncommon moral strength is needed to stay honest when you are debased and cast down by financial woes, but it’s a meaning that can be extracted from the passage equally well. What he certainly does say is that the awful are as worthy of pity and sorrow as anyone else. That generous and utterly unorthodox claim is offered as the foundation of a new social morality.
Hugo does not answer the question he puts at the end. Catholic readers of his day might have wanted to exclaim: the fault lies with the decline of religion. Socialists and progressives might have wanted to say: the fault lies with capitalism, or with the economy, or with society as a whole. But there is one answer that all readers most likely want to resist, though it can hardly fail to arise from the direct form of address that Hugo uses: that somehow or other, the fault lies with us.
7.
Hugo Gets Back to Work
Victor Hugo took the month of May 1860 to read through Les Misères and to list the points that needed attention. There were nineteen in all:
1. Modify the philosophical side of the bishop. Bring in the member of the Convention.
2. Check if there’s a need to use the map of Digne.
3. Maybe Thénardier’s inn: ‘The Federal Soldier of 1815’.
4. Move the convent. (Should I mention that Cosette becomes a happy girl while she’s there?)
5. After the convent, prayer. Describe the absurd monastic regime and say: as long as women are legal minors, as long as the problem of women remains unsolved, the convent is only a secondary crime. Marriage with God is not a bad deal (an acceptable plan B). Claustration on earth is an escape into heaven.
6. Try to replace gamin de Paris with another word: hooligan? Or else the people of Paris when still a child is called le gamin.
7. Touch up the portrait of M. Gillenormand.
8. Perhaps make a very sentimental scene out of the colonel who can’t see his child any more and is obliged to leave him to M. Gillenormand (but without encroaching on Jean Vlajean’s last pain).29
9. Explain how the grandfather splits with his grandson, thus: tradition of antique paternal severity; he’ll have to come back and then we’ll see!
10. Get to the bottom of Mabeuf.
11. For the barricade, note that I have to look at a map of Paris.
12. Don’t give Cosette a silk dress.30
13. Point out it’s nearly dark when J. V. goes into Jondrette’s hovel, which explains why J. V. doesn’t recognize anyone there.
14. Explain why the brazier doesn’t suffocate; because of the broken window pane. Size of the hovel. A vague smell that is unpleasant but bearable.
15. Explain that because of the thickening snow the coming and going of the cab which brings M. Leblanc to the Jondrette hovel can’t be heard (would be better if he came on foot).
16. That’s contradicted by Thénardier’s cab that is heard later on. Sort this out.
17. Explain why Marius only goes to Gillenormand’s in the evening. He remembers it’s the only time the old man was in the habit of having guests, in accordance with old fashions: making day of night and night out of day – or find some other reason.
18. Say that at dawn Chavroche got his kids out of the elephant.
19. Be wary of the word piller (‘to pillage’), overused in the riot.31
Hugo’s ‘to-do’ list of May 1860 hardly seems commensurate with the scale of Les Misérables, and it doesn’t mention most of the changes and additions that were eventually made and which more than doubled the length of Les Misères. At best, it gives us access to Hugo’s idea of how novels should be made. He reminds himself to check on the accuracy of references to the real world (points 2 and 11, use of maps) but also to alter reality so as to mask material borrowed from other hands (point 4, shifting the convent). He is attentive to finding the ‘right word’ (point 6) and avoiding verbal repetition (point 19), which is even more of a style fault in French than in other languages. He tells himself most of all that he needs to enhance the psychological plausibility of his characters (points 7, 8, 9, 10 and 17) and prop up the least credible turns of the plot (points 13, 14, 15, 16). And, remembering the opinions of Charles and others, he plans to strengthen and make more explicit the philosophical side of the book (points 1 and 5). These notes are points for tidying up an existing draft. There is no hint of a plan for bringing its story to completion.
Before Hugo took his first steps in that direction, however, he had other business to attend to. He had been invited to address a fundraising event on Jersey in support of the champion of Italian unity, Giuseppe Garibaldi. He was reluctant to go back to an island that had thrown him out, but his political friends raised hundreds of signatures on a petition begging him to return, and he felt obliged to accept. The crossing was unpleasant, but the welcome loud and warm. Placards were posted all over St Helier saying VICTOR HUGO HAS ARRIVED!, the banquet was packed out, and the writer was fêted like a conquering hero for three days. This rewarding interruption was followed by another, a charity bazaar launched by his wife Adèle to raise money for the children of Guernsey’s poor. Hugo had always been a willing giver of alms. It went with his status, of course, and was also part of what it meant to be a middle-class man. On Guernsey he never walked down to Fermain Bay for a swim without small change in his pocket, which he gave freely to poor folk he met on the way (though he also used it to pay girls for sex, a pursuit no less important to him at that age than decorating his home). The bazaar was the first of the family’s ventures into organizing charity on a larger scale. Adèle, who was not a banished person, spent weeks in France collecting items for sale from friends. Hugo donated autographs, books and photographs of himself; he even served at a stand for a few moments and bought another heap of curios to decorate Hauteville House.
At the end of June 1860, Hugo started on the next stage of work on Les Misérables. For forty days and forty nights (or so he said) he pondered the reasons he had for writing a book about the wretched, the outcast and the poor. However, the product of his immersion in the underlying meaning of the work he had not yet started redrafting for real was a fifty-page ramble dealing with almost everything except the meaning of Les Misérables. Hugo realized that his draft was not a real preface but an exercise of the mind: ‘The author could not have not written [these pages], but it is easy for the reader to skip [them],’ he confessed.32 There’s no disrespect involved in taking the hint, but two things need to be rescued from this false start. The first is that it contains a lengthy attempt to justify belief in the existence of God, boiled down in Les Misérables to a bafflingly dense paragraph put in the mouth of the outcast revolutionary G.:
The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no selfhood, selfhood would set a limit upon it; it would not be infinite. In other words there would be no such thing. Yet exist it does. So it has a self. That selfhood of the infinite is God. (I.1.x, 43)
The second is that when, just before abandoning the preface at the end of August, 1860, Hugo finally asked himself how ‘a dreamer of this kind’ could have written Les Misérables, he explains (to himself) that such a work has to be based on two beliefs: ‘belief in the future of man on earth, that is to say, his improvement in human terms; and faith in the future of man beyond earth, that is to say his improvement on the spiritual plane’. He ends his essay with the much-quoted and often misapplied assertion that ‘the book you are about to read is a religious one’.33 The problem in applying this definition of the novel of Valjean and Cosette is that Hugo’s idea of ‘religious’ is not like anyone else’s understanding of the term.
* * *
Hugo was physically robust, and he kept himself fit through regular exercise and a healthy diet. On Guernsey he went walking and swimming most days of the year; he ate a light diet and took hardl
y any drink. He was good for another twenty-five years, but he didn’t know that when in December 1860 he came down with a sore throat and bad cough. He had such a high temperature that he thought he might die and wondered how long he still had. In a note written on 23 December, he fixed his remaining span at no more than five years. You can tell what his mood was like from the first pages he wrote when at last he got down to completing Les Misérables:
Alas, if despair is a dreadful thing when the hair is black … what is it like in old age, when the years rush on, ever more wan, to that twilight hour when you begin to see the stars from the grave? (IV.15.1, 1,037)
As part of his recovery from his throat-and-chest complaint, he made two changes to the way that he lived. He moved his narrow bed from the ‘Look-out’ to the Oak Room, one storey down, clearing the top floor of the house for two writing shelves and tables for the manuscripts and materials he would need to have at hand.
His second innovation was to stop shaving. Unlike other members of the Romantic movement, Hugo had not grown a beard in his younger years. He remained smooth-cheeked even when beards became the uniform style of democrats and republicans in the 1840s. The Second Empire became so suspicious of facial hair that it banned bearded teachers from schools. Hugo was not averse to signalling his solidarity with other victims of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, but that was not the reason he stopped shaving before restarting the main engine of Les Misérables.
Public speakers have to take care of their throats, and in the 1850s the sermon-giving clergymen of England came up with a new way of staving off coughs, colds and the loss of voice. A ‘Beards Movement’ swept through this traditionally smooth-chinned group and reached the shores of Guernsey too. Hugo must have heard about it from a local curate, or else from the press.34 Hugo’s beard quickly turned into a snow-white extension of his face, with a wisp of black persisting on the upper lip. Charles took many photographs of his father on Jersey in the 1850s, and we can still see what Hugo’s face looked like without a beard: well-proportioned, with a famously high forehead and small, penetrating eyes. However, because of the immense popularity he enjoyed after the publication of Les Misérables, most of the photographs used on book jackets, hung on the walls of French town halls and propped on mantelpieces all over the world were taken after Hugo had transformed himself into a whiskery patriarch who would fit into a Father Christmas parade. It wasn’t a fashion statement, even less a desire to look like God Almighty. Hugo grew a beard to protect himself from diseases that might prevent him finishing Les Misérables.
By the last days of December, he was feeling better and ready to get down to work in his newly cleared Look-out on the top floor of Hauteville House. We know exactly when Hugo took up his quill and started on the mammoth job of revising and completing the story of Les Misérables, because he marked it quite explicitly in the manuscript. On the page that has Gavroche setting off from the barricade to take a letter from Marius to Cosette – and which must therefore be the last page of the original Les Misères, the one written on or just before 23 February 1848 – Hugo erected a milestone in his own life, in the history of this novel and in the history of world literature:
This is where the pair de France broke off and the exile carried on.
30 December 1860, Guernsey.
* * *
Hugo wrote standing at one of his two writing shelves in the top-floor room overlooking the harbour and, beyond it, the often choppy sea breaking on the shore of the island of Sark. He wrote with a goose quill on loose blue-tinted sheets that were roughly the size of A4. The stationery bought in St Peter Port did not quite match the sheets he had used in the 1840s for Les Misères, so the growing manuscript of the novel had a ragged edge. As the writing involved insertions as well as additions, it was especially important to keep track of the sequence in case the pile was disturbed by a gust of wind from an opened window or door. Hugo numbered his sheets from A to Z, with W omitted (as it only occurs in non-French words, W can be considered as not a letter of the French alphabet). The twenty-sixth sheet was number A1, the twenty-seventh B1, the fiftieth Z1, the seventy-fifth Z2, and so on. At some periods Hugo used both sides of a sheet, but his routine for the continuation of Les Misérables was to leave the verso blank. He always left a broad margin for corrections and additions, but much of the new material that turned Les Misères into Les Misérables was far too voluminous to fit in that way and called for a refinement of the numbering scheme. An extra sheet inserted into the sequence after sheet B2, to take an imaginary example, would be numbered B2A, and if this insertion ended up being twelve pages long, it would end on B2L before the pre-existing sequence of pages resumed with C2. In principle, it is no more difficult to learn to count Hugo’s pages than it is to count nineteenth-century coins, but practice is needed before either becomes handy to use. The most practised person of all was Juliette Drouet, who had long before abandoned her career as an actress to be her great man’s copyist. Her job was to transcribe finished sections on to a fair copy that incorporated corrections and additions indicated in the left-hand margins and brought the longer insertions with their branch-numbered pages into the ‘main line’ from A to Zn.
* * *
When Hugo took up his pen on 30 December 1860 the narrative of Les Misérables was exactly where he had left it in Les Misères in 1848. The immediate context out of which new adventures were waiting to be spun was as follows. In her dying moments Éponine (still called Palmyre) has handed Marius (originally, Thomas) a letter from Cosette saying that her ‘father’ has moved from Rue Plumet (not the present-day Rue Plumet, but the street now called Rue Oudinot) to a smaller apartment in Rue de l’Homme-Armé and plans to take her to England, away from suspicious prowlers and from strife in the streets. The letter is addressed to ‘my beloved’, and the endearment makes Marius’s heart leap – and then plunge, for he can’t follow Cosette abroad. He has no money, and even if he had he could not marry without his grandfather’s permission, which would surely be refused. He writes back to his beloved, laying out the insuperable obstacles they face. Better to die on the barricades! ‘I die. I love you. When you read this my soul will be with you and will smile on you.’ He asks Gavroche to deliver the message to the right house, No. 7, in a street that was only half a mile from the barricade.
All kinds of connecting links could have been inserted at this point, but Hugo’s inspiration was to take a step back. He returned to the prior passage describing the first day that Cosette and Valjean had spent in their new abode. The young woman, gloomy and tense, had retired to her room with a headache, and Valjean had ample time to look around. Into that still blank space he inserted an additional detail that acts as a launch-pad for the next turn in the tale. Valjean looked around the room at Rue de l’Homme-Armé and found something. What he found was not present in the manuscript of 1848; it was thought up and inserted in December 1860. It could not be Cosette’s letter, since that was on its way to Marius; and it obviously could not be the reply, which hadn’t been written yet. What struck Valjean’s eye was closely related to the correspondence between the lovers, but it was something else.
Users of ballpoints may not remember that handwriting in ink applied with a quill pen stays wet for a few minutes and can easily get smudged. Drying can be accelerated with a pinch of pounce (powdered cuttlefish bone) or by dabbing the sheet with blotting paper. In the latter case the trace of what’s written shows up on the blotter in left-right inversion. On a well-used piece of blotting paper different lines of mirror writing overlap and can’t be deciphered at a glance. But Cosette had used her sheet only once, so the trace of her writing is clear. Even so, Valjean might not have noticed if it hadn’t caught his eye in the mirror. Like blotters, mirrors invert what they reflect, so they make ‘blotter writing’ readable the right way round. That is the hinge. The double inversion by ink and glass of a message addressed by Cosette to her beloved triggers a moral crisis in the mind of Valjean. At the same time it is a technical trig
ger that sets off the continuing story told in Part V of Les Misérables.
There’s magic in the device Hugo found to make the hinge between the old novel in front of him and the new one in his head. He had spent nine months looking back over the manuscript. To start looking forward, he introduces something that is quite literally written backwards and then turned around thanks to a mirror on the wall. Buvard, bavard (‘The Blathering Blotter’), the chapter title Hugo invented for this contrivance, is a play on words that makes its double function almost explicit. It joins up the story and marks the join in the writing of it.
When Gavroche arrives with Marius’s reply, Valjean intercepts it and understands what it means, since he has now read the message that prompted it. He puts on his uniform as a member of the National Guard (to protect himself from arrest) and sets off for the area around Les Halles, where barricades have been set up. His intention is unstated, but his actions can only mean one thing. He aims to bring his adopted daughter’s lover back home in one piece.35
That’s where Part IV ends in the finished novel. What Hugo wrote next, in January 1861, is the start of what is now Part V, and it is completely different from all that had gone before. Les Misères is a conventional third-person narrative interspersed with characters’ speech in dialogue form. Chapter 1 of Part V, however, is a personal essay about the ‘June Days’ of 1848 (see above, pp. 46–8), an event that lies entirely outside the novel’s chronological frame. It is written in the voice of an ‘observer of social ills’ whose identity is perfectly clear. This is not the narrator. It is Victor Hugo.