by David Bellos
The reflective analysis of the events of June 1848 that forms V.1.i has been disparaged as a digression and dismissed as the blathering of a windbag.36 It is certainly a surprising and perhaps unprecedented intrusion of an author in a work that has the form and content of a novel. However, Les Misérables is not just a longer version of Les Misères. It is still a novel, but it is also much more.
Later on, Hugo inserted many other essays in his own voice into earlier parts of Les Misérables: his visit to the battlefield of Waterloo, for example, his assessment of King Louis-Philippe and so on.37 As a result the ‘1848 essay’ doesn’t play the same role in our reading of the finished book as it did in the writing of it. However, it is retrospectively obvious that none of the dramas that arose in Hugo’s life between the abandonment of Les Misères and the resumption of it as Les Misérables (the coup d’état, exile, political polemics, expulsion from Jersey, poetry or turning tables) affected him as profoundly as those two days in June 1848 when he helped to suppress a popular revolt. That is what he had to come to terms with to carry on with his book, and that he has to come to terms with in his book if it is to be the ‘social and moral panorama’ that he intended it to be. For the dilemma of 1848 was not his alone. As he said in the foreword to Les Contemplations, ‘Ah! Quand je vous parle de moi, je vous parle de vous. Comment ne le sentez-vous pas?’ (‘Ah! When I tell you about myself, I am speaking of you. How can you not sense this?’) The personal discussion of June 1848 at the start of Part V has to be about ‘you’ if you live in a society that has been shaken by or fears to be shaken by political violence; that is to say, if you live in France, or almost anywhere else, in the nineteenth century, and maybe even now.
Interlude: Inventing the Names
In the months of January, February and March 1861, Victor Hugo created a substantial part of Les Misérables, including two of its most dramatic and memorable episodes: the destruction of the barricade in Rue de la Chanvrerie, where Enjolras, Grantaire, Gavroche and many others die; and Valjean’s rescue of Marius through the sewers of old Paris. There can be no greater contrast than between the ill-lit, claustrophobic scenes that he described and the vista that met his eyes when he looked up from his writing shelf: birds, rocks and sailing boats bobbing about on the never-still sea. Hugo was able to abstract himself entirely from his surroundings, for there is barely a trace of ‘the view from Hauteville House’ in the words of the finished text.38 Yet there is a subterranean connection. The old coat of arms of the city of Paris shows a sailing boat, often thought of as an image derived from the elongated shape of the Ile de la Cité, the island in the Seine where Notre-Dame stands. But if the view of sailing ships indirectly brings to mind the city Hugo thought he would never see again, the motto on that old crest could also be applied of his own defiant stand. Fluctuat nec mergitur (‘it/he floats and does not sink’) could have been inscribed on the lintel of Hauteville House, to speak not of Paris but of the man upstairs.
This was also the time when Hugo finally settled the names of most of his characters. These names have become so familiar that it takes an effort to realize that they all had to be invented, for none of them was taken from the existing stock of French first and family names. The only one that wasn’t changed between first draft and last is that of Thénardier, the cruel innkeeper of Montfermeil. Thénard is a genuine French family name, and it belonged to a distinguished research chemist whom the king appointed alongside Hugo to the rank of pair de France, but who voted against child labour reforms. But the aptness of the root name for the role its holder plays in the novel is probably unrelated to these anecdotal facts. Its second syllable, –ard, has the form of a suffix that casts scorn on the adjective or noun to which it is attached. A chauffeur, for example, is a driver, and a chauffard is a bad one; a fête is a party, and a fêtard is an objectionably noisy attendee. To the negative sounding –ard Hugo added –ier, a suffix that usually marks the exercise of a trade or skill. Charpente is a beam and charpentier is a carpenter, just a pâtissier makes pastries and a hôtelier runs an inn. That last is the clue, because it is as a hotel-keeper that Thénardier first appears in the novel. But what of the first syllable of his name? It has the same sound as taenia, the French word for tape-worm. ‘Thénardier’ has become part of the language and now names any rip-off artist in the hotel trade not just because Hugo’s character is a memorably unpleasant example, but because the name is loaded with associations that make it fit especially well.
The Thénardiers’ unloved third child, the baby we hear crying at the inn in 1823 and who reappears as the rhyming urchin at the barricade, was first called Chavroche. That name, like its final version as Gavroche, also taps into meanings contained in a suffix. In colloquial speech, especially in the dialect of Paris, –oche can be added to nouns and adjectives to make them smaller, less prestigious or commoner things: a battered old suitcase, valise, can be a valoche, and a run-down local cinema is a cinoche. The prison-fortress that was knocked down during the Revolution was popularly referred to as La Bastoche, and that is probably why Hugo invented the name that he did for his revolutionary scamp.
Gavroche is also the name of a kind of hat, worn by Brigitte Bardot in Viva Maria! in the role of an Irish bomb-maker on loan to a revolution south of the Rio Grande. Hugo’s character isn’t named after the hat, of course, because the hat is named after Hugo’s Gavroche. However, Bardot’s soft peaked cap isn’t anything that Gavroche ever wore. The boy is so poor that he has ‘no shirt on his body, no shoes on his feet’, the only trousers he’s got are adult cast-offs five sizes too big, and if he ever wears a hat, he borrows it from ‘one of his other fathers’ and it flops down over his ears.39 What it resembles more or less is the headgear of a vigorous young man striding forward with a pistol in each hand in Delacroix’s celebration of the 1830 Revolution, Liberty Guiding the People. That famous image is even taken by some to be ‘a portrait of Gavroche’, but as Delacroix’s painting was done thirty years before Les Misérables was in print, that cannot possibly be right. The historical confusion is even greater than that, because the hat worn by the figure in the painting is actually a faluche, the standard headgear of students at the Sorbonne. It’s quite bizarre. Ignorance of the clothing conventions of nineteenth-century France has led to a misunderstanding of the social meaning of a work as closely associated with the tradition of political activism as Les Misérables; in its turn, the misrecognition of Delacroix’s militant intellectual has injected into later readings of Les Misérables the image of a hat that has no place in it at all. A gavroche is less of a homage to Hugo’s Gavroche than an expression of the difficulty we have in understanding the past.
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At the start of Les Misères the sad heroine was named Marguerite Louet, whose name becomes Fantine fairly soon. ‘Fantine’ was not a regular French name at that time. Hugo may have come across the word in fairy-tales from French-speaking Switzerland, where it means ‘water-sprite’, but it’s not likely he chose it for that reason. The ending –ine is common enough in women’s names – there’s ‘Léopoldine’, ‘Joséphine’, ‘Valentine’ and many more. But ‘Fantine’ isn’t made from –ine added on to a known stem. The best guess is that the first syllable is a contraction of enfant, ‘child’, so the name itself suggests a meaning close to that of ‘kid girl’. That’s just what she was: a child of the streets of Montreuil-sur-Mer, with no parents to name her and no formal identity at all.
In Les Misères Marguerite Louet’s daughter is called Anna, and when she works as a skivvy in the Thénardiers’ inn she’s referred to most often as ‘La Louet’, in a common use of the article and surname for people of lower rank. In rural dialects (and even nowadays, south of the Loire) the final consonant was sounded out, so the girl’s name was indistinguishable in speech from l’alouette, ‘the lark’. Hugo abandoned ‘Anna’ for ‘Cosette’ later on, but kept the association of girl and bird, attributing it not to a pun but to the poetic imagination of the poor:
The replacement name ‘Cosette’ is one of the most mysterious of Hugo’s inventions. Like ‘Fantine’ it has a diminutive ending, and like ‘Fantine’ too it has no obvious stem among French names. The first syllable sounds borrowed from Italian cosa, or ‘thing’, equivalent to French chose, which normally has feminine gender. However, it is also used with masculine gender to mean a lad, a stripling, a puny fellow (as in Alphonse Daudet’s memoir of his miserable childhood, Le Petit Chose). Thirdly, chose is also a stumble-word inserted when you don’t know or can’t recall the right name. When Gavroche brings Marius’s letter to 7, Rue de l’Homme-Armé he finds Valjean outside the front door but as he has no idea of his name he calls him ‘M. Chose’, or ‘Mr Thingy’. He then pretends to misremember the name of the woman to whom the letter is addressed and calls her ‘Chosette’, which is at the same time ‘daughter of Chose’, ‘Miss Thingummy’ and ‘wee girl’. In this way Hugo uses his verbally gifted ruffian to point to the associations of the name he’d invented for the heroine of the tale. The daughter of a ‘kid girl’ among the most humiliated and subjected of the society she lives in, Cosette is just a ‘little thingy’ herself.
Cosette’s beloved is called ‘Thomas’ in most of the first draft, but becomes ‘Marius’ in the scene where Éponine alerts him to danger in the garden of the house in Rue Plumet. ‘Marius’ sounds typically southern nowadays because of Marcel Pagnol’s celebration of all that is Provence in his novel Marius, which he also made into a film. It had no such associations for Hugo, whose given name was Victor-Marie.40 What he slotted in to replace ‘Thomas’ was simply the Latin translation of his neglected second half.
Among other names that were changed in the winter months of 1861 was that of the Thénardiers’ elder daughter. Her mother had dredged up the classical ‘Palmyre’ from the second-rate fiction she loves to read, but Hugo replaced it with one adapted from that of a heroine of the early history of France. Epponina was the wife of a Gaulish chief, Julius Sabinus, who by claiming descent from Julius Caesar irritated the Roman Empire as much as any Astérix. In the story told by Plutarch, a Greek-speaking Roman author studied in classics classes at school, and retold in the nineteenth century by Jules Michelet and François Guizot in their accounts of the origins of the French nation, Epponina accompanied her husband to Rome, where Vespasian sentenced him to death for rebellion. The faithful wife demanded that she be allowed to die with her spouse. The wish was granted with ease, in what Plutarch thought ‘the cruellest and saddest act’ of that emperor’s reign.41 In Hugo’s novel, Éponine dies from a bullet she deflects with her hand from the breast of Marius to her own. She earns her name.
The one name that Hugo did not finalize until he was well advanced with Part V was that of the hero of the tale. The ‘Jean Tréjean’ of Les Misères briefly became ‘Jacques Sou’, and turned into ‘Jean Vlajean’ in January or February 1861. On 20 March, during the composition of the passage on the destruction of the barricade at Rue de la Chanvrerie, Hugo inverted the order of consonant and vowel and settled for good on ‘Jean Valjean’. The name is made by doubling the commonest and most basic name in the French language. Like ‘Ivan’ in Russian or ‘John Doe’ in American law, ‘Jean’ suggests ‘somebody or other’, anybody, a nobody. ‘A name is a self’ Valjean explains to Marius at the very end (V.7.i, 1,250, adapted), but the name that he has carries with it only an elementary level of selfhood. His father, also called Jean, was greeted by the shout ‘Voilà Jean’ (‘There’s Jean’), abbreviated in rapid speech to ‘Vlà Jean’, which he ran together to make into his own name.42 It’s as heartrending as a slumdog answering to the name of ‘Heyou’.
There is an even lower rung than being called ‘You Guy’. In a parable of Ancient Egypt, Ismail Kadare imagined that the slaves who built the pyramids had to earn enough money to buy a name, foreshadowing twentieth-century abominations that turned people into numbers to strip them of their social identities. In Les Misérables, the ultimate victims of social exclusion include the nephews and nieces for whom Valjean stole the loaf of bread and whose names are never given. Similarly, Gavroche never learns the names of the two lost boys he adopts on the streets and takes back with him to live in the elephant and never finds out that he is their brother. However much effort Hugo put into inventing the names of his misérables, he didn’t forget that the greatest humiliation is to have no name at all.
PART THREE
Rooms with a View
8.
Victory at Waterloo
In 1854, a Guernseyman was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Hugo made a public appeal for the penalty to be commuted, since he regarded execution as a crime in itself. Dismayed when the sentence was carried out nonetheless, he dashed off a stark, black-brown watercolour of Charles Tapner hanging by the neck.
In 1859 an American abolitionist, John Brown, tried to seize an armoury at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, so as to provide slaves with the means to fight to make themselves free. The amateur coup was put down by General Robert E. Lee, and Brown was sentenced to death. Hugo penned another stirring appeal for mercy, this time to ‘the United States of America’. He warned that if Brown were to be hanged there was no knowing where the campaign against slavery would end. Newspapers and cables took too long to cross the Atlantic for Hugo’s thunderous humanity to have any effect: he wrote his appeal on 2 December 1859, the very day Brown was hanged. It was published all the same, in French and in translation, in newspapers around the world. It did not go down well in the United States. Hugo was told to mind his own business and stop meddling in American affairs.
A few days later, Paul Chenay, the husband of Adèle’s sister Julie, came to stay at Hauteville House. Chenay was an engraver, and he offered to make a print of Hugo’s image of a hanged man as part of a campaign against capital punishment – and on behalf of slaves in the United States, which was sliding towards civil war, an issue widely covered in the French press. Chenay took the watercolour with him back to Paris and set to work. The engraving was soon ready, but because it bore the date of 2 December, it was misrecognized by the political police as a hostile reference to Louis-Napoléon’s seizure of power in 1851 (see above, p. 52). The plates and proofs were therefore seized and destroyed, and Chenay had to start all over again. The project had also changed. The new idea was to use Hugo’s image as the frontispiece of a pamphlet consisting of Hugo’s appeal to America with several other abolitionist texts he had written over the years. With that in mind, the date was erased and a new title was found. ‘The Hanged Man’ became ‘Ecce Lex’ – ‘Behold the Law’, intended ironically, as in ‘You call that legal?’ The context of the pamphlet naturally made readers see it as a picture of John Brown. Prints went round the world within weeks of publication in February 1861. As the writer in his Lookout carried on with the adventures of Valjean and Marius in the sewers of Paris, Hugo the artist, Hugo the humanitarian and Hugo the prophet loomed like a giant on the world stage. The American Civil War was about to begin.
Most of Hugo’s paintings show imaginary landscapes, castles, ruins and the sea; not many show human figures, and faces are rare. In Les Misérables, on the other hand, pen-portraits abound, as was conventional in fiction of that time. Are any of them self-portraits? In 1832, Valjean is roughly the age Hugo was in 1861 and shares his strong constitution, but nothing more specific links the two for the eye. Marius, on the other hand, whose name is borrowed from Hugo’s, is an intentional portrait of the artist as a young man.
The portrait is affectionate and serious, but it is also an ironical and self-critical one. Hugo’s well-known inclination to bed women whenever he could only arose in middle age and, though it may seem surprising now, he was as chaste as his
hero Marius when he was the same age. Hugo even adapted an episode from his own early life to depict Marius as a comically passionate prude. When Marius sees the wind lift Cosette’s skirt in the Luxembourg Gardens, he is roused to anger and jealousy of anyone who might catch sight of her precious ankle, just as the teenage poet had berated his fiancée for lifting her skirt out of the mud when crossing Rue des Saint-Pères. ‘I cannot tell you what torture I endured,’ he wrote to Adèle in 1822, ‘when I saw passers-by averting their eyes. Please take note if you want to avoid the risk of my slapping the face of the first insolent man who dares look at you.’1 However, the larger role that Marius plays in telling us what it was like to be Victor Hugo is by reproducing in broad outline the story of his political education.
Marius’s father, Colonel Georges Pontmercy, was a professional soldier awarded the title of baron on the battlefield by Napoleon himself. Hugo’s father held the rank of general and was made a count – several steps higher still. The fall of the Empire in 1815 was a disaster for both fathers alike. They became demi-soldes, that is to say, they were put on half-pay, forbidden to enter Paris and assigned to a provincial town: Vernon, halfway between Paris and Rouen, for Pontmercy, and Blois for Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo. Marius and Victor Hugo were therefore brought up in the capital by relatives who had no love for Napoleon Bonaparte. Marius’s grandfather Gillenormand is an unrepentant monarchist; Hugo’s mother, though not as antiquated in her person or views, was also sympathetic to the royalist cause. The political education that Marius receives at the salon of Mme de T. is a caricatural summary of the attitudes Victor Hugo absorbed in his teens;2 and Marius’s later conversion to progressive ideas compresses the path towards the left that Hugo also took in subsequent years. Adèle pointed out some of these parallels in the memoir she published just after the appearance of Les Misérables, and, looking back on the book a decade later, Hugo agreed without difficulty that he had ‘put the whole story of his life’ into the character of Marius.3