by David Bellos
He does not put it all in with a completely straight face. Marius, when he first starts to learn about his father’s past, takes to reading histories of the French Empire and the Bulletins de la Grande Armée, a military newssheet that Napoleon used to create the heroic myth of himself. Marius is enthralled by these reports of victories and derring-do and reads on late into the night:
He felt as it were a swelling tide rising within him … He thought he heard drums, cannon, trumpets … the thudding and distant gallop of cavalry … He was in a state of exhilaration, trembling, panting. All at once … he stood up, reached out of the window with both arms, stared intently into the darkness, the silence, the mysterious infinitude, and cried: Vive l’Empereur! (III.3.vi, 571)
Marius instantly decides to inherit the imperial barony awarded his father but not recognized in Restoration France. Hugo also called himself vicomte in those years, as the second son of a comte. What really riled the young writer as he came to understand that his father was a true hero was that for technical and political reasons the name of General Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo would not be inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe alongside the other heroes of Napoleon’s wars.
Where the two fathers match most of all is in their behaviour after the defeat at Waterloo. General Hugo was not at the battle because he was an officer commanding the garrison at Thionville, in the east of France. He refused to surrender to the Prussian and Russian forces besieging the fortress-city and held out until the Peace of Vienna was signed – he was the very last French officer to yield. Colonel Pontmercy, for his part, was wounded at the battle and then fleeced by Thénardier, but instead of surrendering or returning to civilian life, he joined the rump of Napoleon’s army that retreated south to the valley of the Loire, where it held out for a few weeks. That’s why Gillenormand only ever refers to his son-in-law as a ‘Brigand of the Loire’. But in his emulation of the real General Hugo, Pontmercy transmits to his son the same values that Hugo felt he drew from his father: do your duty, and never give in. As he’d proclaimed in Les Châtiments in 1853:
Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-la!4
(And if only one remains, that man will be me!)
* * *
‘I would like to have finished what I have begun’, Hugo wrote to himself around the time he finished the discussion of 1848 and the harrowing narrative of the barricade’s end. ‘I pray God to order my body to hang on, and to wait until my mind is done.’5 He also had to find a way of allowing Marius to hang on. How would he escape alive from Rue de la Chanvrerie? His ironic identification with the younger hero of the tale has to give way at this point to the central concern of the book: the trial and moral triumph of an older man, Jean Valjean.
Thirty years before, in Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo had written a stunning description of medieval Paris as seen from the sky; now, he set about recreating the modern city seen from underneath. It was a similar kind of imaginative enterprise. Hugo had never visited the sewers, and he drew all his information about them from printed sources he had on his shelf. At the time of writing, there were great works in train to enlarge and extend the underground network of tunnels and pipes, and Hugo knew perfectly well that what he had to describe was a system of urban intestines that had already been swallowed up. However, the idea that the old sewers could provide escape routes for wanted men and petty crooks was not a fanciful one. What is on the brink of the impossible, of course, is that a sixty-year-old could carry a young man over his shoulders for several kilometres over alternately slippery and soggy ground, and even through a slough of shit that rises to his chin. This extraordinary feat brings Valjean close to figures from myth and legend. His escape is like one of the twelve labours of Hercules, and it echoes the visit made by Theseus to the underworld. But it is also a Calvary, for the suffering hero bears a weight on his back as heavy as any cross. When after hours of effort in the dark and foul air he reaches an outlet to the light, he finds a snarling guardian at the gate. The toll-keeper at the exit from hell turns out to be Thénardier, whose amazing ability to bob up again and again like a cork in the sea is equalled only by Valjean’s repeated returns.
The two also share a frankly unbelievable immunity to the cholera bacillus, which would surely have killed anyone who spent that amount of time in the sewers of Paris in June 1832. The first case was reported on 26 March 1832; within a month, nearly 2,000 Parisians had died of the disease. The epidemic raged on through the summer, carrying off not only poor folk living in hovels, but many eminent men and women too, among them Champollion, who had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sadi Carnot, the pioneer of thermodynamics, Casimir Périer, the prime minister, and General Lamarque, whose funeral on 5 June set off the insurrection from which Valjean now has to escape. Although nobody yet knew exactly how the disease was transmitted, it was believed that cholera was connected to water supplies and to the disposal of human waste.6 Escaping with Marius in June 1832 was even riskier than it seems.
Book 2 of Part V begins, like Book 1, with a general essay, this one focused on the economic benefits of recycling human waste. Before the discovery of industrial methods for fixing nitrogen in the early twentieth century, only natural fertilizers were available, and these ranged from animal manure to guano (desiccated bird shit), which was imported in vast quantities from the Pacific and elsewhere. In Paris and other major cities, night soil was also used, often after processing into powder or pellets. However, Hugo had held long conversations on the foreshore of Jersey with his neighbour, Pierre Leroux, who was convinced that a more systematic reuse of human waste could bring higher agricultural yields and help to alleviate hunger among the poor. Leroux put a proposal for his system to the parliament of Jersey (it was turned down) and ran a pilot plot in his own back yard next door … What Hugo proposed for Paris in Les Misérables was no different, but it was out of date. A real engineering scheme for cleaning up the city and spreading fertilizer extracted from human waste in the market gardens of Gennevilliers was in the course of construction already – but Hugo could not possibly acknowledge anything being done in Second Empire France. His enthusiasm may seem slightly comical now, but it is powered by beliefs of greater extension and import. Hugo wants us to hear him saying that nothing is so base as to have no use or place in the world; that the lowest may become the highest if treated the right way; that Paris is not just a ship on a coat of arms or a collection of houses and prisons, but an organic whole and a breathing monster. A Leviathan.
The escape through the belly of the beast seems designed to be put on a cinema screen. Fear of the dark, fear of getting lost, fear of drowning and of being shut in – all these ‘nightmare buttons’ can be operated by a solo performer in a relatively inexpensive set. It’s not especially difficult to show his victory over the obstacles in his path, and his moral triumph also has a visible shape: the inert but still living body on his back belongs to a young man Valjean has reason to wish to see dead, for if he survives he will steal from him the object of his affection and care and his whole raison d’être. As he carries his heavy burden through stinking water that almost comes up to his eyes, Valjean turns from Hercules and Theseus into a Christ-like figure bearing his own cross. The episode in the sewers makes Les Misérables something grander than a novel in the nineteenth-century mode. It reaches out towards the creation of a legend and the transformation of a character into a myth.
As the weather grew milder and the days longer, Les Misérables emerged from under the ground. Marius started to recover, and the author’s health also seemed to improve. Hugo’s physician, Dr Corbin, thought his illustrious patient would benefit further from a break in such arduous work. He mentioned to Juliette that Victor was fit to travel; the idea of a trip occurred to Adèle too. For once, both wives were of one mind, that a holiday would be good for them all. Even more surprisingly, Victor agreed. He hadn’t been off the islands for nine years and he would like to get away for a while. What he did not tell anyone yet was the real reason fo
r his wish to go.
A new dock at St Peter Port had just been finished, and paddle steamers now linked Guernsey to Weymouth, Southampton and Cherbourg on a regular schedule. New railways connected the ports to London and Paris, and travel had never been easier. However, there were no passenger cabins on the Aquila and the Cygnus, which plied the Weymouth and Southampton routes, and travellers had to sit or stand on the open deck for eight to ten hours. Depending on the weather, they would be sprinkled with sea-spray, soaked by a breaking wave, or drenched by pelting rain. Damp is no greater friend to ink and paper than fire, and great precautions had to be taken by a writer with a manuscript in his bags. For the ream and a half of blue-tinted blank paper and the thousand-odd sheets of what was already written, Hugo had a custom leather case made, which was then treated by a new process to make it waterproof. Not a page of Les Misérables got smudged.
As she was able to enter France, Adèle left first on a two-hour crossing to Cherbourg. Two days later, on 25 March, Hugo, Juliette and Charles boarded the Cygnus for Weymouth. Adèle II and her aunt Julie stayed to look after the pet dogs, Sénat and Lux, and to keep company with François-Victor, who was working on the ninth volume of his translation of Shakespeare’s works.
The crossing was calm. Stopping over briefly in London, Hugo called on a doctor, who gave him another clean bill of health. The trip proceeded by way of Dover and Ostend to Brussels, where the travellers joined up with Adèle. The weather was mild, and Hugo’s spirits were high. He scoured antique shops – there was so much more to find in the city than in the islands. Old friends came up from Paris to see him. He went on excursions, held meetings with editors and comrades in exile … But he didn’t forget what he’d really come to do. ‘Finishing my book would please me more than all the excursions in the world,’ he wrote to François-Victor.7
The holiday came to an end on 7 May. Leaving Adèle in Brussels with Charles, Hugo and Juliette took up residence at the Hôtel des Colonnes at Mont Saint-Jean, a village fifteen miles to the south. Their bedroom window looked directly on to the site of the Battle of Waterloo.
For the following eight weeks, Hugo wrote in his hotel room every day. For exercise, he tramped through the countryside, seeking and finding traces of the huge battle that had taken place there. But the landscape wasn’t the same as it had been on 18 and 19 June 1815. Hugo’s room faced the Lion of Waterloo, a monumental sculpture atop a huge conical mound. The 300,000 cubic metres of earth used to make Europe’s first purpose-built war memorial had been excavated from the fields all around, radically changing the lie of the land. That was the reason that Hugo had come here: to do the fieldwork to allow him to imagine what had really happened at the Battle of Waterloo.
During these long days of writing and walking, Juliette had Victor to herself, which happened so rarely now. Hugo had inserted himself into Les Misérables in many ways already, and it must by now have seemed natural to use the last grand scene of the book as a homage and gift to the companion of his life. He has Marius and Cosette marry on 16 February 1833 – the night when he and Juliette had first made love. It’s a touching way to say thank you to a woman who had devoted her life to serving him, but the gift was even sweeter than that. The wedding falls on Shrove Tuesday so as to allow the procession to get tangled in the festivities of Mardi Gras and to come to the notice of Thénardier, who then cooks up a plot. However, 16 February 1833 was not Shrove Tuesday, not a Tuesday at all. Had Hugo forgotten what day of the week it was when he fell head over heels in love? Certainly not. Nor had he forgotten that Mardi Gras was Juliette’s favourite day of the year. Running the two days together in defiance of the calendar makes it certain that he intended to inscribe Juliette twice over in the happy ending of his greatest work in prose.
Hugo’s use of dates started a real trend. James Joyce’s Ulysses is set on 16 June 1904 to commemorate the writer’s first night with Nora Barnacle. Georges Perec set the entire action of Life A User’s Manual around 8 p.m. on 23 June 1975, because that’s when his companion Catherine Binet turned up in a restaurant for their first dinner date. These classics of modernist and postmodernist fiction owe more than you might think to the allegedly old-fashioned Misérables.
* * *
At last the end of the novel was in sight. The failed skulduggery of the novel’s now comical criminal-in-chief, family tensions, the great reconciliation, the death of the hero and his burial in the cemetery of Père Lachaise followed on in an uninterrupted flow. Valjean’s grave is marked by a modest headstone with an epitaph now erased by rain and wind:
He sleeps. Though fate dealt with him strangely
He lived. Bereft of his angel, he died.
It came about simply, of itself
As night follows the end of day.
These last words of the book are followed in the manuscript with the time and place of their writing: ‘Mont Saint-Jean, 30 June 1861, 8.30 a.m.’8
Hugo immediately made it a public fact by writing a letter to his disciple Auguste Vacquerie, the former suitor of Adèle II:
Dear Auguste,
This morning June 30 [1861] at half past eight, with the sun streaming through my window, I finished Les Misérables. I know the news will be of some interest to you and I’d like you to hear it from me. I owe you this announcement of birth … Rest assured, the child is doing fine.9
9.
The Contract of the Century
Hugo had brought the story of Les Misérables to its end, but it was a long way from being a finished book. As he put it in a letter to his publisher friend Pierre-Jules Hetzel:
I have to do a proper inspection of my monster from head to toe. What I’m going to launch on the high seas is my Leviathan: it has seven masts, five funnels, paddle wheels a hundred feet across, and the lifeboats over the sides are the size of liners; it won’t be able to dock anywhere and will have to ride out every storm on the high seas. There can’t be a single nail missing. So I’m going to revise and reread everything; a last, major, serious incubation, and then I’ll say – Go!…
Hugo’s sea-monster was therefore bigger than the largest vessel ever built, the SS Leviathan (later renamed the Great Eastern), which had only six masts and paddle wheels fifty-six feet in diameter. It had been designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel to steam from London to Australia without any stops for taking on fuel. Hugo must have thought that his novel had further to go.
Another letter, this one to François-Victor:
So, the book’s done. Now, when will it be published? That’s a different question. I shall consider it in my own time. As you know I’m in no hurry to publish what I write … Meanwhile I’ll lock up Les Misérables under six keys, con seis llaves as your great brother Calderón says.10
He locked it away for six weeks, in fact, while he took a holiday with Juliette. The couple dashed round Holland looking at medieval dungeons, renaissance churches, quaint houses and a large number of antique dealers’ stores. With hardly a night in the same bed, hardly a day without a ride in the buggy rented from the owners of the Hôtel des Colonnes, Hugo threw himself into a feast of visual delights. He was overwhelmed by Rembrandt’s Night Watch in Amsterdam, disappointed by Dutch landscapes, and ended up thinking Belgium a more interesting place. By the end of August, he was ready to get back to work. He took a steamer from Antwerp and, after changing trains and boats in England, he stepped ashore at St Peter Port on 3 September. There was a lot to do at Hauteville House. He still had to polish and complete Les Misérables, but he had a book to sell.
Few of Hugo’s French contemporaries lived by the pen, and most of his colleagues and rivals in poetry and prose were independently wealthy men. Lamartine owned vineyards in Burgundy, Vigny had an estate near Angoulême, and Eugène Sue had inherited a fortune from his father, a famous medical man. But Hugo’s father, Léopold-Sigisbert, lost almost everything in 1815. From the day he left school in 1817, Victor Hugo had to manage on what he could earn from his literary work. Georges Sand, Honoré de Ba
lzac and Alexandre Dumas were the only other French writers of note who did the same before 1850 or thereabouts.
‘Living by the pen’ presupposes that authors own their own work and can receive payment for it. That may seem obvious now, but the notion of ‘intellectual property’ took a long time to come about. It first arose in England in 1710, in a legal statute recognizing that the content of a book could be traded in the same way as a tangible property. In France, the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 established property as a fundamental right, but made intellectual property a special case. Unlike tangible assets, the contents of literary and artistic work were declared to be ‘inalienable’ properties. This was intended to protect writers and artists from having their work confiscated or suppressed by the state, but the formulation was also taken to mean that the underlying ownership of the content of a work could not be disposed of, even with the owner’s consent. How could French writers make a living if they could not even sell their work? The walk-round solution was to sell not the work, but the right to exploit it for a stated number of years or editions. Publishers (who were often booksellers and printers too) paid up-front for these exclusive licences to make and market a given work. When the licence expired, the right to exploit the work reverted to the author, who was free to sell the rights again.