The Novel of the Century

by David Bellos

  For most of Hugo’s career books remained luxury items, for several reasons. Paper was made from pulped rags, and its supply was limited by the amount of cotton and silk clothing that the population of Paris cast off. Typesetting was done by hand and had a high labour cost. Printing presses were made of wood and operated by hand. They could run no more than 3,000 copies before the frame started to yield and loosen the letters in the bed, when the costly process of composition had to be undertaken again. Many important changes in the technology of printing took place in the course of Hugo’s life, lowering the cost of books and making them more accessible, but even in the 1860s one volume of a new work still cost two or three times a labourer’s daily wage.

  Yet demand for reading matter rose consistently every year, as did literacy rates. To serve the hunger for new books that few people could afford to buy, private lending libraries were set up in the backrooms of printers’ and booksellers’ shops. Hugo himself acquired much of his early literary culture at the ‘reading room’ run by a Mme Royol, whose name Hugo uses for the only ‘friend or close acquaintance’ of M. Mabeuf in Les Misérables.11 The number of readers a work had from being rented out by these cabinets de lecture made no difference to a writer’s income, of course. Nor did French authors earn a penny from the pirated editions of their works printed in Belgium and smuggled back into France. Worse still: by making books available at a lower price and undercutting the market for licensed editions, Belgian trade depressed the sums that French publishers were willing to pay authors for new books.

  New technology did not help at first. Steel presses raised the number of copies that could be printed from a bed of type, but as authors were paid by edition or for a set term of years, that made no difference to what they could earn. The stereotype – a thin alloy plate made from a mould of a bed of lead type – could be used to print 100,000 copies, which made logarithm tables, school texts and administrative documents far cheaper to produce, but it did nothing for new literary work. Steam power reduced the labour involved in operating a press, but it reduced costs only for works with long runs (the first proper steam press was installed by the Times of London to print the issue of 20 June 1815, which announced the fall of Napoleon at Waterloo). Inventors registered patents for alternative raw materials for paper and eventually hit upon esparto grass, which proved viable. Around 1860, steel, stereotype, steam and cheap paper all converged to lower the cost of reading at long last. Les Misérables came at the right time to foster and to take advantage of the democratization of the printed book.

  Hugo was well aware of all this. He knew he had something very valuable to sell.

  Fixing a value for a literary work is not easy now, and the licence system made it even harder then. In 1831, Balzac received a measly 1,150 francs for his breakthrough novel, La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin), and still only 3,500 for the two-volume Père Goriot (Old Goriot) in 1835.12 At those rates, he would have needed to dash off four or five major novels a year to come close to the salary of a bishop or a judge, let alone the income of the playboys and grandes dames that he wrote about. At the other end of the scale, Alphonse de Lamartine earned around 250,000 francs for an eight-volume non-fiction work, L’Histoire de Girondins. The numbers are meaningless, of course, without taking into account the number of years the licence ran. Balzac was able to sell each of his novels many times over; Lamartine’s history was sold only once. They barely suggest a range for fixing the value of Les Misérables in advance.

  The sale of Les Misérables faced an additional difficulty. In 1832, Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris had been a huge success, and his publishers had secured his next book by paying him a fee for a work as yet unseen. Neither party realized at the time that 12,000 francs would turn out to be far less than Hugo’s next novel would be worth. That was partly why Hugo had not written a ‘next novel’ for thirty years. But however long he put off fulfilling its terms, the old contract remained in force. It now belonged to the bookseller Pagnerre, who had acquired the remnants of the business of Hugo’s former publishers, Renduel and Gosselin. He would have to be bought out.

  There was a bigger obstacle still: Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. Censorship under the Second Empire wasn’t especially stringent, but it was skittish, and that was the problem. What publisher would lay out money for a book that might have him hauled into court, like Madame Bovary or Les Fleurs du mal? Hugo’s position as an irreducible opponent of the regime made it likely that his new book would be banned, or, if allowed to appear, it might then be seized and pulped. A Paris publishing house could easily consider Les Misérables worth nothing at all, and perhaps even less than that.

  However, Paris did not have a monopoly on publishing books in French. Since French had been the near-universal language of culture in Europe for two centuries, there were French-language publishing houses in Leipzig, Amsterdam, St Petersburg, Edinburgh and elsewhere. But, they mostly issued reprints of books first published in France and paid no fees to the author of the original work, since the laws of intellectual property were for the most part national ones. But things had begun to change on that front. In 1852, France persuaded Belgium to sign the first true international copyright treaty. It put an end to the trade in pirated editions of French books by extending French copyright protection to Belgium and Belgian copyright to France. The treaty did not submit Belgian publishers to French censorship, however, as Belgium was a sovereign state. Brussels was obviously the place to look for a publisher for Les Misérables.

  The licence fee for a new book was calculated in part by its length. That created yet another obstacle to the sale of Les Misérables. With a single-copy manuscript made of loose sheets not all the same size, some written on both sides and some not, Hugo could not say how many printed pages it would make overall. The work’s size in pages and volumes could only be established after a neat copy had been made, but that task could not be truly started until Hugo had finalized his text. He still had things to add and some to cut, but the detail would only be worked out by the ‘proper inspection’ of the monster he’d told Hetzel he had yet to begin. In September 1861, he really couldn’t say how big Les Misérables would be.

  Given all those uncertainties, it might have been prudent to put off the sale. On the other hand, it was no secret that Hugo had a major new work in train, and publishers had already put in bids for the right to publish it. Pierre-Jules Hetzel came to stay at Hauteville House in June 1860, when Hugo was still gearing himself up to resume the text broken off in 1848, and offered 25,000 francs per volume for a ten-year licence of what was estimated at the time to be a six-volume novel. After he’d left on the steamer, Hugo wrote him a letter saying he could not take the offer seriously.13 He then asked Hetzel to explore whether there were any other publishers with sufficient resources to stump up a larger sum. Hetzel reported back in January 1861 that he was not able to raise a bid at the level Hugo seemed to want. The target was not stated in writing at the time, but we do now know what it was. Hugo wanted more than had ever been paid for any book.

  * * *

  A couple of weeks after he’d written the last line at Mont Saint-Jean, Hugo was in Brussels at the start of his holiday jaunt with Juliette. He took the opportunity to have dinner with his old friend Hetzel, who thought he could now get Hugo to agree to the fee of 150,000 francs that he’d offered him the previous year. Hugo turned him down flat. Hetzel was naturally incensed when he heard a few weeks later that an upstart in the publishing trade was about to sign on with the great man at exactly the same rate. He crossed paths with Adèle at the baths of Spa in September 1861 and told her how offended he was.

  What he had heard was not wrong, but it wasn’t the whole story. Among the publishers contacted by Hetzel when he was trying to raise bids for Hugo’s new book was a carrot-haired young businessman called Albert Lacroix. However, Lacroix had not responded to Hugo’s agent. Instead, he had turned his small firm into a limited company and opened negotiations with a merchant bank.
Then he wrote direct to Victor Hugo.

  Hugo knew the name already. In 1855, Lacroix had sent him a copy of his doctoral dissertation on ‘The Influence of Shakespeare in French Theatre’, and he got a polite acknowledgement in return (Hugo was a meticulous writer of thank-you notes for books he received, few of which he ever read). Lacroix’s liberal political views prevented him from obtaining an academic post, so he joined his uncle’s printing firm and went into publishing instead. He turned the family press into a vehicle for left-wing propaganda and for French translations of philosophical and academic books. He prospered and attracted interest from the colony of French exiles in Belgium, but he had his business sights set higher than that.

  Lacroix’s first letter to Hugo got lost in the post, but ten days later the publisher wrote again, asking for an ‘audience’ with the great man. On 1 September, he tracked down Hugo’s son Charles in Brussels and handed him a copy of the original letter that Hugo had never seen. No doubt primed by Charles, Lacroix wrote again to Guernsey to make it clear that if the price was right, he would not haggle and would pay cash. For the present, he needed to know: how much Hugo wanted, under different forms of sale; how long the book was; how political it would be; and when it would be ready to appear.14 Reasonable questions … to which the answers were far from clear.

  Hugo’s first reply on 5 September told Lacroix to get the information from Charles, who had full powers to speak on his father’s behalf; he also wrote to Charles, telling him to be ‘a living letter’, giving answers that would be better not written down. But he did write them down and sent them to Charles, who transcribed them for Lacroix.

  The work is not political. Its political part is purely historical, Waterloo, the reign of Louis-Philippe, the insurrection of 1832 … and the book, which begins in 1815, ends in 1835. So no allusion to today’s regime. Moreover it is a drama: a social drama; the drama of our society and our time. It will be at least eight volumes, perhaps nine … The book could appear in February [1862], like Notre-Dame de Paris, and if it were 13 February, it would be thirty years to the day.15

  The price Hugo set down consisted of: (1) a buy-out of the old contract with Gosselin and Renduel, at a cost of 12,000 francs; (2) 250,000 francs for an eight-year licence excluding translation rights; (3) 50,000 francs for translation rights, if wanted.16

  That was a lot of money. It was much more than Hugo’s own weight in gold – turned into twenty-franc gold pieces, it would have weighed more than 97kg. It represented twenty years of a bishop’s stipend, enough money to endow a chair at the Sorbonne or to build a small railway. Taken at today’s price of gold, it would come to around £3 million, but since it entitled the publisher to sell the book for only eight years, it remains the highest figure ever paid for a work of literature. Lacroix must have gulped on first reading. But he could do the sums.

  Part of the deal involved translation rights, which had barely been invented.

  In England and America translations were considered original works, and their ownership lay with the translator, not the author of the source text. The first international copyright treaty was signed between England and France in 1851 and under its terms authors on both sides of the Channel had the right to ‘authorize’ translations of their works for five years after the original had appeared. In the United States, however, copyright protection existed only for US citizens, and the country had no international agreements. The American translator of a French work required no authorization but could not publish the translation in Britain; a British translation required authorization, but it could be reprinted without penalty in the USA.17 Step by little step, however, a broader notion of translation rights had begun to spread around Europe. Treaties similar to the Anglo-French arrangement or to the Franco-Belgian deal began to tie the major nations to the German states, to Geneva, to parts of Italy. Lacroix believed that such arrangements would soon be generalized and that a work like Les Misérables would generate significant income from the sale of translation rights. Hugo certainly had global ambitions for his book, but it was Lacroix who first imagined how its worldwide appeal would be monetized.

  He had many doubts about the impending deal nonetheless. He thought it would be easier to sell a three- or four-volume novel than one in nine or ten (Hugo disagreed). His second concern was the degree to which its parts were linked. Were they all part of a story that reached its denouement at the end, or were they different ‘takes’ on the same general idea? Nowadays such questions would rarely be asked – the publisher would read the draft. But there could be no question of that. The manuscript was on Guernsey and Lacroix was not. Negotiations over the publication of Les Misérables had to be done entirely on trust. And in person: ‘If you leave Ostend on a Tuesday you can be in London on Wednesday and Southampton by Wednesday evening and land on Guernsey on Thursday morning. The trip is nothing at all.’18

  Lacroix was a dynamo, but he was not discreet. Soon the whole of the publishing world knew he was on his way to signing the deal of the century. That is how Hetzel learned that Hugo was planning to sell Les Misérables to someone else. What he had not understood was that although the nominal price per volume was roughly what he had bid, the total price offered was twice that amount.

  Lacroix landed at St Peter Port on Thursday 3 October and got down to business at lightning speed. He was a small, slim, agitated man whose conversational style seemed modelled on the charge of the Light Brigade.19 He wasted no time at all. Hugo’s notebook entry for Friday 4 October read: ‘Today I sold Les Misérables to MM A Lacroix, Verboekhoven & Cie of Brussels, for 12 years, for 240,000 francs cash and 60,000 on option. They’ve taken over the Gosselin Renduel contract. The agreement was signed this evening.’20

  The biggest deal in book history was done in a day. Les Misérables was not finished so fast.

  10.

  The Five Parts of Les Misérables

  Lacroix irritated everyone in the book trade by boasting he’d signed the greatest deal ever without having a cent of the cash he was committed to paying out. But he was not a crook. Members of the board of his company were friends of the head of the Brussels branch of the Oppenheim Bank, which agreed to finance the purchase of Les Misérables. There’s some irony in a novel so firmly opposed to debt being launched on the back of a major loan – probably the first loan ever made by a merchant bank to finance a book. Les Misérables stands at the vanguard of the democratization of literature and of the use of venture capital to fund the arts.

  The liquidity Lacroix needed was much more than the 300,000 francs he had promised Victor Hugo. For a book of at least eight volumes in length to appear as a single work, the printer would have to use more lead type than it would normally be prudent to stock. Subcontracting parts to other printers was out of the question for Les Misérables. Lacroix wanted every page crisply printed in the same face, which could not be guaranteed if other print shops were used for parts. Lacroix calculated the quantity of new-cast type he would need as a function of the size and number of the presses he had and the amount of storage he could set aside. The final order was sufficient to set thirty-five to forty printers’ sheets at the same time, that’s to say about one-and-a-half volumes of Les Misérables. It weighed 22 tons.21

  The deal done on 4 October set a very tight deadline for both parties. Lacroix had until 2 December 1861 to come up with the first-stage payment of 125,000 francs in cash and to get it by hand to Hugo’s desk at Hauteville House. Hugo for his part had the same grace period of nine weeks to come up with final copy for the first two volumes of his book. ‘Fantine’ had to be written out in a regular and legible hand on consecutive sheets incorporating the corrections Hugo had made on the left-hand side of his original manuscript, the changes overwritten on the right, and the many longer additions made on branch-numbered sheets – the long section on Myriel’s past (I.1.i), the dinner with the senator (I.1.viii), the visit to the dying revolutionary G. (I.1.x), and much else. Only a person familiar with Hugo’s ha
ndwriting and with his page-numbering scheme could cope with that, and there was only one such person around. The corrected manuscript pages went over to Juliette at La Fallue every day and came back with the fair copy when it was done.

  The task was actually even more onerous than that. Hugo reread the fair copy and made more changes and insertions day by day. These additions then had to be collated with the already written sheets and in many cases copied out all over again. It was more than Juliette could manage on her own. Like Adèle and even Victor Hugo – in fact, like anyone who worked long hours in flickering light on untidy reading and writing tasks – she often had sore eyes that forced her to take time off. She needed help. Hugo first hired the teenage daughter of a visiting French family from Jersey to read out the text while Juliette wrote it down, but that did not really speed things up. François-Victor lent a hand in moments of stress, but he had his own deadlines to meet for his translation of Shakespeare’s works and didn’t have much time to spare. Hugo then took pity on a local woman who had been abandoned by her spouse and appointed her assistant scribe, out of charity, or so he said. But Victoire Estasse’s spelling and grammar were not very good, and panic set in at Hauteville House. ‘I’m in Les Misérables over my head, I’m sinking, drowning, on the sea floor,’ Hugo wrote to a friend.22 He begged Paul Chenay to let his wife Julie, Adèle’s sister, come over to boost the output of fair copy from the Guernsey Scriptorium. She arrived on 13 November 1861 and set to work straight away. Julie was a godsend. Without her labour and skill Hugo and his copyist could not possibly have met the deadline set by Lacroix, which was just three weeks away. Juliette was happy to see the challenge met but not overjoyed to see herself eclipsed. ‘My poor adored,’ she wrote in one of her twice-daily epistles to her dear great man, ‘it pains and almost shames me to be unable to help you at all. I’ve long known that day would come but I didn’t think it would be so soon’.23