by David Bellos
Lacroix turned up as planned on 2 December to collect Part I of Les Misérables. Such was the intensity of Hugo’s race against time that he almost forgot it was the tenth anniversary of the detestable coup d’état. But yes, the fair copy was on the table, ready to be set in type. In return, Lacroix handed over the first-stage payment of 125,000 French francs, which was converted the same day at the Old Bank of Guernsey into £5,000 sterling and placed in 3 per cent British Government stock.
Hugo’s achievement in keeping to schedule seems all the more admirable when we realize what else he had on his plate in those nine weeks. On his return from the continent in September he had found his house in a pitiable state, with leaks in the roof and water seeping through the walls. He had to call in builders to strip out the mortar from the brickwork, repoint it and put on a new coat of roughcast. Meanwhile, a dozen crates of antiques acquired in Belgium and Holland had to be unpacked and their contents distributed around the house. The repairs prompted new ideas for remodelling, and Hugo decided to build his own Crystal Palace – a glass-roofed extension to his writing room, covering part of the terrace and giving him an even better view of the sea. Building the new ‘Lookout’ wasn’t cheap, and it took much longer than planned. But Hugo did not let the hammering and the tramping of builders’ feet interfere with his intense daily writing routine in the house.
The autumn months of 1861 were also gloomy ones, for Hauteville was an almost empty nest. After the summer jaunt to the continent Adèle had stayed on in Brussels and then moved to Paris to get treatment for her eyes. Charles had had enough of Guernsey’s charms, and settled in Brussels to lead the life of a littérateur. As for Adèle II … She had rejected Auguste Vacquerie and every other suitor her parents had been able to drum up. She was a talented musician and a beautiful woman, but rather strange. She had set her heart on marrying a British officer, Albert Pinson, and she wandered around humming his name to herself. Hugo’s stomach turned at the thought of having a British son-in-law, but in the end he had to give his blessing to his daughter’s demands. She wrote to Pinson saying that if he did not come to Guernsey at Christmas to propose marriage, she would do away with herself. The atmosphere in the great house on Hauteville Street was tense and bleak.
* * *
In Brussels, meanwhile, Lacroix’s compositors started setting ‘Fantine’ in type. Each bed of type was as long and wide as the press itself and produced a single sheet of printed paper to be folded into pages to make a book. Quarto format is made by folding the printed paper four times, making eight pages out of a sheet or ‘signature’. Les Misérables was to appear in octavo format, the standard size for new novels, calling for eight folds and giving sixteen pages of text for each one-sided proof sheet, or galley. Each sheet had to be mailed to Guernsey for Hugo’s corrections, then the corrections sent back to Lacroix, who produced a second proof to send to Guernsey for Hugo’s approval, signalled by the words bon à tirer, ‘good for press’ at the bottom, with the initials ‘V. H.’ The twelve sheets containing the first pass of the first 192 pages of Les Misérables reached Hauteville House on 9 January 1862. Hugo raced through four of them by midnight.
Thus began several months of hard labour that resulted in a victory of scribal effort over the nightmarish logistics of Hugo’s island refuge. All the writer had by way of equipment were goose quills, paper and ink, and his only reliable means of communication with Brussels was the thrice-weekly mail boat to Southampton. This was the mad routine he adopted, because he had no choice:
In the morning from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. I revise my manuscript, for I’m working on it up to the last minute, and now and again there are still things missing; in the afternoon, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., whilst two women, two devoted souls, copy and collate their copies without a break, I revise what they have collated, then I sort and split up the definitive copy to be used for printing; in the evening, from eight to midnight, I correct proofs, sometimes as many as six sheets a day, and I write letters. No mail boat leaves without a packet of mine.24
With Adèle now in residence alongside François-Victor and Julie Chenay and with Juliette at La Fallue, Hugo’s household generated around 160 letters a week (excluding Juliette’s twice-daily hand-delivered missives to her lover over the way). Such large use of postage stamps vindicated the recent decision of the Postmaster General, Anthony Trollope, to bring Guernsey within the ambit of the Royal Mail. Letterbox No. 1 in Saumarez Street, St Peter Port, the last remaining Victorian post box in daily use in the British Isles, must be the very one that the Hugos used for thousands of letters to Belgium, France and the world.
Les Misérables came a few years too soon for the typewriting machine and carbon paper to solve its logistical problems, and a few months too soon to make more than occasional use of the telegraph.25 Every page was sent in hard copy by land and by sea from Brussels by way of Ostend, Dover, London and Southampton and took a minimum of three days to reach St Peter Port.
Sometimes it took longer than that, if the weather was bad or there were problems with steamers or trains. The hold-up that riled Hugo the most was what he called the ‘English Sunday’. If the Saturday mail boat was delayed by weather until after the main post office closed, no postal worker would unload it before Monday at dawn. From the Lookout, Hugo could almost see his next proofs lying in the hold of the steamer in Le Havelet dock and the thirty-six-hour delay drove him wild. But at least he could grumble about it to his publisher to prove that it was not his fault if the next packet of corrections got back to Brussels days late.
Hugo marked up the proof pages with the conventional marks for ‘delete’, ‘insert’, ‘replace’, ‘transpose’ and so on, but he did not send them back. Fearful they might be lost or, worse still, stolen and leaked to a newspaper as a ‘scoop’, he copied over his corrections on to a list that was less costly to mail and of no use to anyone who didn’t have the pages to which it referred. Like the original manuscript in Hugo’s hand, the corrected proofs of Les Misérables never left Hauteville House.26
* * *
Lacroix had the right number of steam-powered steel presses, he had the type and he had the men. Julie and Juliette worked like Trojans, and Hugo put in seven twelve-hour days every week. What could go wrong? More or less everything else.
Hugo was now correcting proofs while still changing, adding and cutting things from the chapters not yet copied over or sent out. That helps to account for the tight knitting of tiny details in different parts of the final text. For example, when going over his presentation of the generic gamin de Paris at the start of Part III, he slipped in a quaint example of street-speech as a clue to what lies in store: ‘Ohey, Titi, oheeey! ’ere comes trouble, there’s bashers about, grab your stuff and run for it, cut through the sewer’ (III.1.viii, 528).
The disadvantage of writing on two levels at once was that adjustments in the parts of the text still being written could put them out of synch with sheets already set in type, or worse still, already corrected and passed as ‘good for press’. The constraints got tighter the further Hugo went.
When the first proofs needed more than trivial correction, Hugo insisted on a second pass before approving them as ‘good for press’. At the start, master and servant were courteous with each other, but it was clear who was in charge:
Hauteville House, 12 January 1862, one hour after midnight.
I cannot but request second proofs for almost all the sheets. Out of the eleven sheets corrected, I have been able to pass only four (sheets 1, 2, 5 and 9) and even for these I am not entirely unworried. I am happy to acknowledge the copy edits, which have been done very well and demonstrate your intelligent and meticulous attention. But despite everything, the author’s eye is nearly always needed twice over.27
On the other hand, Lacroix conducted the business side of the project by his own lights. Contrary to the agreement made in October 1861, he did not pay cash to Pagnerre to expunge the inherited rights to Hugo’s ‘next novel’. Instead, h
e granted the bookseller exclusive rights to the first edition of Les Misérables inside France. The first run of final proofs would be dispatched from Brussels to Paris to provide the copy text for a separate French printing of the novel, to appear simultaneously with the Belgian ‘original’. It looks like a lopsided bargain – the first French edition of Les Misérables was surely worth more than 12,000 francs! – but what it shows is Lacroix’s common sense. If the political climate worsened in France or if Hugo made himself even more objectionable to the authorities (neither of which was unthinkable), then the book might be banned, impounded or even pulped. Lacroix didn’t want his own stock to be forfeit in such an eventuality; the Brussels printing would be lapped up by the rest of Europe in any case. Lacroix pulled out all the stops to serve Victor Hugo, but he was also watching his own back.
The double printing in Brussels and Paris added an extra layer of complication through the winter and spring of 1862. As long as Hugo failed to return ‘good for press’ proofs in the right sequence to Brussels, Lacroix had nothing to send on to Paris, and the French printing, which was set to be the largest of all, could not even be started.
When second proofs still had blemishes (or when Hugo had further changes of his own), a third run was required. As each circuit between author and printer took from seven to ten days (and sometimes more, when the weather, or a Sunday, got in the way), some sheets took a month to go from first composition to ‘good for press’; but others took a week. The page-numbers couldn’t be confirmed for volume 1 until all its sheets had been passed as ‘good’. As long as any sheet was still in process, the beds of type for all other parts of the volume had to stay in storage, and until they had been used to run off the final text, the letters they were made from could not be broken up and reused for the next part of the book. Storage space would soon be full to overflowing. The publisher would soon have to lay off typographers for lack of letters to use. Black clouds were gathering. As winter weather and spring tides kept mail boats in port, a storm was brewing between Hugo and Lacroix.
Lacroix had stuck his neck out in agreeing to pay a large sum for the right to license foreign-language translations of Les Misérables and he needed to make a start on recouping his outlay. There was no lack of foreign-language publishers who wanted to be involved, but they all needed copyright protection under the laws of their own states to stop other publishers from bringing out rival translations or pirating the ones they commissioned. That required the author of the original, whose ‘intellectual property’ was ‘inalienable’, to sign an exclusive licence for translation to this foreign publisher and that. Such documents had to be in German, English, Italian and so on to be valid in the relevant jurisdiction. Lacroix did not find it easy to get an overworked celebrity living on Guernsey who knew no languages except Latin and Spanish to bother signing papers he did not understand and to have his signature authenticated by officials of the Bailiwick who couldn’t read the papers either. On 19 January, Lacroix gave his author a detailed explanation of what he had to do to navigate the waters of international rights. A month later, on 13 February, he reminded him that Leipzig was still waiting. It was still waiting on 25 February. Hugo finally got round to it and mailed the German declaration of rights on 2 March. Just in time! By then, it had been decided that Part I, ‘Fantine’, would go on sale on 10 April simultaneously in Brussels, Paris and Leipzig, where it was being printed, and in a dozen other cities throughout Europe and even beyond.
As French remained the language of culture of the European elite, Lacroix had an international market for the original text that was separate from the market for its translation rights. But since many European states had not yet signed copyright treaties with Belgium or France, the international status of the language of Les Misérables created its own risks. Nineteenth-century compositors not subject to proofreading and authors’ corrections could work at amazing speed, and a single copy of the book in the hands of an unscrupulous Russian or Swedish printer could be turned into a spoiler edition in ten days. The best protection was to get Lacroix’s own stock to the major capitals of the world in advance. As it took up to a month to get bulk freight to many of these places, all copies of the book had to be kept under embargo meanwhile. ‘Do not let anyone see the manuscript, I beg you, not even your best friend!’28 Hugo warned Lacroix, who knew why perfectly well. He was actually withholding copy-text from Pagnerre because he was not confident of the security situation in Paris. When Hugo learned from Paul Meurice that the Paris printing had not even begun, he was furious. To his mind, the way to beat pirates and cost-cutters at home and abroad was to produce cheap editions for the masses from stereotype as soon as the expensive octavo edition sold out. He could hardly wait for small-format editions to go on sale so the people would read Les Misérables. Lacroix didn’t tell him straight out, but that was not a good business plan. To recoup the outlay of hundreds of thousands of francs and to repay the Oppenheim loan, the full-price edition had to go on providing sole means of access to the masterpiece for just as long as Lacroix could drag it out.
These realities of the jungle of books loop in and out of daily exchanges between Guernsey and Brussels that became increasingly fraught. In any case, it was insane to think the receipt and dispatch of proofs to an island in the sea could be maintained at a regular rhythm outside the summer months. Storms, high winds and fog caused foreseeable and frequent delays in the steamer service to Southampton in January, February and March. Now and again Hugo was able to get the captain of the Weymouth service (which was not supposed to carry mail) to help him out,29 but he was basically limited to three services a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. But because of the ‘English’ Sunday what Hugo should have been correcting in the evening of Saturday 26 January wasn’t on his desk until Monday.30 Easterly gales delayed a letter posted in Brussels on 2 February for a whole week.31 Spring tides delayed the boat due to dock on 6 March for two days.32 ‘It would be so much easier if you weren’t in St Peter Port, but in Brussels!’ Lacroix protested again and again. He even rented a fine house for the writer and his team a few yards from the printing house in Rue Royale. But Hugo would not budge. He had his routine and he would stick it out, even if it meant giving up sleep. The fragile logistics that sometimes brought three separately written sets of corrections in the same post and sometimes left the printers with nothing to do for ten days drove the enterprise into a brick wall. ‘We are unable to proceed at present. We have no type left, and printing is suspended. You are in possession of twenty-seven proof sheets awaiting corrections.’33
Hugo, who was as tense about finishing the job as Lacroix, picked a fight. The main reason for delay, he said, was clumsy typesetting and sloppy correcting. If Lacroix could get his workers to do their jobs, then he wouldn’t have to send out second and third proofs. Instead of nagging him to leave his highly efficient scriptorium and waste his time packing up and settling in to a new home, Lacroix should look to his own house, and put it in order!
Then the press broke down, and two days were lost waiting for a spare part.34
What worried Lacroix even more was that Hugo still would not tell him how long the book was, or how it would be divided into parts. How could he trade sub-rights without telling his clients what he had to sell? It’s not that Hugo was being coy. He still hadn’t worked it out.
The manuscript that Hugo completed on 30 June 1861 was divided into three parts – ‘Fantine’, ‘Cosette et Marius’ and ‘Jean Valjean’. A subdivision into four emerged only as he corrected the proofs of Part II in January 1862, when he divided it into II ‘Cosette’ and III ‘Marius’. When he was going over the manuscript of ‘Marius’ one last time before dispatching it to Brussels in February 1862, the idea of a further subdivision occurred. ‘If we have five parts [each printed in two volumes]’, he wrote to Lacroix on 3 February, ‘we would have only ten volumes. With four parts we would have eight. That would make for a more reasonable price and increase sales, and your pro
fit too, which is as important to me as my own.’35 But the five-part idea grew on him. ‘I carry on thinking more and more that it will have five parts, I can see them clearly. Don’t call that a promise … but … I think I am sure that there will be five parts.’36 Two weeks later, this emergent structure was laid down in the form of an optimistic publication schedule:
Part I – 15 March
Part II – 25 March
Part III – 5 April
Part IV – 15 April
Part V – 1 May
The name of Part IV was invented when ‘Fantine’ was already printed and about to be dispatched to booksellers under embargo.37 ‘I think that the title of Part IV will probably be “The Idyll of Rue Plumet and the Epic of Rue Saint-Denis”,’ he wrote to Lacroix on 13 March. ‘Make up your mind, old man,’ I can hear the publisher muttering as he shuttled between his steam engines, his paper suppliers, his ink reserves, his typographers and correctors and bankers to keep everything in synch on the greatest rush job his profession would ever know.
* * *
The final division of Les Misérables into five parts may have emerged alarmingly late but it is not an arbitrary one. It gives the novel a familiar overall design – the five-act structure of a classical tragedy. In addition, each of its parts is designed in the same way: Part I begins with a step back even before the plot has begun, with a retrospective account of the life, character, ideas and actions of Bishop Myriel that ‘in no way impinges on the substance of what we are about to relate (I.1.i, 5). Part II begins with a great essay on the Battle of Waterloo, Part III with a general essay on the street-children of Paris and Part IV with an essay on Louis-Philippe. The great step back at the start of Part V (or rather, the step forward, to 1848) is, by that stage, almost expected, as it confirms the pattern set up by all that precedes. Far from being digressions, the essay chapters constitute the basic rhythm of the text. They are what makes Les Misérables what it is: food for the heart, and food for the mind.