by David Bellos
Interlude: The Mind of Jean Valjean
Madame Bovary takes you inside the mind of a provincial housewife; Great Expectations lays out the world as seen by a boy from the marshes of Kent; Crime and Punishment provides an exhaustive exploration of the mental turmoil of an impoverished intellectual in St Petersburg. Les Misérables is strikingly different from the other great novels of its age. Except at two moments of anguish, it hardly allows you to know what it was like to be Jean Valjean.
The absence of the inner man from a story in which he occupies centre stage comes in part from his taciturn nature. Valjean must surely be the least talkative protagonist of nineteenth-century fiction before Melville’s Bartleby. But Hugo had several reasons to keep his hero’s mouth mostly shut.
Speaking doesn’t just communicate information. The words you use, the way you put them together, the pitch of your voice and the way you form the sounds also identify who you are. In written texts like novels, the converse is no less true: characters’ identities are constituted by the way they speak (more correctly, by the way their speech is represented). Dickens had a knack for creating memorable and now almost proverbial characters out of the forms of language attributed to them in direct speech. You could say that Mr Micawber, Sam Weller, Miss Flyte, Magwitch and many more are the special languages Dickens cooked up for them. In French, Balzac is Dickens’s only real rival in this domain, but Hugo performs the same act by creating the character of Gavroche out of quips, rhymes, slang, Paris dialect and puns. But he does nothing of the kind for Valjean.
A farmhand who’s spent nineteen years in jail can’t be expected to sound like a successful entrepreneur or a respected small-town mayor. Dickens wouldn’t have left a detail of that kind unattended. Like Les Misérables, Great Expectations is the story of a convict morally transformed by an act of kindness. When he returns from Australia, Magwitch can’t show himself in public because he would give himself away on opening his mouth. ‘Pint out the place!’ Magwitch says on his first encounter with Pip on the marshes, with the spelling indicating a ‘low’ London accent. Twenty years later, floating down the Thames in a small boat, he still speaks to Pip in marked forms of lower-class speech: ‘It come to be flat there [in Australia], for all I was a-growing rich. Everybody knowed Magwitch.’38 By contrast, Valjean’s enunciation of French is simply rubbed out of Les Misérables. The less he says, the less likely readers will notice this strange fact.
Hugo tells us how Valjean came to improve the vocabulary and syntax of his speech: ‘He always took his meals alone, with a book open in front of him … He loved books … It was observed that … his language had grown more refined, more carefully chosen, gentler…’ (I.5.iii, 157).
Reading can do a lot, but it doesn’t change the sound of your consonants and vowels. To turn a flower girl into a lady, for example, Shaw’s Professor Higgins has to train Eliza Doolittle for weeks on end to say ‘Rhine in Spine’ as if it rhymed with his way of saying ‘pain’. Changes in the fundamental sounds of a person’s speech, even those that are socially advantageous, don’t come from reading books.
Valjean’s accentless French is also masked by the omission of almost all reference to the accents of the other characters, which is itself masked by constant use of the word ‘accent’ to describe something else. ‘Accents’ in Les Misérables may be ‘decisive’, ‘humble’, ‘proud’ ‘lugubrious’, ‘naive’, ‘natural’, ‘plaintive’, ‘pure’, ‘respectful’, ‘haughty’, ‘fierce’, ‘cold’ ‘measured’ and ‘beseeching’. In these usages, ‘accent’ refers not to pronunciation, but to the emotional import of the way something is said, the affect expressed in a tone of voice. It’s a legitimate sense of the word in French, but its main function in Les Misérables is to deflect attention from one of the least plausible elements in the novel’s plot.39
It’s not that Hugo was deaf. He picked up on the foreign and regional accents of people around him and he logged curiosities in his notebooks. But as he wrote in his essay on Shakespeare, ‘Everything is voluntary in a work of art’40 – especially what’s left out.
All the same, there are places in Les Misérables where Jean Valjean speaks out. When he is set upon by the sinister teenage criminal Montparnasse, he overpowers the younger man and gives him a piece of his mind.
My boy, through laziness you’re letting yourself in for the most arduous kind of existence. Ah! You profess to be an idler! Prepare yourself for work. Have you ever seen a machine that’s to be feared? It’s called a rolling-mill. You need to be wary of it, it’s a crafty and ravenous thing. If it gets hold of your coat flap it’ll have all the rest of you. The machine is idleness. Stop while there’s still time … (IV.4.ii, 826)
A reformed convict is quite likely to disapprove of a life of crime, but this long and energetic denunciation of idleness as the source of corruption harks back directly to the ideas of Malthus – and to Hugo’s own view that a decent job brings moral as well as financial improvement to the poor. In fact, this diatribe delivered on the streets within earshot of Gavroche is such a complete break with Valjean’s habitual taciturnity that we are justified in thinking that the person speaking is really Victor Hugo.
With this exception, and prior to the long confession he makes to Marius, the only access that we have to the mind of Jean Valjean comes from the silent conversations he has with himself at the two crisis points in his life. The first arises when he learns that a simple-minded vagrant called Champmathieu is about to stand trial for a second offence as the former convict Valjean. He has to choose a course of action: to let the man be convicted, or to give himself up and save Champmathieu from a punishment he does not deserve. The first course will allow him to carry on being M. Madeleine, giving work and alms to a whole town. From a utilitarian perspective it is his social duty to carry on. The second course would destroy the prosperity of Montreuil-sur-Mer but it corresponds to the moral duty of saving an innocent man. It’s a tough call, and it takes Valjean all night. Before dawn, he sets off for the court at Arras, but we don’t know what he has decided to do – in all probability, nor does he. I don’t think this is just a novelist’s trick to create narrative suspense. Valjean’s inner life is so hidden that we cannot know what it is really like; in addition, the balance between his duties is so fine that the out-turn of the ‘storm in the mind’ hangs by a thread.
The second crisis arises at the end of Part IV, when Valjean learns of Cosette’s love for Marius. The second mental storm, also conducted through inner speech (including some sentences spoken aloud, heard by the narrator alone), pits the bad side of love (possessiveness, jealousy, the fear of loneliness) against a paternal wish for Cosette to find happiness with a man her own age. Here again, Hugo withholds the resolution of a conflict inside Valjean’s head, but the external signs of what he’s decided come sooner than in the Arras scene, because he puts on his National Guard uniform in order to go out. That can only mean he is on his way to the barricade.
The repeated retention of decisions reached through inner turmoil make Valjean into a man who can be known by what he does, not through thoughts or words. That’s the way the lives of the saints used to be written. But Hugo makes it more complicated than that. When Valjean finally drops off to sleep in the course of the night spent meditating on what to do about Champmathieu, he has a dream. The novel tells us what that dream was. But how does it know? In Les Misères, the dream is retold in the third person, and is known to the narrator because ‘[Tréjean] recounted his dream many times’. That clashes with Valjean’s general reluctance to open his mouth, and so, when revising the text in 1861, Hugo recast it as a first-person text put in writing by Valjean himself. It’s the only piece of writing attributed to the hero in the entire novel; no explanation is given of how it came into the story-teller’s possession. You could call that a continuity glitch or a novelist’s sleight of hand, but the dream is so strange as to focus attention on something else: who really dreamed this dream? Does it give us access t
o the deep self of Jean Valjean – or to the troubled mind of Victor Hugo?
Valjean’s dream is set off by a sound: midnight chimes remind him that he’d recently seen an old bell at a scrap dealer’s with the inscription ‘Antoine Albin de Romainville’. Around three in the morning his ‘thoughts started to become confused again … The name of Romainville kept coming back into his mind with two lines of a song that he had once heard … He remembered that Romainville was a little forest near Paris where young lovers went to gather lilacs in April’ (I.7.iii, 216). What is omitted – Hugo must have assumed his readers would know it – is the refrain of a popular music-hall song:
Qu’on est heureux
Qu’on est joyeux,
Tranquille
A Romainville
Ce bois charmant
Pour les amants
Offre mille agréments
(How we’re happy
How we’re joyful
And calm
At Romainville
This lovely forest
offers a thousand pleasures
for lovers)
Valjean’s waking mind represses the memory, however. When he rereads the record of his dream-self entering a village that ‘must be Romainville’, he overwrites it with a question: Why Romainville? The answer may have been obvious in 1862: ‘happy’, ‘joyful’ and ‘calm’ is what Valjean cannot be.
The main vision in the dream is a village that turns out to be a town with no one about, yet behind every door stands a silent man with an earth-coloured face, one of whom tells the dreamer that he is already dead. The scene is close to one depicted in Stefan Grabiński’s Grey Room, and the ‘Polish Poe’ may well have taken it directly from Les Misérables. However, Hugo’s set-up of Valjean’s vision of the world of the dead speaks of a walk with a brother ‘that I have to say I never think about and can scarcely remember now’.
Did Valjean have a brother? What we do know is that Hugo had two. The elder, Eugène, suffered mental breakdown in 1823 and died in 1838. Many critics are therefore eager to link this part of the dream to sibling rivalry and retrospective guilt in the mind of Victor Hugo. But that is not the only way it can be understood.
Valjean didn’t quite know it yet, but he had a kind of a brother he would see next day in court. When he sees Champmathieu in the defendant’s box, ‘He thought he saw himself, aged, with not exactly the same features, to be sure. But identical in attitude and appearance, with that bristling hair, those wary brown eyes’ (I.7.ix, 242).
Champmathieu comes from Faverolles, as he does (one of the reasons he has been misidentified as Valjean), and he has the same nobody-name of Jean, pronounced champ in rural dialect. It’s intriguing to think that what M. Madeleine sees with horror as his alter ego in the courtroom at Arras could plausibly be an actual brother of his. His nightmare would thus have been a premonition, fed by the details of the case that Javert had already given him. Other characters in Les Misérables meet siblings they don’t know are related to them. Why not Valjean?
Seen in this light, Valjean’s self-sacrifice to save Champmathieu could be understood as a fraternal act, not just metaphorically, but in a literal sense.41 Fraternity, the too-often forgotten complement of equality and freedom in the French revolutionary creed, may be embodied in the plot of the Champmathieu affair and in the dream on which it secretly hangs.
At around the same time, in St Petersburg, a lowly clerk, a poor drudge in some obscure office of the imperial state, was constantly pestered and humiliated by his superiors. One of them had the common humanity to see that the doleful, red-rimmed eyes of the ridiculous, balding, ill-dressed Akaky Akakyevich said just one thing: ‘I am your brother’.42 Indirectly, through a premonitory dream and the shock of recognition of one misérable in another, the Champmathieu episode of Les Misérables says the same thing.
* * *
Near the start of Part I an unnamed traveller strides into Digne in October 1815 with a large iron-tipped walking stick and the fearsome look of a ragged and tousled giant. He has no name until he introduces himself in the next chapter but one to the priest who offers to give him a bed for the night. Instead, he is referred to in the first paragraph as a passant, a ‘passer-by’.
In the first paragraph of Part II, another passant wanders along the road from Nivelles to La Hulpe, place-names known to all who have read accounts of the Battle of Waterloo. But this passant is ‘the person telling this story’, that’s to say, not the narrator, but Victor Hugo. Somewhat obscured by the current English translation of the term as ‘traveller’, the use of the term passant for both Valjean and Hugo sets up a strange resonance between the author and the character in the book.43
The superficial similarities are trivial. Both are good walkers: Hugo once climbed up to the Mer de Glace from Chamonix, and Valjean covers thirty-six miles of hilly countryside in a day. They were about the same age: Valjean is sixty-two when he saves Marius from Rue de la Chanvrerie and Hugo fifty-nine when he wrote it. Both dress simply on purpose when they could afford finer attire, both give alms, and both stick to a plain and very light diet. (Hugo takes his distaste for rich food to an almost polemical extreme in Les Misérables by omitting to tell us what there is to eat on the table at Bombarda’s restaurant, or even at the wedding luncheon laid out on a lavishly decorated table for Cosette and Marius. No other nineteenth century novel I know is so discreet about its characters’ intake of food.) Hugo had learned what it was to be an outcast, but it doesn’t make sense to compare Guernsey to the bagne at Toulon. Hugo had seen men like Valjean – at Bicêtre, on a Paris street and in Toulon – but he’d never been anything like one.
However, the dream he attributes to Valjean seems to have been a dream that he dreamed himself and recounted to his wife Adèle. The difficulty Valjean has in knowing where his duty really lies also matches Hugo’s own split mind over what he did in June 1848. Like Hugo, Valjean doesn’t follow Catholic rituals, but he believes and he prays. Obviously, it wouldn’t be reasonable to think novelists could ever convincingly create characters with whom they had absolutely nothing in common. But Hugo put in a secret sign to remind himself and maybe those who knew him well that there were deep links of identity between the dutiful and persistent ex-convict and himself. Hugo was born on 26 February 1802, but because he was a slightly premature baby, he always believed he had been conceived on 24 June 1801. Valjean’s prison number on his first incarceration at Toulon is 24601.
PART FOUR
War, Peace and Progress
11.
The Start of It All
Claude Lelouch’s 1995 film of Les Misérables retells Hugo’s tale as a story not of the nineteenth but of the twentieth century, and it begins with a ball on the night of 31 December 1899. As the clock hands reach midnight, they bring in a New Year that marks the calendric start of a new century. Hugo’s own century did not start the same way, because at that time France used a now forgotten decimal calendar introduced in the wake of the French Revolution: 31 December 1799 coincided with the unremarkable date of 10 Nivôse, Year VIII, which can’t be seen as the start of anything. However, Lelouch’s invention expresses a fundamental truth about Hugo’s project. Les Misérables aimed to be the ‘novel of the nineteenth century’, and so it starts at the beginning. When exactly was that? In nineteenth-century France, it was obvious that the new age had begun on 18 June 1815, on a ‘drab plain’ south of Brussels near a village called Waterloo.
With the exception of Lelouch, no adaptation I have seen accepts Hugo’s own definition of the start of the story he tells. A recent Japanese animated serial for television, for example, starts with Fantine and Cosette walking towards Montfermeil, in 1817. Boleslawski’s classic Hollywood version begins with the trial of Jean Valjean in 1796. The musical begins with a scene during Valjean’s imprisonment in Toulon. The wealth of threads and loops in Hugo’s narrative would permit many other plausible starts on stage or screen: a priest singled out at an imperial reception for promo
tion to the bishopric of D., for example, with ‘1805’ overprinted on the screen; a raucous dinner where four boozy young men walk out on their girlfriends, with a supertitle saying ‘Bombarda’s Restaurant, 1817’; or a gloomily elegant salon where aged gentlemen and jewel-bedecked matrons express relief at the return of the king in front of a wide-eyed, eight-year-old Marius. It isn’t absurd to use the career of Myriel (and the theme of charity), or the fall of Fantine (and the theme of poverty) or the education of Marius (and the theme of political transformation) as ways into the labyrinth of Les Misérables, but none of these start-points is where Hugo actually put it. Even less close to the novel’s design is Tatiana Lukashevich’s Gavrosh, a film made in the Soviet Union in 1937, which starts with a street urchin scrawling political graffiti on a wall and running away from the police. The paranoid politics of the Soviet Union at the time of the great purges meant there was probably no alternative to making ‘revolution’ the main theme and Gavroche the lead character in an adaptation of Hugo’s book. But the fact is that Les Misérables really begins in 1815.
The time-line of Hugo’s story maps on to historical events with great precision. Jean Valjean is arrested for the theft of a loaf, tried, sentenced and sent to Bicêtre to be chained and then transported south to the hard-labour prison at Toulon. The chaining ceremony – Hugo describes it in detail in The Last Day of a Condemned Man – takes place on 22 April 1796. That is to say, Valjean goes down on the same day that a young Corsican general only recently risen from the ranks won a great victory at the Battle of Montenotte. That success put Napoleon Bonaparte on track to become commander-in-chief, then first consul in 1799 and finally emperor in 1804. Throughout the nineteen years that Valjean spends in jail, Napoleon led armies of Frenchmen into battle all over Europe. They were manned initially by professionals, volunteers and enthusiasts, then increasingly by conscripts drawn from every corner of France and from the many territories incorporated into the Empire over those years. Hundreds of thousands of peasants and labourers were forced into service to fight and to die at the mass slaughters now commemorated on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris as the Battles of Lodi (1796), Rivoli (1797), the Pyramids (1798), Marengo (1800), Copenhagen (1801), Trafalgar (1805), Austerlitz (1805), Jena (1806), Eylau (1807), Zaragoza (1808), Wagram (1809) and Borodino (1812). Many more thousands died of cold and hunger in the retreat from Moscow over the Berezina in 1813 and thousands more at Dresden before Napoleon was finally forced to abdicate in 1814.