The Novel of the Century

by David Bellos

  Cambronne does not comply with an order from the enemy, but does his duty as a soldier by carrying on the fight, even when the only weapon he has left is a rude word. Writers have a natural tendency to believe that the word is mightier than the sword, and no one ever had a greater stake in the adage than Victor Hugo. By 1861, he knew that pamphlets and poems would not unseat the petty dictator who had usurped the throne and the mantle of Napoleonic France, but his own long resistance had a meaning to itself, and it was the same as the meaning of Cambronne’s ‘Merde!’: don’t give in; don’t be polite; be like General Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo; best of all, be like me.

  * * *

  In view of the importance of what Hugo has to say in the first book of Part II and of the shabby way it has been treated up to now by critics, adapters, translators and editors, I propose a new film version that would begin at the real beginning, and go something like this.

  EXT. DUSK. LONG SHOT

  Golden-orange sunset.

  OVERPRINT: 18 JUNE 1815

  EXT. DUSK. LONG SHOT PAN

  Rolling fields, some with grass, some with ripening wheat, small woods. Forty-eight thousand infantry and fourteen thousand cavalry in French uniforms. Fifty thousand British infantry, eleven thousand British cavalry. Units of Hanoverian and other German troops, with small detachments of Belgians and Dutch, all in distinctive uniforms. Two hundred and fifty artillery pieces on the French lines, one hundred and fifty big guns facing them.

  Sounds off: shells exploding, muskets firing, horses neighing, men screaming; bagpipes and drums.

  EXT. DUSK. ZOOM IN

  Small group of French soldiers standing their ground in centre field, shoulder to shoulder, armed with sabres. Surrounded by men in British uniforms on slightly higher ground.

  Sounds on: clashing ironware, huffing and puffing, shouts and obscenities.

  EXT. RAKING LIGHT OF SETTING SUN FROM LEFT. CLOSE UP

  Face of MAITLAND, a sweaty, moustachioed British officer.

  MAITLAND (bawling): French Soldiers! Brave Men! You are surrounded! Surrender now or face your end!

  EXT. ALMOST NIGHT. MEDIUM SHOT

  Group of French soldiers, including many dead and wounded, with a small number standing. A tall, stout man steps towards camera.

  EXT. NIGHT. CLOSE UP

  Face of CAMBRONNE, streaked with sweat and blood.

  CAMBRONNE (at top of voice): Fuck you!

  BLACK SCREEN

  Sound off: deafening blast, then complete silence.

  EXT. NIGHT. MEDIUM SHOT

  Limbs and debris flying randomly through black smoke.

  Sounds off: groans.

  BLACK SCREEN

  VOICE OFF: Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo. But Wellington did not win it; and Blücher did not even fight in it. The man who gave such a magnificent reply to mortal thunder was the true victor of the Battle of Waterloo.

  EXT. NIGHT. LONG SHOT

  Raking moonlight.

  Corpses arrayed on top of each other in a long, narrow pit. One crouching, black-cloaked and black-hooded figure moving along the line like a scavenging ape or a ghoul.

  EXT. NIGHT. ZOOM IN

  On the figure poking about among limbs and torn uniforms.

  EXT. NIGHT. CLOSE SHOT

  The scavenger raises the hand of a corpse and pulls a ring off its finger. As it falls back the hand quivers, then shows more signs of life. The corpse-robber grasps it, pulls the arm, and raises a blood-stained man into the moonlight.

  The robber fumbles inside his victim’s pockets, extracting a watch and a purse. As he stashes them inside his capacious greatcoat, the dead man opens his eyes and wakes up.

  EXT. NIGHT. MIDDLE SHOT

  BARON GEORGES PONTMERCY (staring blankly): Thank you kindly, good sir.

  THÉNARDIER: I’m glad to help an officer of the guard.

  PONTMERCY: You have saved my life. Let me give you my purse and my watch.

  THÉNARDIER (grinning to camera): You’re most generous, captain.

  PONTMERCY: May I know your name?

  THÉNARDIER: I’m called Thénardier.

  PONTMERCY (enunciating with difficulty):… mercy, at your service for ever more. (He then passes out.)

  EXT. NIGHT. CLOSE UP. SIDE.

  Thénardier’s long, dirty, angular face with darting eyes and a fixed grin.

  BLACK SCREEN

  TITLE CAPTION

  Les Misérables

  Start Here

  12.

  The Paris of Les Misérables

  In January 1862, Hugo and his helpers at Hauteville House worked at a frantic pace on four fronts at the same time. He wrote and they copied out the chapters urgently needed to permit Lacroix to start typesetting the first volume of Part II, beginning with the great essay on the Battle of Waterloo. Concurrently, Hugo had to decide on and then draft the matter that would figure at the head of Part I to allow the page-numbering of the first volume to be fixed. Meanwhile, after dinner every day there were galleys to be corrected and lists of corrections to be copied out and rushed down to the boat before it left, three times a week. But the main front was the final revision, collation and copying out of all the rest of Part II, where the action of the novel moves to Paris. Hats off to Hugo, Juliette and Julie, who completed all these equally huge and delicate tasks by the end of the month. By early February, Lacroix’s compositors had the whole of Part II to set in type.

  A large part of the matter of Part II comes out of Les Misères, written more than fifteen years before. Hugo needed to check his own memory of the layout of the streets and buildings he mentions, but he could not do that directly, as he refused to set foot in France. He therefore sent a scout to do this necessary work for him. Théophile Guérin, a journalist and fellow exile in Guernsey who was able to take advantage of the 1859 amnesty, sent back a meticulous topographical study of the main Paris locations of Les Misérables: Rue de l’Homme–Armé, the last residence of Valjean, the Rousseau restaurant, where Marius eats in his years of poverty, the wastelands north of the Pont d’Austerlitz, where Valjean and Cosette flee when Javert is on their tail, and Boulevard de l’Hôpital, alongside the present-day Gare d’Austerlitz, where the Gorbeau tenement is located. Hugo needed this information not solely in order to get his urban geography right. He needed to be sure of the real city in order to get it wrong.

  Hugo’s attachment to the Paris of old was deep and sincere. He lets it show at the start of Book 5 of Part II, where he steps forward and talks about his feelings directly, in the third person. Since the author of this book left the city, he writes, Paris has been transformed. ‘A new city has grown up that is as it were unknown to him … the Paris of his youth is now a Paris of the past’ (II.5.i, 404). As in the essay on the 1848 Revolution written the previous spring and at the opening of the Waterloo chapters that describe Hugo’s visit to the battlefield in May 1861, ‘now’ means not the ‘now’ of the fiction, but the ‘now’ of writing. It is therefore easy to see nostalgia for the old city that Hugo expresses in Les Misérables as a barely veiled criticism of the urban renewal being carried out at a great pace by Baron Haussmann, in charge of the rebuilding of Paris at that time. However, Hugo’s attachment to the fabric of Paris and his experience of rebuilding and change go back much further than that.

  In his youth, Hugo the royalist had been among the first to raise alarm at the dilapidation of the city’s medieval heritage by profiteers and crooks known as the bande noire or ‘Black Gang’. His campaign to save old buildings was crowned by Notre-Dame de Paris, which represents the great cathedral in the form that it had at the height of its glory in the late fifteenth century. The novel had a spectacular impact not just on the history of the novel in France, but on the physical shape of the city. Largely inspired by Hugo’s lavish descriptions (based on extensive research and a strong visual imagination), the architect Viollet-le-Duc drew up plans to clear away later constructions that hid Notre-Dame from view, to reconstruct its two main towers
and to add a spire (as well as adding a new wing linked to the nave by those supposedly medieval flying buttresses that now adorn the south wall). The project was approved by the city council, and work began in 1845, at the time when Hugo began writing Les Misères. Seventeen years later, the new-old cathedral was about to emerge from the scaffolding and protective shrouds that had hidden the building site for so long. The Notre-Dame we now know was unveiled in 1862, a few weeks after the publication of Les Misérables. Ironically, a rather large feature of the new and unseen Paris that Hugo half-laments at the opening of Book 5 of Part II was the direct result of his own architectural imagination.

  Haussmann’s reinvention of the layout of the Left Bank (to which we owe the Boulevard Saint-Michel and the Boulevard Saint-Germain) and his construction of a new residential area along avenues radiating from the Arc de Triomphe were neither the first nor the largest of the changes made to Paris between the fictional time of Les Misérables and the time of its completion. In the course of the 1830s, while Hugo was ensconced in his apartment in Place Royale, the east–west axis of Rue de Rivoli was completed, and Place de la Bastille was remodelled around a new column commemorating the July Revolution of 1830. The greatest change came from the introduction of railways, starting in 1837 with a line to Versailles. Over the following decade, long before Hugo’s exile, whole neighbourhoods were swept away to allow rail lines to bring steam trains into central Paris. Large new termini sprang up almost year by year: Gare Saint-Lazare (called the Embarcadère des Batignolles at the start) was opened in 1837; Gare d’Orléans (now Gare d’Austerlitz), in 1840; Gare du Nord, in 1846; Gare de Lyon, in 1847; Gare de l’Est, in 1849. These huge public works altered the relation of one quarter to another, just as the slow but steady spread of street lighting by gas and the metalling of main roads that began around 1835 transformed the appearance of the old city of Hugo’s youth. The implicit criticism of the vandalism of the Second Empire in Hugo’s resurrection from exile of a Paris that can no longer be seen is really a diversion. It serves mainly to camouflage the unreal cityscape of Les Misérables.

  One of the sites checked out by Guérin was the address of the Gorbeau tenement – the lodgings of Valjean in the 1820s, and of Marius and Thénardier later on. The loyal scout confirmed that house-numbers in Boulevard de l’Hôpital jumped on the even side from 46 to 54, with nothing in between. That left a ‘real’ space for Hugo’s imaginary address of ‘50–52’. But why those numbers in particular? Ingenious readers have suggested that Hugo wanted to make it clear by a kind of strident silence that ‘51’ did not exist – that the year of Louis-Napoléon’s detestable putsch had been expunged from the sequence of integers. Given the many other number-games played in the novel, that does not seem far-fetched.

  The location of the students’ barricade, on the other hand, could not be checked out, because Rue de la Chanvrerie had been demolished long before (and not by Baron Haussmann). What happens there in Parts IV and V of Les Misérables is, however, calqued on real events that took place somewhere else, in the Cloître Saint-Merri, about a kilometre to the east, roughly where the decorative fountain by Niki de Saint-Phalle now stands in the courtyard of the Pompidou Centre. But the most outrageous change that Hugo made to the geography of Paris can’t be explained by nostalgia or resentment, or by a need to fictionalize a historical event.

  When Valjean believes (quite correctly) that he has been recognized by Javert, he makes the decision to leave his lodgings in Boulevard de l’Hôpital. He takes Cosette on a zigzag walk through the real streets of the Latin Quarter to throw his pursuer off the trail, then crosses the Seine by the Austerlitz bridge. Javert and his squad are closing in on him but haven’t caught up yet. Valjean plunges into a labyrinth of streets whose names can’t be found on any map, in an area that has since disappeared and that Hugo calls ‘Petit-Picpus’. Because of all the rebuilding of Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, including the construction of the Gare de Lyon, Hugo’s readers of 1862 could easily believe that thirty years before the area had been completely different. In any case, there weren’t many people left who could remember 1823 – at the age of sixty, Hugo was an old man by the standards of his day. He was also a first-rate liar when he needed to be. ‘Petit-Picpus, of which no present map has retained any trace, is quite clearly marked on the 1727 map published in Paris by Denis Thierry’ (II.5.iii, 410). Well, it isn’t; the map is a fiction, and a far from innocent one. No area of Paris was called ‘Petit-Picpus’, but the one Hugo invented slots into a quite specific corner which had been mostly waste ground in the 1820s. If we plot Valjean’s escape route on a real map of Paris by the left and right turns he takes after crossing the Seine and by the distances Hugo specifies between each turn, then our pencil moves inexorably towards the centre of a small rectangle bounded nowadays by Avenue Ledru-Rollin, Avenue Daumesnil, Boulevard Diderot and Rue de Lyon. It is therefore possible to say almost exactly where he was when Javert’s dragnet trapped him at the tip of a Y, and what wall it was that he climbed over to get away. For there was a wall at that location – not in the 1820s, but in 1862. It was not the perimeter of a convent, but the grim face of the Maison centrale de détention, better known as the Mazas Prison, the infamous penitentiary where Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte put republicans and democrats who had not fled France.5

  Les Misérables is very short on describing Valjean’s years in a real jail. His time in a convent stands in lieu in an almost literal sense, since it is built on the site of a prison more fearful even than the bagne at Toulon.

  Hugo’s long chapters on convent life draw on the notes he had Juliette and Léonie make for him in 1847. Their reminiscences concern convent schools located in the Latin Quarter, but Hugo felt that he could not use their real location without giving offence to the nuns who still lived there and to readers who might object to a novel invading such an inherently private space. In his to-do list of May 1860 Hugo noted that he would have to ‘shift the convent’, and in January 1861 he got around to doing it as he revised Part II. His reprise in prose at the start of Book 5 of Baudelaire’s lament that ‘the shape of a city changes faster, alas, than the heart of a man’ diverts attention from the unreal city he is about to describe.6

  Why did Hugo put his characters in a convent in the first place? Why is a substantial section of a novel about the contemporary poor devoted to the description and analysis of distinctly unmodern monastic life? Albert Lacroix was the first to read the Petit-Picpus episode of Les Misérables but not the last to be puzzled and slightly alarmed by it. His disappointment must have been great to give him the courage to write to Hugo – with appropriate humility – to ask him to cut it out.

  After the escape into the convent, the action stops, and two admirable chapters, one descriptive, the other philosophical, interrupt and maybe even diminish the reader’s impatient curiosity. I mean the common reader, the general public, not readers with a refined literary taste … so I ask you whether in your opinion it would not be better … to set aside ‘Petit-Picpus’ and ‘Parenthesis’ until the second or third edition.7

  Lacroix was a free-thinker with no high opinion of the Catholic church, and he found it incomprehensible that Victor Hugo, the figurehead of all that was liberal and forward-looking in Europe, should have given such respectful and lengthy attention to a group of self-incarcerated fanatics. Many modern readers feel something of the same bewilderment, and almost all the adapters of Les Misérables for stage and screen either omit the convent episode entirely or skim over it at great speed. Is this a part of Hugo’s long novel that really could be cut?

  With the figure of the un-Catholic Bishop Myriel, Hugo outraged the conservatives and the devout. With the Convent of the Perpetual Adoration, he upset ‘blinkered republicans’ who spoke to him through his son Charles. Les Misérables is intentionally designed to be equally irritating to both sides. How else could it seriously promote the great reconciliation between factions and classes whose lamentable and often bloody disputes were
contingent and not necessary parts of social life?

  In narrative terms, the convent episode is a ‘stop-the-clock’ device that allows Cosette to pupate from victim in Part I to the leading lady of Parts III, IV and V. In that respect it mirrors Valjean’s prison sentence, which is a kind of time machine allowing the entirety of the reign of Napoleon I to be left out. But that doesn’t explain why Hugo inserts the historical and reflective chapter that even he calls a parenthesis.

  Nuns have nothing, not even their real names. Coming for the most part from aristocratic backgrounds, their self-imposed poverty is a complement or counterpoint to the humiliation of all the Fantines of the world. The convent is also an ‘ideal community’, offering women an escape from the contradictions of civilian life. As Hugo put it in his brief note in May: ‘Describe the absurd monastic regime and say: as long as women are legal minors, as long as the problem of women remains unsolved, the convent is only a secondary crime.’ Hugo did his best to make his portrayal of convent life as accurate as possible because he wanted to grant appropriate respect to autonomous, self-governing communities of women. An unlikely beginning for feminist ideas – but that is what it is.

  Lacroix’s disappointment with the slow narrative pace of the convent chapters reveals a surprising disregard for one of the most suspense-laden parts of the whole book. When he climbs over the wall, Valjean is accepted with open arms by the convent gardener, Fauchelevent, the man that Mayor Madeleine had rescued from under his overturned cart years before. However, Fauchelevent cannot present Valjean to the nuns and ask for him to be taken on as his assistant unless the fugitive enters by the front door, not over the back wall. The scheme to get Valjean out and then back in involves burying a deceased nun illegally in the convent’s crypt and substituting Valjean for her corpse when her coffin is taken to the Vaugirard cemetery. Fauchelevent expects to be able to bribe the gravedigger to look the other way when he lets Valjean out, but alas, there’s a new man on the job, who turns out to be a particularly rule-bound bore. Fauchelevent has to expend all his guile to get the man to leave, by which time Valjean has been buried alive for quite a while. He could have died. But he rises again.