The Novel of the Century

by David Bellos

  Thénardier first appears as a camp-following corpse-robber at the Battle of Waterloo, then as an innkeeper at Montfermeil, then as the head of the Patron-Minette gang in Paris. He is imprisoned, escapes in a feat as daring as Valjean’s high dive from the Orion in Toulon, crops up once more as the unofficial gatekeeper of the sewers of Paris, reappears in fancy dress in a float in the Mardi Gras parade before disguising himself once again in order to blackmail Marius. He’s a remarkable fellow indeed, as persistent as Javert and as resourceful as Valjean, whose changes of status and identity are not more numerous than his.

  But he’s not entirely human. A vulture at Waterloo, a ghoul in the sewers, Thénardier is compared in each of his roles to a beast or a bird of the night: an owl, a wolf, a cat or a tiger.20 He is also not entirely French, unlike all the other characters: ‘a mongrel [who was] most likely a Fleming from Lille when in Flanders, a Frenchman in Paris, a Belgian in Brussels, conveniently astride two frontiers’ (II.3.ii, 345). But he was also on the frontier between two social and moral identities: ‘Thénardier had everything it takes to live as … an honest tradesman, a solid citizen … [and] he had everything it takes to be a villain … [he was] a shopkeeper with an element of the monster within him’ (II.3.x, 384). In this respect, Hugo’s ‘bad guy’ is much more like a character in a conventional modern novel than any of the other leading figures. Myriel, Valjean, Fantine, Cosette or Javert are all drawn in singular terms, whereas Thénardier, despite all his animal attachments, is mixed, contradictory and complicated, like human life itself.

  What keeps him going, moreover, is not just greed, but passion. ‘He bore a grudge against the entire human race, since he had a deep furnace of hate burning within him’ (II.3.ii, 346), and his wife also harbours a ‘hatred of the human race’ (IV.6.i, 845). He keeps it covered up most of the time – he was a ‘restrained sort of villain’ who rarely let his anger show (II.3.ii, 346) – but when at last he has a supposedly wealthy man tied to a chair in front of him, he lets fly.

  Villain! Yes, I know that’s what you call us, you rich folk! Well, it’s true I’m a bankrupt, I’m in hiding, I’ve no food, I’ve no money, I’m a villain! I’ve not eaten for three days, I’m a villain! Ah! You lot keep your feet warm, you have shoes made by Sakoski, you have padded overcoats like archbishops, you live on the first floor in houses with caretakers, you eat truffles, you eat asparagus at forty francs a bunch in the month of January, and green peas, you gorge yourselves, and when you want to know whether it’s cold you look in the newspaper to see what Engineer Chevalier’s thermometer says. We’re our own thermometers, we are!… We feel the blood freezing in our veins, and the ice reaching into our hearts and we say ‘There is no God!’ And you come into our dens, yes, our dens, and call us villains! But we will eat you! We will devour you, you poor things! (III.8.xx, 717)

  Thénardier’s angry diatribe against the privilege and comfort of others is a stunning act of imaginative sympathy on Hugo’s part with the suffering of the dispossessed, but it is also very frightening. People as angry as that aren’t going to be ‘improved’ by acts of kindness from a ‘visitor of the poor’. Why should Thénardier starve when others do not? What barriers can stop such resentment and greed from undermining and eventually overwhelming the social order? The figure of Thénardier is a warning that Satan may make his own use of the legitimate grievances of the poor.

  Les Misérables cannot answer the fundamental problem it raises in this scene. The devil himself may not exist, but evil does, in the form of resentment and greed. Thénardier sails off to the New World at the end but leaves behind the unsolved problem of the destructive potential of hate. There was nothing Hugo could do about that.

  Interlude: High Style, Low Style, Latin and Slang

  The rules of propriety that governed literary expression in the seventeenth century put strict limits on the vocabulary that could be used, and as a result the exquisitely crafted tragedies of Racine were made out of barely more than 2,000 different words. Hugo thought much more highly of Shakespeare, with his allegedly unparalleled lexical breadth. Les Misérables, with its large cast of characters, many-layered plot and multiple settings, gave him a marvellous opportunity to rival the English master and to extend the word-set of literary French beyond all previous bounds. There are around 20,000 different words in the 630,000 words of the text21 – maybe as many as in all of Shakespeare, in fact, who was working in a language with a much larger vocabulary.22

  Some of the words few readers of Les Misérables have come across before or will ever see again were literally rescued from old dictionaries that Hugo had to hand. Chiragre, ‘suffering gout in the wrist or hand’, had hardly been used for 200 years until Hugo put it back into circulation in Les Misérables in his description of Luc-Esprit Gillenormand. Some of them have become obscure because they refer to things that have disappeared, such as berlingot, ‘a rickety one-seat horse-drawn carriage’, cacolet, ‘a chair fitted to the back of a mule for carrying travellers in mountainous districts’, and maringotte, ‘a small horse-drawn vehicle used by travelling clowns and players’. Other difficult words name trades that are no longer plied, like taillandier, ‘a maker of spades, hoes, and axes’, and tabellion, ‘a copyist in a law office’ – which is where Picard-speaking Fauchelevent picked up his knowledge of standard French. Other rare words used by Hugo seem to have simply vanished of their own accord, such as fayousse and pigoche, both referring to outdoor versions of tiddlywinks played by Gavroche and his pals on the streets.

  A large contingent of the special words used in Les Misérables refer to birds, flowers, vines, creepers, weeds and herbs. Hugo’s mother had been a keen gardener and handed on to her son not only daily watering and weeding duties in the lush back yard of Les Feuillantines, the house where they lived in the Latin Quarter (recreated in the garden of Rue Plumet), but a keen eye and a correspondingly precise vocabulary for everything that grew, cheeped, crawled and fluttered around. That is why Hugo refers without difficulty or approximation to a particular kind of bean called gourgane, a variety of potato called viquelotte, bladderwort (cotylédon), navelwort (utricule), Aaron’s Rod (bouillon-blanc), wagtails (hoche-queue), yellow buntings (verdier) and so on.

  Valjean inherits the Hugos’ botanical expertise, as seems reasonable for a peasant who first earned his living pruning trees. When he has become mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer, he occasionally breaks his rule of saying as little as possible to pass on his knowledge to locals, particularly about how to make best use of nettles and weeds – mauvaises herbes, or ‘bad grasses’ in French. It is in this context that he comes out with one of the major theme statements of the novel, one which was surely intended and was often taken by Hugo’s conservative critics to be an inflammatory assertion of society’s overall responsibility for crime. ‘There are no “bad grasses” or “bad men”,’ he says. ‘There are only bad gardeners’ (I.5.iii, 152, adapted).

  Elsewhere, Hugo recycles recondite legal, ecclesiastical and political terms such as apanagiste (the beneficiary of a provision made for the younger children of kings), viduité (the state of widowhood), psallant (‘singer of psalms’), caloyer (‘monk of the order of St Basil’) and ochlocratie (‘rule of the mob’); historical curiosities such as miquelet, meaning ‘a Catalan insurgent’, and quaint expressions like écoute-s’il-pleut (literally, ‘listen-if-it-rains’) to mean ‘eyewash’ or ‘wishful thinking’.23 However, not all the words in Les Misérables can be found in even the largest dictionaries of French: zinzelière, used to describe the screen protecting Gavroche’s bed from the rats, is found nowhere else in French;24 and no dictionary lists gargoine, which must mean something like ‘throat’ or ‘gullet’.25 There’s a suspicion Hugo invented some of the words of Les Misérables from scratch for the impish pleasure of making his own mark on the tongue.26 The lexical richness of Les Misérables creates a nice paradox: it is one of the most-translated texts in world literature, yet nobody knows or has ever known for sure what all th
e words in it mean.

  Hugo pushes back the edges of what counts as French in more ways than this. Breaking with a centuries-old tradition of scorn for regional and rural forms of speech, he treats the dialects of France with respect and writes them into his novel. Bishop Myriel learns to greet his parishioners in their local tongues, Catalan and Provençal; and Valjean’s housekeeper, Toussaint, speaks in the Norman dialect of Barneville (the nearest point to Guernsey on the mainland of France), equally impenetrable to speakers of standard French.27 He even incorporates a Jerseyese word that he picked up from one of the maids at Hauteville House: scrobage, ‘floor-scrubbing’, that he might well have cut had he known it was only English in Franco-Norman disguise.28

  However, the main way Les Misérables redefines what is French is by introducing popular forms of speech that had rarely been put in writing before. Hugo does not do this by sounding out the pronunciation of ‘lower’ kinds of speech in the manner of Dickens, of course, since for the sake of the plot he has to deceive us into believing that Valjean can get away with opening his mouth. He makes barely an exception to his iron rule of accent-free French, and phonetic spellings arise only in Hugo’s exposition of the speech of Gavroche.29 Instead of sounding out the absurdly long string required in standard French to say ‘what’s that?’ qu’est-ce que c’est que cela? (literally, ‘what is it that it is that that?’), the uneducated urchin blurts out the contracted keksékça. Although it looks decidedly un-French, the expression is one that Hugo insists all French speakers know and use. He is certainly right that outside of ‘pulpit diction’ used in church and classroom settings nobody utters the full set of sounds of keserkersékersa. What Gavroche does, however, in addition to swallowing the weak vowels indicated by –er in this transcription, is to invert the order of the first s and k. This is a genuine feature of popular Parisian French. It’s likely, for example, that Fantine would have pronounced the name of her lover as Félisque rather than Félix Tholomyès and called her dinner at Bombarda’s restaurant un lusque, instead of luxe, ‘a treat’.30 Equally typical of popular Parisian is Gavroche’s way of asking more general questions. Instead of inverting verb and subject, as is normal in high-register and written French, Gavroche adds the interrogative particle ti to the end of his verb, saying j’ai ti instead of ai-je for ‘do I have…’.31 Both these dialectal features can be heard on the streets of Paris today.

  Hugo does not make a clear distinction between those aspects of the language of the poor that are particular to a place or region, such as the inversion of s and k and interrogative ti, and those that mark a speaker as a member of a particular social class. In addition, he bundles together the vocabulary of popular, familiar and ‘rough’ French with the special set of words used by thieves. These technical distinctions are ignored in Les Misérables so as to introduce a new register of French that Hugo calls argot, or slang. In a sense, he is right to muddle them up, because the boundaries between ‘rough’ and ‘proper’ French are always shifting. The words Gavroche uses for ‘bed’ and ‘sleep’, for example, piaule and pioncer, which for Hugo belonged to the exotic language of the streets, are now part of the lexicon of conversational French, just as English ‘snooze’ and ‘snitch’ come from the secret language of convicts transported to Australia in the first decade of the nineteenth century.32

  Hugo most certainly heard popular French in the speech of the servants, tradesmen and prostitutes who came across his path, and his inclusion of elements of their vernacular in a literary novel – especially his use of the taboo word merde, in the story of Cambronne’s defiance at Waterloo – was part of his long campaign to stretch the boundaries of what could be written down. On the other hand, it is unlikely that a member of the underworld ever taught him how to operate in genuine argot, the secret language of crime. That’s because the whole point of ‘flash’ or ‘cant’ language was to keep outsiders in the dark. The strange and exotic vocabulary of the criminal underclass was first made public in England by a convict who bought his freedom by providing the governor of the colony of New South Wales with a decoding device for spying on the plans of the prisoners in his charge,33 and in France by the extraordinary Eugène-François Vidocq, a convict who became chief of Paris police and on his retirement published memoirs to which he appended a vocabulary of prisoners’ argot.34 Novelists seized upon this quaint and superficially impenetrable set of words as a resource for adventure stories set in the world of crime. Sue plundered it for Les Mystères de Paris in 1842, and Balzac used the same vocabulary in the prison scenes of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (A Harlot High and Low, 1847). Hugo used the same repeated set of terms, but also found a less well-known source for them. In the 1840s, he had Léonie Biard check Sue’s slang against the anonymous Mémoires d’un forban philosophe (Memoirs of a Philosopher Crook), and in Les Misérables he always uses her spellings rather than Sue’s for words that originally figured in the list compiled by Vidocq.35

  However, Vidocq’s list of slang words is not very long. A popular French novelist of the twentieth century, Frédéric Dard, complained in an interview that there are only about a hundred words and expressions recorded in all the dictionaries of French slang published since then. ‘It’s always the same ones that crop up again and again, so that led me to invent my own.’36 He probably didn’t know it, but he was following the example of Victor Hugo. The argot passages in Les Misérables are literary exercises that certainly use words found in written sources, but they also do more than that. The conversations among the members of Patron-Minette are imaginations of a heightened and richer form of the vocabulary listed by Vidocq.

  Hugo also has much more to say than other novelists and linguists of his age about the significance of the ‘anti-language’ of the ‘third floor down’.37 At first, he defends it as a language like any other. As the professional jargon of a business called crime, he says, slang is no more exceptional than the special terms used by lawyers, sailors, cloth merchants and so on. What’s more, like language in general, it is both partly archaic, retaining old words from an earlier state of French, and constantly self-renewing, inventing new words to replace those that have become overused, or known to the world at large; and it is highly dialectal, having distinct forms for the four main groups who rule the city’s underworld of crime. Like other languages too, it is partly borrowed from abroad, with traces of Romany, Spanish, Italian and English in it. Above all, slang is full of metaphors and colourful figures of speech: dévisser le coco, ‘to unscrew the coconut’, for example, means ‘to wring someone’s neck’. In these formal respects French argot has the features of a regular language and deserves to be treated as an authentic form of speech.

  Hugo then complicates the issue. He points out that the only thing that distinguishes argot from French is its vocabulary, because its grammar and morphology conform to the standard. That makes it not a language at all, but a growth, a cancer, an ugly deformation of proper French. More than that: its ugliness mirrors the lives of the people who speak it. Anticipating much later theories about the link between language, culture and thought, Hugo declares argot to be the natural and necessary expression of la misère, and that abolishing the one will rid society of the other. What began as an apparent defence of the richness and dignity of a special vernacular turns into an argument to banish it by teaching the ragged how to speak proper French.

  Hugo’s incoherence is no different from the internal contradiction that challenges language teachers of our own time. Respect for the linguistic dignity of vernacular forms of speech – the variety of English spoken in Singapore, for example, or Afro-American Vernacular English – conflicts with the indisputable advantages of learning to use a standard form of the language. Hugo calls for universal primary education as the solution to the ‘problem’ of argot quite explicitly. However, what his novel actually shows makes it unclear whether argot is in fact a problem for those who speak it, and whether formal schooling would be a solution to their plight. Épon
ine, Gavroche and their parents the Thénardiers are already literate without any schooling. They are also bilingual between ‘slang’ and standard French. ‘Functional diglossia’ is the norm in Les Misérables, just as it is in most circumstances in the world. Like Myriel, who picks up Catalan, and Fauchelevent, who drops Picard, the misérables of Paris learn the forms of language they need to get on in the world. Far from being imprisoned in poverty and crime because of the language they speak, Hugo’s poor, spearheaded by Gavroche, play with the different registers of language they possess.

  * * *

  Les Misérables is a showcase not just of the vocabulary and regional and popular varieties of French, but of all the devices traditionally used to heighten the impact of spoken and written prose. Hugo’s familiarity with Latin authors allowed him to transfer the ancient machinery of rhetoric to French, and he puts almost every part of it on display in Les Misérables. This produces an opulent, overblown style that is the opposite of how composition teachers think English should be written nowadays. Where an instructor would recommend a single illustration to support a point, Hugo goes for two or four or maybe nine. Where a plain-English style model would dictate a descriptive adjective, Hugo puts in a simile or three. Instead of just saying what happened next, the sentences of Les Misérables build a scaffolding of concessive and conditional and relative clauses, like a rickety pyramid of chairs in a circus act. But Hugo’s foot rarely slips. His towering accumulations of words are performances of an ancient craft, and part of the point of his book is to show you how it is done. Even if you don’t ever want to write this way, it is worth knowing how to name the main acts in Hugo’s long show.