The Novel of the Century

by David Bellos

  • ‘The door on the left leads from the courtyard into the orchard. The orchard is dreadful’ (II.1.ii, 282). To start a sentence with the last word of the preceding one for emphasis or suspense is called anadiplosis. Anadiplosis is commoner than you think.

  • ‘But slang! What is the good of preserving slang? What is the good of keeping slang alive? To this we have only one thing to say…’ (IV.7.i, 884). Pretending to question something that is already decided in order to introduce the reasons for it constitutes the rhetorical device of deliberation. Hugo uses it frequently in the essay chapters. Is it a pedagogical device? That question would be an instance of deliberation if the answer were laid out below.

  • ‘Stunning to look at, with a delicate profile, eyes of deep blue, fleshy eyelids, small arched feet, beautifully turned wrists and ankles, a white complexion showing here and there the azure-tinted branching of the veins, fresh young cheeks, the sturdy neck of Aeginetan Junos…’ (I.3.iii, 118). This initial description of Fantine, listing ‘all the parts, ways and means’ of her beauty in sequence, is an application of the figure called enumeration.

  • ‘… in his tone, in his gestures, in his eyes that set every word ablaze, in this eruption of an evil nature revealing all, in this mixture of swagger and abjectness, pride and pettiness, rage and stupidity, in this chaos of real grievances and false sentiment, in this malicious man’s shameless relish of the pleasure of violence, in this brazen nakedness of an ugly soul, in this conflagration of every suffering combined with every hatred, there was something hideously evil and heart-breakingly true’ (III.8.xx, 718). Here, enumeration is combined with gradation, which consists of listing ideas or objects in an order that makes each one say either slightly more or slightly less than the preceding one.

  • Locked into this gradated enumeration is Hugo’s most characteristic figure of speech, antithesis, or the arrangement of things in balancing pairs: ‘swagger and abjectness, pride and pettiness, rage and stupidity … real grievances and false sentiment…’

  • ‘It is just about acceptable for a reader to be taken into a bridal chamber but not into a young virgin’s room … It is the retreat of a still-unopened flower … it is quite improper for any of this to be recounted … We shall therefore show none of all that’ (V.1.x, 1,080–81). This is top and tail of a paragraph that describes Cosette in her room before her wedding. The device of pretending not to be saying what you are saying is preterition. A stand-by of evasive politicians, preterition was easily recognized by nineteenth-century readers from the Latin authors studied at school.

  • ‘… as long as there are ignorance and poverty on earth, books such as this one may not be useless’ (from the Foreword, adapted). Herman Melville often uses double negation (Captain Delano in Benito Cereno is said to be ‘not unbewildered’), but Hugo’s spectacular use of litotes in this famous declaration isn’t just a quirk of style. It expresses modesty and confidence at the same time, and it leaves suspended the question of the way in which Les Misérables might be a useful book.

  • ‘Up above the other speakers, on top of a pile of paving stones, Bossuet, rifle in hand, cried out, “O Cydathenaeum, O Myrrhinus, O Probalinthus, O graces of the Aeantis! Oh, who will grant that I may deliver Homer’s verses like a Greek of Laurium or Aedapteon?”’ (V.1.ii, 1,060). Bossuet’s direct and spoken appeal to long-dead figures from classical history and myth is an apostrophe (direct address to another person) and an example of prosopopeia, treating the dead, the absent and the mythical as capable of intervening in the present world. Bossuet also learned how to do it from Greek and Latin lessons at school.

  • Widow Hucheloup, who runs the Café Corinthe, claims to recall the bucolic sounds of her rural youth, where loups-de-gorge sang among the ogrépines (IV.12.i, 977). Far from being dialectal, these words are mishearings of rouge-gorges (robin redbreasts) and aubépines (hawthorn). As they incorporate the typically Parisian interchange of /l/ for /r/ these malapropisms give away the fact that she’s a city girl. These kinds of word-distortion are a favourite resource of French humourists. In the film adaptation of the novel by Claude Lelouch, Darry Cowl, a master of the form, stammers out a three-minute plot summary of Les Misérables in which almost every word is ‘wrong’ in this way.

  • Gavroche encounters a quartet of old gossips in Rue de Thorigny, and their conversation hops around like this: ‘Cat’s fleas don’t go after people.’ ‘Remember the king of Rome?’ ‘It was the Duc de Bordeaux I liked.’ ‘Meat’s so dear these days.’ ‘Mesdames, business is bad’ (IV.11.ii, 965). Taking elements that make sense on their own but add up to nothing when put together is an ancient rhetorical trick called verbigeration.

  Hugo’s publisher Albert Lacroix, entranced and overwhelmed by the manuscript he had to set in type, slipped from regular business French in his correspondence with Hauteville House into increasingly Hugonic mode. By the time he acknowledged receipt of the last set of corrected galleys from St Peter Port, he was piling up accumulation, enumeration, gradation, simile, metaphor and antithesis like the great man himself:

  Your work, dear master, is that great and magnificent forest where everything exists, merges and combines. Like the song of birds, the call of the eagle, the ray of the divine, you show us all that is there: the ecstasy of hearts, the ulcers on souls, the darkness of minds, joy and suffering … Your book is the forest of human life and of our nineteenth century. It leaves us captivated, penetrated, moved, transfigured, renewed, improved and pensive.38

  Lacroix’s gushing praise was undoubtedly sincere, but as a pastiche it is not entirely fair, for Hugo always knew when to abandon the rhetorical devices of expansion for short sentences that deliver a sharp shock. Hugo was a master, not a prisoner of rhetoric. In fact, the alternation between lavishly long sentences and memorable one-liners creates the underlying rhythm and much of the meaning of the whole book. ‘The poor girl went on the streets’ (I.5.x, 172, adapted) seals the fate of Fantine. ‘He must be the best of them all’ (III.8.xxi, 734, adapted) sums up Jean Valjean. ‘There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life’ (V.6.ii, 1,235, adapted) says what there is to say about love.

  * * *

  M. Madeleine pays the salary of the primary teachers in the school at Montreuil-sur-Mer, but his charitable act would surely backfire if the masters resembled the Creakles, Squeers and Blimbers who bore and torture small boys in David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby and Dombey and Son. Hugo believed in education in principle, but he says almost nothing about its practice in Les Misérables. We learn only that Valjean was taught to read by prison visitors, and that Cosette learned to read from him. Teaching is not a topic in Hugo’s novel – because the teacher is the novel itself.

  What Les Misérables invites you to learn first of all is more French, through a virtuoso display of the language in all its forms. Not quite everything that looks like French is worth learning, however: the circumlocutions of provincial lawyers, for example, derided as pale imitations of the already pale Racine, or the pretentious formulae of Thénardier’s begging letters, where even the names of famous victories aren’t spelled correctly.39 But almost every other variety of what Hugo calls without blushing ‘la grande langue humaine’ (‘the great language of the human race’) (IV.7.i, 886, adapted) is worthy of interest, and the range is joyously wide: the administrative prose of Javert, the jolly puns of Grantaire, the clever couplets of Gavroche, the baroque expletives of Gillenormand, the language games of children and convent girls, the antique pronunciation of King Louis-Philippe,40 and above all the stylistic tours de force of Victor Hugo, who can bring a hovel, a palace, a battle, a barricade, a meadow or an inn to life by the force of words alone. His strings of epithets and near-synonymous verbs may strike modern readers as too heavy, but they were written to delight readers of a verbally more capacious age with a five-star display of the art of writing itself.

  But writing French is not enough. When a character needs to be made more black or more white, w
hen a plot-turn is worthy of high admiration or low scorn, Hugo brings up his ultimate resource, and Latin is its name.

  Modern editions usually provide translations of the numerous Latin phrases in Les Misérables in footnotes, but in nineteenth-century printings the only footnotes are those that translate expressions in argot, Catalan and Provençal. Latin you are supposed to know – or to learn.

  Hugo could assume his readers would be familiar with the first words of Psalm 22, ‘vermis sum’ (‘I am a worm’) (I.1.x, 42), and the first words of the catechism, ‘credo in patrem’ (‘I believe in the father’) (I.1.xiii) because the church still used Latin, and most French people continued to go to church at least once in a while. It was just as fair to expect comprehension of Latin phrases widely used in everyday French (some are also part of English today), such as ‘finis’ (‘end’), ‘casus belli’ (‘cause of war’), ‘currit rota’ (‘time moves on’), ‘carpe horas’ (‘mark the hour’), ‘quia nominor Leo’ (‘for my name is Lion’, that’s to say, ‘because I’m bigger than you’).41 To be true to the Latin Quarter culture of the student members of the ‘Friends of the ABC’ Hugo lends them a couple of comical Franco-Latin mash-ups, such as ‘Non licet omnibus adire Corinthum’ (IV.12.iii, 988), literally ‘Not all may approach Corinth’, punning on ‘the omnibus cannot reach Café Corinthe’ because the street is too narrow. But that is only a small slice of the Latin inserted into the French of Les Misérables.

  Some Latin phrases are intended to be dismissed as supercilious nonsense – when Tholomyès says ‘Glory be to wine’, for instance, then says it again in Latin, claiming it’s Spanish. Others are glossed in the text itself, which ends up teaching you what a learned Latin tag means. For example, when Tholomyès declares that ‘there’s nothing new. Nothing we haven’t already seen in the Creator’s creation’, he is translating ‘nil sub sole novum’ (literally, ‘nothing new under the sun’), which is given in the original in the following sentence.42 Some Latin phrases are so close to French (and to English, on occasions) that context makes them easy to guess: ‘quid obscurum, quid divinum’ (‘something obscure, something divine’), just glosses the statement that all battles contain ‘a certain amount of storm’, that’s to say, are subject to the fog of war. Les Misérables almost teaches you how to read Latin.

  Why should a novel about the poor and the downtrodden try to do that? The answer was much more obvious 150 years ago than it is now. Learning Latin helped its first readers take a step ‘towards the light’. Knowledge of the language of Rome had been the distinguishing feature of the educated classes for more than 1,000 years. The mass schooling that Hugo wanted would teach people to read and write first of all, but from mass literacy would come an elite able to enjoy the cultural riches he himself had lapped up as a boy. The Latin of Les Misérables is a step-by-step progression from those familiar words that even the poorest would hear in church, through jokes and proverbial expressions to quotations from Virgil and Tacitus which, through careful glossing and implicit translation, make Latin comprehension achievable to those who only read French.

  Teaching Latin grammar has been repeatedly defended as an aid to writing French, since French schoolbook grammar is based on Latin models. For Hugo and for generations of educationalists in France, however, the real value of Latin was higher than that. It was the foundation of the humanities, and the best thing an education could hand on. The school system that was reinvented in the 1870s with the same progressive and democratic ideals in mind as those that motivate Les Misérables made Latin and Greek prestige subjects in school and the principal passports to advancement.

  ‘Elitism for all’ sounds like a sour joke now, but it was a rainbow on the horizon for Victor Hugo. The splotches of Latin all over Les Misérables aren’t there to impress you, but to help you on your way.

  * * *

  In 1817, the innkeeper’s wife at The Sergeant of Waterloo in Montfermeil agrees to foster Fantine’s infant child Cosette, but treats her as a skivvy since her capacity for maternal affection is fully occupied by her own daughters, Azelma and Éponine. She is just as heartless towards the baby boy she has in 1823, whom we are supposed to have heard bawling in the background when Valjean rescued Cosette on Christmas Eve.43 Later on, while the story moves to Paris and then to the convent of Petit-Picpus, Mme Thénardier has two more sons she does not care to keep. She rents them out to an underworld acquaintance, La Magnon, who had once worked for Marius’s grandfather Gillenormand. The boys are used to blackmail the old man, who is too proud of his virility to deny that he had fathered them himself. After the Thénardiers and their accomplices have been jailed for extortion in the hold-up at the Gorbeau tenement, the police round up many other members of the ‘third floor down’, including La Magnon, whose infant charges are left to fend for themselves with only a scrap of paper giving them the address of Gillenormand’s agent to call on. But the scrap is blown away by the wind, and the two boys, who have been brought up as little gentlemen, are on the streets. Gavroche comes across the waifs and takes them under his wing. He teaches them how to filch bread from a pastry shop and how to use the language of the streets, and he takes them back to live in his secret hide-away inside the life-size plasterboard elephant that was still standing in Place de la Bastille. (It was a demonstration model for a piece of giant statuary commissioned by Napoleon, but never built.) Gavroche turns out to be the best natural teacher in the whole book. The two boys quickly internalize the new vocabulary he’s given them for talking about policemen, food, clothes and the rest. Alas, Gavroche, who never knows that he’s been looking after his own brothers, loses track of them on 5 June 1832, when riots break out and capture his whole attention. The starving boys find themselves at the pond in the Luxembourg Gardens, where they watch a middle-class boy throw bread to the already well-fed ducks. When the coast is clear, the older one manages to fish a soggy crust out of the pond to give to his little brother. He doesn’t say, ‘Here, eat that,’ in the language he’d spoken up to then. In memory of the kindly urchin who’d taken them in, he uses lower-class Parisian slang: ‘Colle-toi-ça dans le fusil’ (‘Stuff that in yer gob’). I think it’s the most moving moment in the whole book. Yes, you can use the novel to learn the rudiments of Latin, but what was learned by these two boys shows the opposite direction of travel. The register of their language keeps in step with their social position. Like the nieces and nephews for whom Valjean stole a loaf in 1796, the nameless boys have now joined the ranks of the misérables.

  PART FIVE

  Great Expectations

  15.

  Publication Day: 4 April 1862

  In the spring of 1862, Adèle went to Paris to get more treatment for her eyes, but also to serve as the publicity manager for the launch of the first two volumes of Les Misérables. She did not have to create public interest from scratch, of course, since there was long-standing excitement about a new novel by the most famous man not in France. Rather, she had to raise it to a pitch so high it would discourage the authorities from banning or seizing the book. But she also had to let not a scrap of it be seen in advance. The requirement to boost the book while keeping it secret made the publicity manager’s job a work of art.

  Adèle turned out to be very good at it. She enlisted two talented copy-writers as her aides: Paul Meurice, a playwright who was an old friend of the family and a fervent disciple of Victor Hugo, and Noël Parfait, a journalist and poet who was one of the few other people to have written about the uprising of 5 June 1832.1 They kept in constant touch with Charles in Brussels, whose job was to oversee Belgian publicity and to liaise with Lacroix.

  In the absence of electronic media, new books were promoted through advertisements, reviews and editorial comment in the printed press. It was customary to send two signed copies to regular newspaper reviewers (the extra copy was for resale) with a covering letter. This also could not be done for Les Misérables.

  Adèle’s first solution was to promote the novel through a
billboard campaign. Twenty-five illustrations of the characters of the novel commissioned for the illustrated edition that would appear a year later were printed on posters and plastered all over Paris. It was not illegal, and it made the novel’s imminent appearance known to the whole world without releasing any part of its text. Nothing like it had ever been done for a book. But there never had been a book like Les Misérables.

  Her second innovation was to create materials for newspapers to use without letting them print a word until the chosen day. Adèle called on newspaper offices with drafts of announcements penned by Charles Hugo and by Paul Meurice, perhaps even by herself, with the unprecedented request that they be held back until a signal was given by the mistress of works. Les Misérables was probably the first work ever launched under embargo, a system that has become commonplace nowadays. The prestige of Hugo was such that editors complied with the unusual requirements laid down by the poet’s wife. No notices for Part I of Les Misérables appeared before the ring of the bell, meaning all appeared at once, starting on 2 April 1862.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Hugo took time out from his heavy schedule to do something of a completely different kind. The people of Guernsey were not rich, and on the streets in town and even on the beach there were many ill-nourished children and beggars to be seen. Adèle had held a charity bazaar to raise funds for a poor school in 1861, but now Hugo decided on a new form of charitable action on the island to which he owed his precious sanctuary. On 10 March 1862, with no proofs to correct until the next steamboat came in, he invited ten children he had picked up in town to come and have a meal at Hauteville House. Mary Sixty was asked to prepare a healthy feast, which meant meat and wine, even for children. The first dîner des pauvres, or ‘poor dinner’, was a great success. Hugo decided to repeat it every other Tuesday, and the group of youngsters at table beneath the benign smile of the whiskery patriarch more than doubled in size. News of the initiative spread, and the idea was taken up first in London, then almost everywhere else. By 1867, according to Graham Robb, ‘60,000 urchins were being fed in the Parish of Marylebone alone along lines set out by Victor Hugo’.2 The tradition of bringing poor children from school to eat lunch in a middle-class household ultimately led to the introduction of canteens in publicly funded schools. Free school lunches, which became a universal right in Britain and France only two generations ago, can be traced back directly to the initiative Hugo took at St Peter Port in the brief respite the mail boat schedule gave him from the unending task of correcting proofs for Part III of Les Misérables.