The Novel of the Century

by David Bellos

  16.

  A Story without End

  Translators were standing by from day one with quills at the ready to start on the monumental task of getting the book into Spanish, English, German and Italian. Hugo’s use of dozens of difficult words, his heady rhetoric and frequent recourse to Latin were not the only problems they faced. Les Misérables gives an outsize role to the French language and to the historical, moral, political and intellectual role of France. It was not obvious how the ‘Francocentrism’ of Les Misérables could be represented in countries that viewed French assertiveness as the main cause of trouble in the world for the previous hundred years.

  Hugo’s confidence that France was the moral and intellectual powerhouse of the world rested on a long tradition. Medieval monarchs had seen themselves as the heirs of ancient glories through the operation of translatio imperii. Chrétien de Troyes gave the notion an airing in the prologue to Cligès, written around 1176 CE. Seven hundred years later, Enjolras blurts it out again: ‘What Greece began is worthy of being completed by France’ (V.1.v, 1,069). Again, in the narrator’s voice: ‘The torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, was first carried by Greece. Who passed it on to Italy, who passed it on to France. Divine trail-blazing nations! Vitai lampada tradunt!’ (V.1.xx, 1,112).

  The mock-classical monuments that Napoleon erected (including the elephant that got no further than a plasterboard model in Place de la Bastille) were style-coded reminders of translatio imperii from Ancient Rome to the French Empire of the day. Opposed to the ‘Corsican upstart’ because of his suppression of civil liberties, Enjolras is even more Francocentric than Bonaparte was: ‘France needs no Corsica to be great. France is great by virtue of being France. Quia nominor Leo’ (III.4.v, 608).25

  Hugo gives the glorification of France by genealogical descent an entirely new twist, however. As it was the only nation (apart from America, which Hugo pointedly leaves out) to have remade itself through a revolution, the Revolution of 1789 was what made France the centre of the world. ‘Liberty radiates from France. It is a solar phenomenon. None but the blind can fail to se it! Bonaparte said so’ (II.2.iii, 336). Les Misérables gives the first full formulation of this now conventional explanation of the exceptional status of France, alluded to in campaign statements and presidential speeches on all sides of the political horizon: ‘France is meant to stir the soul of nations, not to stifle it. Since 1792 all revolutions in Europe have been the French Revolution’ (II.2.iii, 336). That is why ‘noble men who throughout the universe fight for the great enterprise … [have] their eyes fixed on France’. Hugo rejects and derides the Bourbon doctrine of the divine right of kings, but he comes close to adopting a similar idea on behalf of ‘the magnificent and irresistibly human movement begun on the fourteenth of July 1789’, stating: ‘The French Revolution is an act of God’ (V.1.xx, 1,110).

  * * *

  If Les Misérables is the ‘drama of the nineteenth century’, then the nineteenth century must be markedly French. Hugo was not a drum-beating nationalist, however. What put France at the forefront of modern history were not its national qualities, but the generous ideas of its revolutionary motto, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Fraught with unforeseen consequences and abuses as they may be, these universal values are the ones that Hugo stood by.

  Diluted into a national motto, these values may now seem banal, but in 1862 they were aspirations that had yet to be realized in any stable way. No European polity existed that even attempted to balance freedom with equality and both with a fraternal or unifying social bond – certainly not the British, Russian, Ottoman, or Austrian Empires, let alone France under Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. If they have become self-evidently desirable aims in the developed world nowadays, it is because they have been fought for again and again and made meaningful to mass audiences through works of art like Les Misérables.

  The problem for outsiders is that Hugo promotes these universal values as specifically French gifts to the world. The publisher of the first Italian translation, for example, doubted whether the lengthy essays on French history and politics were needed to make the book a success abroad. ‘There are some Italians, rather a lot in fact, who say: “This book, Les Misérables, is a French book. It is not about us. Let the French read it as history, let us read it as a novel.”’ Hugo disagreed and pulled out all the rhetorical stops in his grandiose reply:

  I do not know whether [my book] will be read by all, but I wrote it for everyone. It speaks to England as much as to Spain, to Italy as much as to France, to Germany as much as to Ireland, to republics with slaves as well as to empires with serfs. Social problems go beyond borders. The sores of the human race, these running sores that cover the globe, don’t stop at red or blue lines drawn on the map. Wherever men are ignorant and desperate, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children suffer for want of instruction or a warm hearth, Les Misérables knocks on the door and says: Open up, I have come for you.

  …

  Speaking for myself, I write for all, with a deep love for my country, but without preoccupying myself with France more than any other nation. As I grow older I grow simpler and become increasingly a patriot of humanity.

  That is the trend of our times and the law of radiation of the French Revolution. To respond to the growing enlargement of civilization, books must stop being exclusively French, Italian, German, Spanish or English, and become European; more than that, human. From this follows a new logic in art, and new constraints on creation that change everything, even conventions of taste and language, which must expand, like everything else.

  Some French critics have reproached me for being outside what they call French taste. I am delighted and I hope their praise is deserved.26

  It is hard to explain, but it is certainly true that the ‘Franco-French’ propaganda of Les Misérables and Hugo’s reliance on the ancient concept of translatio imperii, his detailed adjustments to the geography of Paris, his thoughtful discussion of the character of King Louis-Philippe, his essays on the Battle of Waterloo and the etymologies of slang have not interfered with the appeal of Les Misérables to readers of all nations. What the novel did was to make France itself seem like a beacon of hope to the subjects of feudal regimes and to foster such ‘galloping Francophilia’27 among the dispossessed as to make Paris the destination of their dreams.

  * * *

  The release of the full novel took three months in all: ‘Fantine’ came out on 4 April, ‘Cosette’ and ‘Marius’ formed a four-volume batch six weeks later, in mid-May; and another six weeks elapsed until the final four-volume set of Parts IV and V, went on sale on 30 June 1862. Lacroix did his sums and reckoned that 100,000 copies of the first two volumes had been sold: roughly 40,000 from the legal editions printed in Paris, Brussels and Leipzig; at least 25,000 from the twenty-two pirated editions he knew about; and 30,000 in the nine different translations he had authorized, including a Spanish-language edition printed in Paris, volume by volume, with a time-lag of barely six weeks.28 But the true dissemination of Les Misérables in the first few months of its public life was wider still than what these record-breaking numbers suggest.

  The United States did not recognize the copyright of non-citizens, so Les Misérables could be reprinted in French without fear of penalty – and it was, instantly, by Lassalle, in New York (the size of his print-run is not known, but it must have been large to judge by the number of copies still available second-hand). The novel could also be translated in the USA without reference or payment to the author or publisher of the original. Fantine: A Novel, translated by Charles Wilbour, appeared in New York as early as June 1862; Cosette came out in July, Marius and Saint-Denis in November, and Jean Valjean in December. The five volumes had a series title, Les Misérables, followed by a subtitle, The Wretched, in parentheses, on the title page. Sales of Wilbour’s translation ran into the hundreds of thousands. One retail order for 25,000 copies was reported to be the largest order ever placed for a book in Amer
ica, and I would guess it was the largest in the world.29 The extraordinary speed of publication may suggest this was a piece of hack work, but Charles Wilbour was no ordinary translator. A classicist trained at Brown University, he was a journalist, then a businessman and finally an Egyptologist of great renown who discovered the first Elephantine Papyri, which are now the greatest treasure of the Brooklyn Museum. Translating Les Misérables in six months was only one of his achievements.

  Wilbour’s translation was printed in two columns on broadsheet pages suitable for splitting into parts, and pamphlet-sized sections with coloured, comic-like illustrated cover sheets went on sale for a nickel or a dime within weeks. This is the form in which Les Misérables first reached the mass audience that Hugo sought – but not at all where he imagined it would be found. In Richmond, Virginia, the cultural centre of the separatist confederacy of slave-owning states, where the copyright laws of the Union were not observed, a pirate edition was launched straight away. However, it was not quite the same as the one Wilbour had produced. The preface, signed ‘A. F.’, makes the changes clear:

  It is proper to state here that whilst every chapter and paragraph in any way connected with the story has been scrupulously preserved, several long, and it must be confessed rather rambling disquisitions on political and other matters of a purely local character, of no interest whatever on this side of the Atlantic, and exclusively intended for French readers of the book, have not been included in this reprint. A few scattered sentences reflecting on slavery – which the author, with strange inconsistency, has thought fit to introduce into a work written mainly to denounce the European systems of labour as gigantic instruments of tyranny and oppression – it has also been deemed advisable to strike out … The extraneous matter omitted has not the remotest connection with the characters or incidents of the novel, and the absence of a few anti-slavery paragraphs will hardly be complained of by Southern readers. 30

  Consequently, where Hugo had written and Yankees read ‘I voted for the downfall of the tyrant; that is to say, for the abolition of prostitution for woman, of slavery for man, of night for the child,’ Confederates were offered ‘I voted for the annihilation of the tyrant; that is to say, for the abolition of prostitution for woman, of degeneracy for man, and of night for the child’.31

  This ‘localization’ of Hugo’s novel to the views and sensitivities of slave-owning states is a travesty of the author’s position and of some of the meanings of his work. What is left if you suppress Hugo’s firm opposition to capital punishment, to racial prejudice and to slavery? Quite a lot, it turns out. An old soldier recalls:

  How we wept with Fantine and Cosette! How we loved the good Mayor Madeline, all the dearer to us because he had once been Valjean! How we hated Javert, that cold and stony pillar of ‘authority’! How we starved with Marius and waxed indignant in contemplating his frigid grandfather! How we fought over and over the wonderful battle of Waterloo, and compared it with other contests of which we knew!

  Certainly no book ever achieved the popularity of that most marvellous picture of life. [Confederate soldiers] … formed groups around the camp-fire and the man who was deemed to have the greatest elocutionary development was appointed reader for the assembly.32

  Sounding out Hugo’s untranslated title in a southern drawl, those campfire readers turned Les Misérables not into Lez Miz, but into Lees Miserables. A tiny accident in diction – the lengthening of a vowel that is often lengthened in English in the pronunciation of ‘the’ – made a pun that prompted powerful self-recognition. Yes, Hugo’s book was really about them, the miserable soldiers of Robert E. Lee! That is how they now thought of themselves: ‘I certainly laid down that night one of Lee’s miserables, as we used to term ourselves after reading Victor Hugo’s great novel.’33

  In this peculiar way, a novel appealing for sympathy with the outcast and damned became the collective nickname of doomed men who saw themselves as oppressed. Seen from the French side with politics in mind, it would be comical if it weren’t so abhorrent. Yet, as we have seen, Hugo’s novel explicitly overrides the distinction between the destitute, the despicable and the hapless, merging them into a single collective that reconfigures the language of nineteenth-century France. ‘There is a point where the poor and the wicked become mixed up and lumped together in the one fateful word: les misérables’ [p. 671, adapted]. Why should ragged soldiers be excluded from this new community of the downtrodden? The miserable men who fought to preserve slavery in the American South did not get the meaning of the novel entirely wrong.

  * * *

  The international dissemination of Hugo’s novel was not plain sailing on every one of the seven seas, and some countries had to wait a long time for the novel to arrive on their shores. Lacroix sold the Russian rights to a publisher in St Petersburg, but the tsar’s censors banned the translation of a work seen as inimical to the imperial regime. A very short abridgment was permitted in 1870, but the whole text only became available in Russian in 1892.34 In China, the delay was even greater. A revolutionary Buddhist monk, Su Manshu, and one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu, first began to retell the adventures of Jin Huajin (Jean Valjean) in classical Chinese in issues of the Shanghai Daily National in 1903, starting with I.2, not I.1. Between chapters I.1.v and I.1.ix (chapters vi–viii were omitted) they inserted seven episodes of their own invention, introducing Chinese characters commenting on the events in Bali (Paris) and making numerous points about the need for revolutionary change. However, when they got as far as the episode of Petit-Gervais – which they altered almost beyond recognition – the journal was shut down, and the project abandoned. Twenty years later, the husband-and-wife team of Fang Yu and Li Dan began again, translating Les Misérables from scratch, and Part I came out in 1932. Shortly after, the publisher’s office was bombed, and much of the remainder of the book went up in flames; other parts of the manuscript had been sent to Hong Kong but disappeared in the post. It was not until 1954 that the translators were able to resume the project, or rather, to begin it all over again. A new version of Parts I and II appeared at long last in 1959 – and then the Cultural Revolution intervened. Like many Western-educated intellectuals in Mao’s China, the translators of Les Misérables were imprisoned and all their manuscripts were burned. On their release in 1971, Li Dan and Fang Yu, now in their seventies, went back to work. Li Dan died in 1977 but Fang Yu carried on on her own, completing Parts III and IV and finally, Part V. The full Chinese translation of Les Misérables appeared in 1984, 122 years late.35

  The British translation, like the American one, appeared before the end of 1862. The translator, Sir Charles Lascelles Wraxall, had been suggested to Hugo by his friend Alphonse Esquiros, an exiled French writer and politician who was teaching history at Greenwich Military Academy at that time. Wraxall, who lived mostly abroad, was a military historian who had his own views about what really happened at Waterloo. He didn’t hesitate to correct Hugo on such matters, and when he came across passages he didn’t approve of, he left them out. There is hardly a chapter in the book that is free of editorial interventions, ranging in length from substantial omission to dropped lines and words.36 The version of Les Misérables published in London by Hurst and Blackett was a disaster on every score.

  Unfortunately, the publishers had bought proper translation rights from Lacroix, so only Wraxall’s hodgepodge could be sold legally in the British Isles. It came out as a conventional ‘triple-decker’ at half a guinea a volume, an expensive format intended mainly for the stock of circulating libraries. When the inadequacies of Wraxall’s work were revealed, the publishers did not make corrections or commission an alternative version. They did not print new editions in cheaper format either. British readers would have to wait a long time to read the whole of Les Misérables.

  The egregious amendments of Lascelles Wraxall became an insular convention that lasted until the twenty-first century. Norman Denny’s 1955 translation, the standard versi
on available in the UK for fifty years, takes the books relating to the convent of Petit-Picpus (II.7) and the long essay on slang (IV.7) out of their right places and hides them away in an appendix at the end of the book. The full text of Les Misérables in the right order of reading was not available to British readers until 2008, in a version by the Australian writer Julie Rose. The Chinese had beaten them to it by twenty-three years.

  * * *

  As he said in his letter to his Italian publisher, Hugo wanted Les Misérables ‘to be read by all’. The ten-volume first edition in French cost sixty francs and was far too expensive for ordinary folk to buy for themselves. Some workers’ clubs pooled resources to buy one copy per twelve and then drew lots for who would get the first read.37 And as not everyone could read, chapters from Les Misérables were recited every night in cafés and homes throughout the land. The passion for Hugo’s story was almost universal, especially among the poor, but the work could not be got to all by these means alone.