The Novel of the Century

by David Bellos

  Charles Dickens faced the same issue in England, and solved it in an original way. He drafted shortened ‘reading aloud’ versions of his best-loved novels and went on tour around the country, entrancing audiences in village halls with three-hour one-man performances of Great Expectations, The Old Curiosity Shop and Oliver Twist. Dickens was a gifted amateur actor and a wonderful mimic of the accents his characters have.38 Hugo could not follow his example, however. For one thing, he refused to set foot in France; and despite his long experience of writing for the stage, he did not have a great speaking voice or theatrical ambitions for himself. All the same, he knew that the surest way of reaching a genuinely popular audience was through the stage.

  Enjoyment of theatre, magically recreated by Marcel Carné in Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise), was one of the few uncontentious bonds between the social classes in nineteenth-century France. Audiences did not consist of the well-heeled and often grey-haired folk you find watching Broadway shows nowadays. With the wealthy in the boxes, ordinary folk in the pit and rabble up in the gods, theatrical crowds were noisy, irreverent and socially diverse – in Les Misérables, even Gavroche goes to see the latest plays. To reach the real-life urchins of Second Empire France, Hugo’s novel had to become a play.

  Because it was accessible to all social classes, however, theatre was subject to more stringent censorship than books, and all new plays had to obtain official approval before they could be staged. Given Hugo’s position as an irreducible enemy of Napoleon III and the furore in the press over the political meaning of Les Misérables, approval for a stage version was not likely to be obtained as long as the Second Empire stood.

  Hugo nonetheless encouraged Charles to try to make a play from the novel, which might serve as a launch-pad for the literary career his son hoped to have. Charles thought he might circumvent the censors by creating a show in two parts, to be performed on successive evenings, like Part I and Part II of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. The first part, presenting Myriel, Valjean and Fantine would have a chance of getting past the censors, he thought, and if it were a huge success then it might make it difficult for the authorities to refuse approval for the sequel containing the more politically sensitive barricade scenes.

  Hugo himself did not like the two-part idea. Charles’s draft script was nonetheless submitted not long after the appearance of the last volumes of the book. The censors read it straight away and decided they did not like Charles’s Part I either. The Paris première of ‘Fantine’, originally scheduled for September 1862, was promptly cancelled. A Brussels theatre stepped in to the breach, but the director insisted on a unitary play to be performed in one sitting. Adèle nagged Charles to fall into line with his father, who demanded in no uncertain terms that his son return to Guernsey and take guidance on how to redraft the script. Charles dug in his heels. He still thought that the glory of dramatizing his father’s greatest work would be the real start of his own career and he wanted to do it twice over, but he was forced to give in in the end. At Hugo’s request, Paul Meurice took a month out of his own work in November 1862 to serve as script-doctor to a play that would appear over Charles’s sole name. Les Misérables. Drame was ready just in time for its Brussels première on 3 January 1863.

  It has a Prologue presenting the story of Valjean and Myriel in Digne. Part I, ‘Fantine’, is a sequence of tableaux taking the story from Montfermeil to Montreuil-sur-Mer and Arras for the courtroom scene, then back to Montfermeil for Valjean’s rescue of Cosette and to Paris for a short convent scene. Part II, ‘Valjean’, contains a highly compressed version of the romance between Marius and Cosette, the ambush in the Gorbeau tenement and a more developed barricade scene. Finally, the Epilogue, jumping right over the marriage of the young lovers, brings us straight to Valjean’s confession and death.

  Any number of other selections of material from Hugo’s overstuffed novel can be imagined, but nearly all subsequent adapters for stage and screen have followed Charles’s basic decisions about what to cut. The dramatic tradition of Les Misérables characteristically omits: (1) the history of Myriel before meeting Valjean; (2) the story of Fantine before she entrusts Cosette to the Thénardiers; (3) the Battle of Waterloo; (4) Valjean’s second imprisonment and his dramatic escape from the Orion; (5) almost all of the Petit-Picpus episode, including Valjean’s escape in a coffin; (6) all of the story of Marius before he meets the ‘Friends of the ABC’. Indicated as ‘optional’ scenes in the printed version of Charles’s script are the episodes of Petit-Gervais and a short scene set in the convent. As a consequence of the omission of the Waterloo section, the narrative link between Thénardier and Marius disappears, and the hold-up in the Gorbeau tenement becomes a much simpler affair. Obviously, you can’t get it all in a three-hour play, but it is striking how few of the later film and stage versions of the novel significantly alter the selection made by Charles. That does not mean that he got it right first time. It means that adapters of the novel have constantly maintained and renewed a tradition of reading that is almost as old as Les Misérables itself.

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  Charles Hugo’s version is also partly responsible for the now seemingly ineradicable confusion among illustrators and rewriters of Les Misérables as to which of the several French revolutions its barricades defend. The anachronisms are first introduced when Valjean is released from the grip of Thénardier and his gang in the Gorbeau tenement. As Javert moves to make his arrest, a revolutionary crowd bursts into the room, led by Feuilly, the fan-maker ‘Friend of the ABC’. He orders Javert to release his prisoner.

  FEUILLY (to Valjean): Citizen, you are free.

  GAVROCHE: On behalf of Citizen Éponine …

  FEUILLY: Liberty arrests nobody today.

  GAVROCHE (to JAVERT, who is shaking from head to toe): Long Live the Rights of Man!

  Is this 1789, 1792 or 1848? Hard to tell … But it is certainly not 1832, when no republic emerged to make Frenchmen into citizens or to proclaim afresh the Rights of Man. Charles made a parallel alteration to the denouement of the barricade scene. In the novel, Enjolras and Grantaire, the last two men standing, cry, ‘Long Live the Republic,’ before being executed by firing squad in the back room of the Café Corinthe.39 In Charles’s dramatization (in which the character of Grantaire doesn’t appear) Enjolras leans out of a window to shout, ‘Long Live Liberty,’ before the set is destroyed by an artillery assault.

  From the acorns Charles planted through these inserted keywords so as to link the novel’s historical setting to a longer tradition of revolutionary acts have grown hybrid ideas that merge Gavroche with the student in Delacroix’s commemoration of July 1830 and dust-jacket designs showing his Goddess of Liberty brandishing a red flag instead of the tricolour … For Hugo, the uprising of 5 June 1832 was best suited to talking about the meaning of revolution in general. Confusing it with other revolutions by appropriating their icons and keywords irritates scholarly guardians of the past, but at bottom it only extends Hugo’s own transformation of history into myth.

  Charles’s play was not a success when it opened in Brussels. There was not a single notice in the Paris press, and it had few mentions even in Belgium. The flop must have been at least half-expected at Hauteville House. Neither Hugo nor any other family member made the trip to see its opening night.

  The half-title page of the published edition of Les Misérables. Drame states that the play had been licensed for performance in French in Liège, Antwerp, Hamburg, Berlin, Pest, Stockholm, Lisbon and Madrid, making it seem it was a European success. But it’s far from sure that any of these licences were taken up. The influence of the first full dramatization of Les Misérables comes from the fact that it was printed and published as a book by Albert Lacroix and remained accessible to later adapters for many decades.

  A far more spectacular theatrical career awaited Valjean, Fantine, Cosette and Javert outside of the French-speaking world. First of all in Italy, where dramatized scenes from the earlier parts of th
e novel went on tour with a travelling company in June 1862 even before the last volumes had appeared, and then, repeatedly, in England. This may be because Wraxall’s translation was both awful and too expensive for most people to read, but, whatever the cause, new adaptations roll by in theatrical journals year by year: Charity, by Charles H. Hazlewood, ‘founded on Victor Hugo’s story of Les Misérables’, London, November 1862; Jean Valjean, by Harry Seymour, London, 1863; Out of Evil Cometh Good, by Clarance Holt, Birmingham, 1867; The Barricade, also by Clarance Holt, London, 1869; Atonement by W. Muskerry, London and Manchester, 1872. These titles, like many others that can be found in various parts of the English-speaking world – Fantine and Cosette in Boston in 1869 and 1875, The Yellow Passport, performed in Guernsey in 1868 and then in Sydney, Australia, in 1874, then retitled Saint or Sinner and A Convict Martyr, staged in Australia and California – show that the narrative elements of Part I ‘Fantine’ provided most of the material for the English-language stage, and that the ‘revolutionary’ parts were nearly always ignored.

  Les Misérables also reached audiences in other foreign languages through the stage. In Yiddish a play adapted from the novel under the title Der Giber in Keyten, ‘The Hero in Chains’, was performed in Warsaw in 1911; other versions were staged in Vilna and printed as play scripts too.40 One of these had a musical accompaniment, but that was already nothing new. The first musical of Les Misérables was performed in Philadelphia within weeks of the novel’s completion in American English, in January 1863: Fantine or The Fate of a Grisette by Albert Cassedy, with a musical score by Charles Koppitz.

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  In 1895, Louis and Auguste Lumière perfected a device for recording moving images, which they called the cinématographe. They used it as a documentary device and shot short reels of a train arriving in a station, a crowd leaving a factory and, soon after, street scenes in cities all over the world. In 1897, they recorded an act by a quick-change artiste from the Paris music-hall. In this historic sixty-second clip, an unknown performer uses wigs, hats, scarves, posture and expression to represent in rapid succession Victor Hugo, Jean Valjean, Thénardier, Marius and Javert.41 It is the first entrance into the cinema not just of Les Misérables, but of fiction of any kind. Ever since, Hugo’s novel has fed the film industries of almost every country in the world, and Les Misérables has become the most frequently adapted novel of all time. Some of these films are monuments in the history of cinema: Albert Capellani’s 1912 version in four parts and six hours; Henri Fescourt’s even longer silent film in 1925 (recently restored and performed to the original score at a gala in Toulouse); and the first sound adaptation by Raymond Bernard, in 1934. Adaptations of parts of the novel have appeared in Hollywood every few years since 1909, and the long tradition of filming of Les Misérables in East Asia began in Japan in 1923 (Ah! Ah! Mujo, by Kiyochiko Ushihara) and includes Tomu Ushida’s Jan Barujan (1931), a multi-authored Remizeraburu in 1950, animated cartoon versions by Keiji Hisoaka in 1980 and Koichi Motohashi (Shojou Cosetta, 2007) and other movies made in Korea and India. Overall, there are now at least sixty-five screen versions of Les Misérables in languages as varied as Russian, Farsi, Turkish, Tamul and Arabic as well as in French, English and Japanese.42 Though they have made all kinds of historical mistakes and often misrepresented the beliefs and attitudes of its author, film-makers have lent Victor Hugo a powerful hand in bringing his story to the global audience he sought.

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  ‘Your great work is at an end, dear master,’ Lacroix wrote to Hugo in June 1862 on receipt of the last corrected proofs from Hauteville House.

  I’ve got so accustomed to living with your mind and to providing my workers with their daily tasks that I find it painful to utter the word: end. Why does that have to be everything? Why must Valjean die, why must Cosette and Marius abandon us…?43

  He was the first but far from the last reader of Hugo’s 365 chapters to wish there were many more. And there could have been, even then. In the extraordinary long burst of creative energy that kept Hugo writing throughout 1861 and the first half of 1862 all kinds of details, descriptions, analyses and loops in the plot were added, but there were some new and old inventions that were cut away at the last minute. The ‘Reliquat des Misérables’, a large folder of notes, materials, drafts and ‘leftovers’, contains alternative versions of various parts of the story, and a substantial extension of it too, in seven supplementary chapters that would have followed on from III.7.ii.

  This dropped underworld episode consists of an account of the practice of ‘marriage’ between prisoners and women outside the walls. Every prison community has an artist, Hugo says, who draws a bouquet of flowers for a group of inmates. The flowers are numbered by each prisoner’s cell. The flower-picture finds its way to the women’s detention centre at Saint-Lazare, and responses come back by way of a secret mail service to inform the senders ‘that Palmyra has chosen the tuberose, that Fanny has fallen for the azalea, and that Séraphine has adopted the geranium’.44 The bandits identified by the flower and therefore by their cell-number now have wives, for the women, whose detention was usually not very long, considered themselves married to men they did not know and might well never see. All for a flower! ‘You think it’s funny? You are wrong. It is worthy of awe.’45 The story of these ‘flowers of evil’ leads into an essay on the mysteries of the human heart and the ‘black zone’ at the heart of Paris, where we return to the criminal part of the plot of Les Misérables. Claquesous, Gueulemer and Babet, three of Thénardier’s sinister accomplices in the Patron-Minette gang, are the ‘flower-husbands’ of Dahlia, Zéphine and Favourite, the three companions of Fantine in her life as a kept woman before 1817. In the twelve years since we last saw them, these young women have withered away, stepping down from circle to circle into the ‘seventh ring of hell’.46

  Hugo cut the ‘flower chapters’ during the frantic preparation of the manuscript of Part III in February 1862, considering it more suited to joining the philosophical preface he’d written the previous summer as the core of another work on ‘The Soul’, which was never pursued.47 However, the existence of a vanished fragment that neatly connects two widely separated parts of the narrative invites us to wonder if other interstitial links might have been invented by Hugo – and whether we could imagine any ourselves.

  Every story ever told makes the same invitation, and even the most perfectly crafted plays and novels can prompt later writers to fill in the gaps. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead offers a sidelight on the strange goings-on at Elsinore from the angle of two characters Shakespeare hardly mentions; Raymond Jean’s Mademoiselle Bovary imagines the life of Berthe, the daughter that Emma (and her author) neglected; and Kamel Daoud’s recent Meursault Investigation fills in the back-story of the Arab victim that Camus didn’t even name in The Outsider. Hugo’s much vaster novel may seem to fill in every detail on its oversize canvas, but the multiplicity of its characters, events, settings and topics also allows for an infinite number of connections between them that readers may wish to make up.

  Victor Hugo’s descendants, acting in defence of the ‘moral right’ of their ancestor to control the use made of his book in France even long after the end of copyright protection, refused to allow the publication of explicit continuations of the story of Marius and Cosette. They ignored Laura Kalpakian’s Cosette in 1995 because it was published in the USA, but they took François Cérésa to court for Cosette ou le temps des illusions and Marius ou le fugitif, both published in 2001. The case went to appeal and was finally resolved in 2008 in favour of the artistic freedom of writers to reuse characters and write new stories about them even from the most sacred of literary texts. But these explicitly commercial works, like Susan Fletcher’s A Little in Love (2014), which retells and extends the story of Éponine, aren’t the best evidence of the power of Les Misérables to grow new branches of its plot.

  Inuki Takako’s ‘super-deformed’ manga, Aloette na uta (‘The
Song of Aloette’) retells the story of Cosette under the thumb of the Thénardiers at Montfermeil, and of Fantine’s expulsion from the factory in Montreuil. The artist adapts it to a Japanese perspective and also introduces an additional character, a Western-looking priest who advises Cosette to be patient and submissive, for suffering is the human lot. The drawings bring Cosette’s suffering at the hands of a quite hideous Mme Thénardier close to torture, and by the end the poor girl is so badly harried and thrashed that she stops being able to speak and to hear. The final large panel has a narrator intervene to explain that late-onset autism was quite common in nineteenth-century Europe, so harshly were children treated then. This is an entirely original addition to Hugo’s conception of what suffering may do to a child, but it is also more than what it seems. For a specialist in modern Japan, it is a coded protest at the way Japanese children are given excessive workloads at school nowadays, at the risk of driving them out of their minds.48

  Nowadays, however, Les Misérables grows and changes not just in sequels and adaptations for radio, film, television and graphic books, but in the vast and unpoliced universe of amateur writing on the web. Fan fiction consists of short texts that modify, expand or fill in the gaps of a published work, written by mostly young readers who, like Lacroix in 1862, don’t want the stories they love to have a final shape and a definitive end. The leading ‘vehicles’ for writing of this kind are children’s and young adult novels like Harry Potter, Twilight and Lord of the Rings, so it is quite surprising – and gratifying – to see that Les Misérables is among them. Some fan fictioneers try to answer quite interesting questions. For example: what crimes did Javert solve between his arrest of Valjean in 1823 and his pursuit of him through Paris in 1829? What were the names of the nieces and nephews for whom Valjean stole the loaf in 1796, and what happened to them after that? Exactly how did Thénardier get from the prison of La Force on to the roof of a ruined house in Rue du Roi-de-Sicile? (Hugo says ‘that is what no one has been able to explain or understand’, IV.6.iii, 872).