The Novel of the Century

by David Bellos

  Most of these ‘ficlets’, as they are called, pursue the idea implicit in Hugo’s work that in some sense the dead live on. That is also a feature of Shojou Cosetta, a 52-part Japanese animated television cartoon in which an eternal Gavroche becomes Cosette’s best friend.49 Imagining that Éponine, Enjolras, Grantaire and so on survive the barricade or else return from the beyond, fan fictioneers typically reinsert their closest generational relatives in the novel into circumstances that belong to them: Café Musain may become a Starbucks where Enjolras and Grantaire discover they are gay; Marius may find himself torn between a loyal wife and a passion for Éponine; or Enjolras may pursue a romance with the undead Éponine – a formerly popular ‘ship’ that received its own ‘smush name’, ‘Enjonine’. Since then, there’s been a wave of ‘alternative universe’ rewritings that have nominally resurrected revolutionaries discussing not the political issues of the nineteenth century but questions of greater relevance to the writers themselves. Chief among them at the moment is the representation of ‘marginalized groups’, so the ‘Friends of the ABC’ now figure on sites like An Archive of Our Own as a rainbow of different racial, sexual and gender identities. I am told by those who navigate this underground ocean that a fictional addition to Les Misérables presenting a boy–girl romance between non-black youngsters with no physical handicap would now be considered by denizens of the deep as a positively reactionary political act.50

  Indirectly, the repoliticization of the sentimental potential of Hugo’s story points to a singular feature of the novel itself. Dickens’s novels of the London poor ask us to respect and to love characters with physical and mental disabilities of many kinds: Amy Dorritt suffers from dwarfism, for example, Miss Flyte has a wandering mind, Tiny Tim has a crippled leg, and Jenny Wren is a wheelchair case. There is nothing of the kind in Les Misérables. All of Hugo’s characters have all their limbs and all their faculties too. I’m not sure why this is so, for the misérables of Paris must have been afflicted by these kinds of misfortune just as much as the London poor. If there are some kinds of outcast that Hugo inadvertently casts out, we might think of saying thank you to amateur scribblers who have brought them back into the fold.

  17.

  The Meaning of Les Misérables

  Despite the complexity of its plot, the crowd of characters it puts on stage and the range of topics it covers, Les Misérables conveys a central message that arises exclusively from the actions of its hero, Jean Valjean.

  In the course of his life he overcomes many physical obstacles and copes with three personal crises: his last unnecessary act as a thug when he robs Petit-Gervais of his coin; the temptation to let his ‘brother’ Champmathieu take the rap for him in Montreuil; and his jealous anger in Paris when a young man arises to rob him of his beloved adoptee, Cosette. Muscular strength, acrobatic skills learned in prison and an ability to tolerate pain allow him to release Fauchelevent from under his cart, to climb the convent wall, to escape from the hold-up and to carry Marius through the sewers. But what resources does he have that allow him to overcome the moral obstacles in his path?

  Hugo gives several answers, and allows readers to make a choice.

  Valjean’s pursuit of a moral life arises from his strange encounter with a righteous man. In a reversal of Mephistopheles’ pact with Dr Faust, Myriel purchases the ex-prisoner’s soul with an unsolicited and almost inconceivable gift. Valjean makes no promise in return, yet the bishop tells him he has one to keep: ‘Don’t forget … you promised to use this money to become an honest man’ (I.2.xii, 99). Valjean is hardly himself when he strides away from Digne, for he is in thrall to a spirit not his own. He rebels against such possession when he comes across Petit-Gervais. He does a bad deed, so it seems, solely in order to be himself. But as soon as the mountain lad has run off in fright, the spirit of Myriel reasserts itself over him. Around three the next morning the coach driver coming in from Grenoble ‘saw a man who looked as if he was praying, kneeling on the ground in the darkness at Monseigneur Bienvenu’s front door’ (I.2.xiii, 106). Kneeling is recognized as a ritual of contrition in every corner of the globe. The reawakening of Valjean’s moral fibre is thus presented in these early chapters of the book as a story of possession, in a vaguely religious light.

  Taking his new name ‘Madeleine’ from La Madelaine-sous-Montreuil, a hamlet nestled beneath the ramparts of the town at the end of his road,51 Valjean opens a factory and is soon rich enough to give alms and to fund education and health for the poor, in emulation of the charitable actions of Bishop Bienvenu. He is especially attentive to lads from Savoie, presumably because he hopes to come across Petit-Gervais and make amends for having stolen his two-franc coin.52 From then on, Mayor Madeleine has only two aims, ‘to conceal his name, and to sanctify his life’ (I.7.iii, 202). However, when he has to decide what to do about the charges against Champmathieu, he cannot rely only on ‘possession’ and ‘emulation’, the two resources the novel has given him up to that point. The tussle between his commitment to the community and his obligation to rescue an innocent man can’t be resolved without recourse to values that override them both. His night of doubt begins when he extinguishes the light.

  He had the feeling that someone could see him.

  Someone? Who?

  … What he wanted to strike blind was staring at him. His conscience.

  His conscience, that is to say God. (I.7.iii, 204)

  The French-Russian-Polish novelist Romain Gary, whose entire literary project grew out of an early reading of Les Misérables,53 also gives a central role to an ‘inner witness’ guiding his path – not the divinity, in his account, but the all-seeing eye of his mother, even from beyond the grave.54 We too can set aside Hugo’s invocation of God if we wish and understand conscience as moral self-awareness. The looking eye belongs interchangeably to the bishop (‘all the more present for being dead’, 208) gazing steadily at him, and to himself. Conscience dictates his provisional decision to turn himself in, but the words Valjean utters at this point call on a different concept of what is morally right: ‘Let’s take this course! Let’s do our duty! Let’s save this man!’

  Valjean goes round in circles for some time after this, and Hugo maintains narrative suspense and psychological veracity by not announcing in advance what Madeleine is going to do at the trial. But although he also brings in an ‘inner voice’ and allows those who wish to hear it as the voice of God, the key word laid down after ‘conscience’ in this dense and intricate chapter is duty.

  Possession, emulation, conscience and duty push Valjean in the same direction, and you could say that they’re just rhetorical variations on the same basic thing. But that thing – what makes right right and wrong wrong – is uncommonly hard to name for itself. Hugo’s variations, moreover, are handles that open doors on to a variety of different cultures. Jewish, Muslim, Protestant and Catholic believers can relate all these terms to Hugo’s own preferred source of moral discrimination, which he calls God; but in cultures where the old and the scholarly are revered, emulation (of Myriel) may seem the better guide to the righteous path; and in other frames of reference, such as Hugo’s imagination of the Ancient World, duty would be the ultimate decider. It’s not that Hugo was hedging his bets. By getting different value-systems to converge on the dilemma of one man, he created a story that can be grasped and applied far beyond nineteenth-century France.

  These alternative value-systems converge when, near the end of the story, Valjean has to decide how he should relate to his adopted daughter once she is married. As the young couple’s good fortune is his creation twice over (he rescued Cosette from Montfermeil and Marius from the barricade), he would be justified in profiting from the material and emotional comfort that the two of them could provide him in old age. If he did so, however, he would bring into their happy and respectable home the memory of his unexpunged crime and thus expose a bourgeois family to the risk of being undone.55 In a vague replay of the dilemmas of King Lear and Old Gori
ot (and of all kinds of real people who reach a certain age), Valjean needs to determine what role a redundant parent should play in the future life of a child. This conflict between what is convenient and what is right repeats the conundrum Valjean faced at the courthouse in Arras and again when he discovered the ‘bothersome blotter’ revealing that Cosette was not his alone. The problem could be translated into banal domestic terms nowadays as a decision grandparents may have to make between indulging their affection for children by moving in and crowding them out and respecting their right to get on with their lives on their own. But those are not the terms Hugo uses to analyse a crossroads dramatically exacerbated by the past and present circumstances of Jean Valjean. Accumulation and gradation structure the question: ‘What would he do? Would he impose himself … Would he remain the kind of father he had been up to now? Would he continue to say nothing?… Would he be destiny’s sinister mute alongside these two happy creatures?’ (V.6.iv, 1,239). The first abstract formulation Hugo gives of this inner struggle is ‘the fight between our selfishness and our duty’. He then casts Valjean’s deliberations as a virtual fistfight between a man and ‘the sacred shadow’, ‘the inexorable’, ‘the invisible’, which he also calls ‘conscience’. The hero lies prostrate for twelve hours (with arms outstretched, like a man taken down from a cross) grappling with the dilemma while ‘his mind slithered and soared, now like the hydra, now like the eagle’ (1,241). If you’d seen him lying rigid like that, you might have thought he was dead, but suddenly he shuddered convulsively, and you could see he was alive.

  Hugo then takes a liberty with grammar to produce an eerie formula that sticks in every reader’s mind. To express the passive voice – to say ‘it could be seen’ – French typically uses the active voice with an all-purpose impersonal pronoun, on, similar to ‘one’ in English: on voit, ‘one sees’, which I’ve translated as ‘you could see’ at the end of the last paragraph. French on isn’t anybody, it’s just a formal convenience, but Hugo treats it as if it referred to a real subject of the verb ‘to see’. He therefore asks, almost like a child, ‘Qui? On?’ (‘Who’s that? Who is “One”?’) and gives an answer that has no precedent in grown-up prose: ‘Le On qui est dans les ténèbres’ (‘The “One” who is in the shadows’). The upper-case O leaves you in no doubt that this is a way of naming God. In that case, given the issue and the way it has been articulated up to this point, Hugo’s God is an externalization of moral conscience and a guide to what duty is – unless it is the other way round. In addition, the ‘seeing eye in the shadows’ is a perfectly Romantic ghost, and quite possibly the ghost of Bishop Myriel. Possession, emulation, duty, conscience and the divine are all wrapped up in the new use Hugo found for the lowliest function word the French language has.

  * * *

  Hollywood and Broadway have grasped Les Misérables in a different way, setting duty and conscience against each other, not on parallel tracks. To simplify these simplifications: where Valjean hears the voice of conscience, Javert hears duty, which leads him not to a lesser good, but to evil. For Hugo, however, the policeman was not bad, but blind.

  As a child of convicts who becomes an inspector of the Paris police, Javert is an inspiring example of the ‘careers based on merit’ that Napoleon I’s institutional reforms were designed to promote. His sense of honour is exemplary: when he realizes (incorrectly) that he has denounced Madeleine unjustly, he insists on being dismissed from his post. His devotion to duty is not what sets him against Valjean. How could it be, when Valjean justifies the most serious choices he makes by the same value, duty? The sleuth’s tragic flaw is something else.

  Javert’s dogged persistence can be ‘translated’ into our own pet hates – bureaucratic myopia, mindless literalism, mental rigidity – but his meaning is broader than any of these. Javert’s limited vision of the social sphere is both a product and a pillar of the society he strives to uphold. For him, there are two and only two kinds of person, the well-to-do and the ne’er-do-well. Javert sees these classes as fundamentally incompatible, and his job is to keep them apart. A bourgeois lout like Bamatabois must be in the right because he belongs to the righteous class, and a streetwalker like Fantine must be in the wrong. Javert’s attitudes and actions exploit and also redouble the social injustice that legal justice served to maintain under the monarchy after 1815. The figure of Javert is marginal to the philosophical and religious dimensions of Les Misérables, but near the heart of its social and political critique. Equality is mocked when laws are understood and implemented in terms of social class. Justice is only served if the misérables are treated as equal members of the human race.

  Javert’s too-simple understanding of duty is contradicted by the noble behaviour of Valjean, who lets the police spy go free instead of shooting him dead. A member of the underclass behaving with generosity shatters Javert’s view of the world. Unable to grasp how he could reconcile himself to the existence of a man whose actions have turned his world upside down, he throws himself into the Seine. At this late stage in the narrative of Les Misérables, psychological plausibility is less vital than the symbolic meaning of the act: those who refuse reconciliation between social classes in the name of law and order are swept away. Moral progress cannot be realized as long as Javert’s two-part vision of humanity persists.

  The moral compass of Les Misérables thus spreads far beyond the history, geography, politics and economics of the world in which its story is set. The novel achieves the extraordinary feat of being at the same time an intricately realistic portrait of a specific place and time, a dramatic page-turner with masterful moments of theatrical suspense and surprise, an encyclopedia of facts and ideas and an easily understood demonstration of generous moral principles that we could do far worse than apply to our own lives.

  Epilogue: Journey’s End

  On 14 June 1862 Victor Hugo corrected the last galley of the last volume of Les Misérables and dispatched it to Brussels. He could now switch to a less demanding routine.

  He would rise at dawn and swallow two raw eggs with his coffee. In the morning he stood in his Crystal Palace, writing until eleven, then took a bath in cold water on the roof. Lunch with visitors, afternoons devoted to a variety of tasks, including home improvement and a swim in the sea, an evening meal, and long conversations into the night.

  He was always doing something with his hands. One of his diversions was to rescue the last quills he’d used to write and correct Les Misérables. He sewed them with twine on to a stiff paper backing and had the montage framed.

  Hugo had been confined to Hauteville House for nine months, and what he’d done in that time almost beggars belief. He’d turned a single-copy manuscript of a still unfinished work into the greatest publishing sensation of his age. Not single-handedly – Juliette Drouet, Julie Chenay and Victoire Estasse, Albert Lacroix and Eugène Verboekhoven, Pagnerre and the printer Claye, François-Victor and Charles had played indispensible roles, and a whole team of supporters, headed by Adèle, with Auguste Vacquerie, Paul Meurice and Noël Parfait beside her, had laboured to smooth the work’s path to success. All the same, it was his book. And now it was done.

  On 21 July, the feast of Saint-Victor and thus Hugo’s name-day, loyal Lacroix arrived in Guernsey to pay his respects and talk business about the next books of Hugo’s that he wanted to bring out. A week later, writer and publisher set off on the return journey together, accompanied by Juliette. The sea was calm, the sun was bright, and the boat ride to Southampton sheer pleasure. On to London to see the real Crystal Palace at Sydenham, and then to Brussels to stay with Lacroix before taking Juliette on another jaunt by train, riverboat and horse-drawn buggy through the Ardennes and other parts of the Low Countries that they loved so much. He got back to Brussels in mid-September for the banquet that Lacroix was going to host in his own lavish home, which sat alongside and on top of his great printing works at 2, Impasse du Parc.

  The Banquet des Misérables, held on 16 September, from 6:30 p
.m. until dawn next day, must be the biggest book bash in history. There were eighty guests, from Belgium, France, Spain, Sweden, England and Italy: friends and relatives of the publisher and author, local and foreign journalists, the speaker of the Belgian Parliament and the burgomaster of Brussels, and acquaintances who didn’t yet know they were the great-uncle of Marguerite Yourcenar and the grandfather of the publisher of Tintin. All received a signed photograph of Victor Hugo as a souvenir and were photographed in their turn before entering the dining room.56

  Adèle declined the invitation on health grounds, but Juliette crept into the hall and hid behind a curtain, ‘like Polonius behind the arras’, to watch her dear great man enjoy this moment of glory. It was still the nineteenth century.

  The horseshoe table was laid with such an amount of silver and porcelain that it struck one visitor as a ‘fairy palace, or the gold-room of King Charlemagne’. With eighty place settings and chairs the dining room was so crowded that the inward-opening windows had to stay shut. To make the atmosphere breathable in a room that filled up with a lot of hot air, Lacroix had some of the windows smashed, like the aristocratic host of the Vaubyessard Ball that Emma Bovary attends.

  I’ll skip the speeches, and readers with delicate stomachs might want to skip what follows. For the record, here are all the dishes that the author of Les Misérables could have picked at while well-wishers and hangers-on praised to the skies his political positions, his moral example and his art.

  Soupe de queue de boeuf

  (Oxtail soup)

  Petites bouchées crevettes

  (Shrimp vol-au-vent)