The Novel of the Century
Page 29
Saumon sauce genevoise
(Salmon in fish-head sauce)
Filet de boeuf béarnaise
(Beef filet with egg-and-butter sauce)
Jambon de Bayonne aux petits pois
(Gammon and peas)
Chapons de Breda à la Toulouse
(Poached chicken breasts in mushroom sauce)
Canard aux olives
(Duck with olives)
Chaud-froid de bécassines aux truffes
(Snipe in cream sauce with truffles)
Mayonnaise de homards
(Lobster mayonnaise)
Sorbet à l’ananas
(Pineapple sorbet)
*
Champignons à la provençale
(Mushrooms with garlic and parsley)
Fonds d’artichauts à l’italienne
(Artichoke hearts in lemon and vinegar)
Perdreaux truffés
(Young partridge stuffed with truffles)
Ortolans bardés
(Songbirds wrapped in bacon)
Foie gras
(Goose Liver)
Écrevisses de la Meuse
(Locally sourced crayfish)
Pêches à la Condé
(Rice cake with peaches)
Macédoine de fruits au marasquin
(Diced fruit in Maraschino)
Glaces
Fruits
Desserts
The first edition of Les Misérables is remarkably clean. Despite the lunatic logistics of dispatching and receiving every page by means of three trains and two ships, only a few typos got through, and the text you read today is almost identical to the one Hugo first held in his hands in July 1862. With one big exception, and it takes us back to the start.
Before dawn on 19 June 1815, a camp-following scavenger lifts the watch and the purse from what he takes to be a corpse in the gulley of Ohain. The scavenger is Thénardier, and the corpse belongs to the father of Marius. But the soldier is not quite dead. He awakes from his faint to thank a man who has the minimal decency to help him rise from the grave. In the manuscript, on the first and second proofs and in the first edition, Colonel Georges Pontmercy tells Thénardier his name.
Years later, at Boulevard de l’Hôpital, the man masquerading as Jondrette learns the name of his neighbour, Marius Pontmercy, but does not recognize it. Had he known it, he would certainly have tried to claim a reward for having ‘rescued’ the young man’s father. Hugo realized that his plot was incoherent at this point a few weeks after the novel was out, and he asked Lacroix to correct a key passage in III.8.xx. Where in the first edition Thénardier says, ‘I was at Waterloo, I was! I saved a general called Comte de Pontmercy,’ later editions have ‘Comte somebody-or-other’ together with an explanatory insertion straight after: ‘He told me his name but his damned voice was so weak I didn’t hear. All I heard was “merci”’ (III.8.xx, 717).
By creating asymmetry in knowledge between the crook and the spy looking through the gap in the plasterwork, Hugo fixed a huge glitch in the moral drama of the master-scene in Boulevard de l’Hôpital.
Are there other slips that he missed? A few. But I don’t want to end this book with a list of minor blunders in the all-conquering novel of the nineteenth century. If you do want to know what they are, I invite you to read Les Misérables again rather slowly and to enter all the characters’ names with the dates and locations of their actions on a chart, which will probably need to be the size of a wall. You will find far more echoes and connections that you hadn’t noticed before than glitches and mistakes. Les Misérables is very tightly knit.
Albert Lacroix’s performance as publisher and financier was flawless. He paid as he had promised: 125,000 francs on 2 December 1861; 60,000 francs on 23 February 1862; 55,000 francs on 17 June; and 60,000 francs for translation rights in a separate transaction. Les Misérables earned it all back in a matter of weeks, enabling Lacroix to settle his account with the Oppenheim Bank without over-running his time or his credit limit. He brought out Adèle’s memoir of Victor Hugo in spring 1863 and then moved his main base of operation to Paris, with branch offices in Livorno and Leipzig. He became a big shot in international publishing whilst remaining a remarkably successful talent-spotter. He published the first full edition of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), a foundational work in the transformation of French poetry; Thérèse Raquin, by a still unknown novelist called Émile Zola; and Thyl Eulenspiegel by Charles de Coster, an instant bestseller which became the first real classic of Belgian literature in the French language. But his luck ran out within a decade. He quarrelled with Hugo and then lost most of his capital in unwise investments in French property. In the 1870s, his still famous firm was a shadow of its former self.
Hugo’s daughter Adèle II absconded in 1863 in search of her fantasy lover Pinson. She wandered around the New World for several years, suffered a mental breakdown and was repatriated from Barbados in 1872. She spent the rest of her days in an institution and died in 1915. Her story was adapted for the screen by François Truffaut in L’Histoire d’Adèle H.
Charles Hugo left Guernsey in 1864 to settle in Brussels, where he married and started a family of his own. In January 1865, François-Victor also left Hauteville House for good. His mother accompanied him to Brussels and stayed there two years. Hugo stayed on the island with Juliette Drouet beside him. ‘I had to choose between my family and my work, between happiness and duty,’ Hugo said about these years of (purely relative) solitude. But I do not think he was insincere or had his tongue near his cheek when he said: ‘I chose duty. That is the law of my life.’57 It is the ‘law’ of Les Misérables.
Adèle died in Brussels in 1868. Victor accompanied her coffin to the French border but did not cross it. He had said he would not return to France while it was ruled by Louis-Napoléon and he kept his word. Juliette Drouet lived a longer life and passed away in Paris in 1883.
In 1870, Louis-Napoléon foolishly declared war on Prussia, and his armies were quickly defeated and forced to surrender at Sedan. The hated Second Empire came to an inglorious end, and Victor Hugo immediately returned to Paris via Brussels, with a retinue and baggage train that filled nine railway carriages. That winter, Paris was under siege and desperately short of food. In the spring of 1871, left-wing socialists seized power and turned the city into a commune. The reconstituted French army took six weeks to put the Commune down and exacted bloodthirsty revenge. Almost like the British royal family during the Blitz, Hugo remained steadfast in his loyalty to the city during the siege and the Commune. L’Année Terrible, his account of the events of 1870–71, remains a precious historical source.
Hugo never sold Hauteville House, and he took long breaks in Guernsey throughout the 1870s. His Toilers of the Sea is a wonderful homage to the Channel Islands. Its long introduction, though not always factually correct, remains an enchanting portrait of Normandy-in-the-Sea.
Hugo’s son Charles died of a heart attack in 1871, at the age of forty-four. His brother François-Victor died two years later.
Hugo continued to write fiction and verse into old age and was never short of an opinion on national and international affairs. He became almost a tutelary deity as the Third Republic put into practice some of his key ideas – chief among them, universal male suffrage and universal primary education. In 1883, he visited the foundry works of the sculptor Bartholdi and admired the huge new statue in course of assembly, soon to be dismantled and shipped to the United States. It was called Liberty.
The joy of Hugo’s last years were Charles’s two children, Jeanne and Georges. It is for them that he wrote one of his best-loved poetry collections, The Art of Being a Grandfather (1877).
He died in 1885 at the age of eighty-three, having outlived his sons, his wife, his lover and almost every man of his own generation.
Around two million people took part in the procession accompanying his mortal remains to the Panthéon. Never before and never since has such a
large crowd been seen in Paris. The entire city turned out to honour the playwright, the poet, the reformer and campaigner, but the vast mass of people following his hearse were paying homage to the beloved author of Les Misérables.
Statue of Victor Hugo (1913), by Jean Boucher. Candie Gardens, St Peter Port, Guernsey
France in the Nineteenth Century: A Time Line
1789
Fall of the Bastille. The French Revolution begins
1791
Declaration of the Rights of Man
1792
Execution of King Louis XVI. The First Republic
1793–4
Mass public executions of real and supposed opponents of the revolutionary regime (‘The Terror’)
1796
Napoleon Bonaparte wins the Battle of Montenotte
1799
Napoleon Bonaparte becomes First Consul
1802
Reform of the penal code
Birth of Victor Hugo
1803
Reform of the currency system
1804
Bonaparte crowned Emperor Napoleon I
The First Empire
1805
Battle of Austerlitz
1812
Napoleon’s ‘Great Army’ takes Moscow
1813
The Great Army retreats from Russia
1814
Napoleon abdicates and is exiled to Elba
Louis XVIII becomes King
The First Restoration
1815
Napoleon escapes from Elba and raises an army
The One Hundred Days
19 June: Battle of Waterloo
France occupied by foreign troops, and Louis XVIII resumes the throne
The Second Restoration
1823
France invades Spain
1824
Charles X succeeds Louis XVIII
1825
Charles X crowned at Rheims
1830
France seizes Algiers
The July Revolution (‘the three glorious days’) puts Charles X to flight
Louis-Philippe d’Orléans accedes to the throne
The July Monarchy
1832
June: a small uprising in Paris is put down in a day
1837
First railway in France
1840
Louis Daguerre makes the first photographic image
1848
February: an uprising deposes Louis-Philippe
The Second Republic
June: popular riots are put down with great violence
November: Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon I, elected president of the Republic
1851
2 December: Louis-Napoléon abolishes parliament and seizes full control
1852
Louis-Napoléon crowned Emperor Napoleon III
The Second Empire
1856
Crimean War, fought by Britain and France against Russia
1861
Nice and Savoy incorporated into the French state by plebiscite
1862
Publication of Les Misérables
1864
Red Cross founded in Geneva
1870
Franco-Prussian War. Louis-Napoléon abdicates. Siege of Paris
1871
The Commune
1875
Formal inauguration of the Third Republic, a parliamentary democracy with universal male suffrage that survived until 1940
1877
Obligatory universal free primary education introduced in France
1885
Death of Victor Hugo
1895
Louis and Auguste Lumière capture the moving image on film
Acknowledgements
My thanks go first of all to learned scholars in France and elsewhere who have revealed so much about the composition, meaning and transmission of Les Misérables, chief amongst them René Journet, Bernard Leuilliot, Guy Robert and Guy Rosa. My great debt to Hugo’s biographers, Graham Robb and Jean-Marc Hovasse, is apparent from the frequent appearance of their names in the notes where (barring forgetfulness on my part) I have acknowledged all the sources drawn on in this book.
I also owe many precious facts and ideas to old and new friends, to colleagues and to current and former students at Princeton and elsewhere, and I hope I have not omitted any of them from the following list: Jeffrey Angles, David Bell, Natalie Berkman, Guy de Boeck, Jessica Christy, Peter Cogman, Denis Feeney, Michaël Ferrier, Harold James, Michael Jennings, Robert Kaufman, Pierre László, Tuo Liu, Simone Marchesi, Pierre Masson, Amanda Mazur, Serguei Oushakine, Richard Register, Patrick Schwemmer, Bradley Stephens, Michael Wachtel and Liesl Yamaguchi.
Special thanks go to Ilona Morison for the hike that started me off on this journey, and to Pascale Voilley, who put up with my trudging on to the end.
I am tremendously grateful to my agent, Rebecca Carter, and to her predecessor at Janklow & Nesbitt, Claire Conrad, and also to the impressive team of copy-editors, map makers, typographers and cover designers at Penguin Books who have made this book what it is. I wish to thank most of all my editor, Helen Conford, whose wise advice and unstinting attention removed many blemishes from earlier drafts. All remaining infelicities are undoubtedly my own.
Works Cited
By Victor Hugo
Actes et Paroles. I. – Avant l’Exil, vol. 43 of Œuvres complètes (Paris: Hetzel, 1880–89).
Choses vues. Souvenirs, journaux, cahiers, 1830–1885, ed. Hubert Juin, revised edn (Paris: Gallimard, 2002).
Claude Gueux (1834), ed. P. Savey-Casard (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1956).
Les Contemplations (1856), ed. Léon Cellier (Paris: Garnier, 1969).
Correspondance (Paris: Albin Michel, 1950).
Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (1829), ed. Roger Borderie (Paris: Folio Classique, 1970).
Lettres à Juliette Drouet, ed. Jean Gaudon (Paris: Pauvert, 1964).
Les Misérables, ed. Maurice Allem (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléïade’, 1951).
Les Misérables, ed. Marius-François Guyard (Paris: Garnier, 1963).
Œuvres complètes (Paris: Édition de l’Imprimerie nationale, 1909).
Œuvres complètes, chronological edition, ed. Jean Massin (Paris: Club français du livre, 1967–70).
Œuvres complètes (Paris: Laffont, Collection Bouquins, 1985).
Toute la lyre (Paris: Hetzel, 1888).
By Members of Hugo’s Immediate Entourage
Hugo, Adèle, Victor Hugo raconté par Adèle Hugo, ed. Evelyne Blewer et al. (Paris: Plon, 1985).
Hugo, Adèle (Adèle II), Journal, ed. Frances Vernor Guille (Paris: Minard, 1968 (vol. 1), 1971 (vol. 2), 1984 (vol. 3)).
Hugo, Charles, Les Misérables. Drame (Brussels: Lacroix et Verboekhoven, 1863).
Hugo, Charles, Les Hommes de l’Exil (Paris: Lemerre, 1875).
Parfait, Noël, L’Aurore d’un beau jour: Épisodes des 5 et 6 juin 1832 (Paris: Bousquet, 1833).
Vacquerie, Auguste, Profils et grimaces (Paris: Pagnerre, 1854).
By Others
Anon. Les Éditeurs belges de Victor Hugo et le Banquet des Misérables, catalogue of the exhibition ‘Lacroix et Verboekhoven’, Musée Wellington à Waterloo, 1962 (Brussels: Crédit communal, 1962).
Bach, Max, ‘Critique et politique: La Réception des Misérables en 1862’, PMLA 77.5 (1962), pp. 595–608.
Balzac, Honoré de, La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 1976).
Balzac, Honoré de, Lettres à Madame Hanska, ed. Roger Pierrot (Paris: Delta, 1967).
Balzac, Honoré de, Old Goriot (1835), trans. Marion Ayton Crawford (London: Penguin, 1972).
Baudelaire, Charles, Correspondance, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).
Baudelaire, Charles, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
&nbs
p; Behr, Edward, Les Misérables. History in the Making (New York: Arcade, 1989).
Bellos, David, ‘An Icon of 1830: Interpreting Delacroix’s Liberty Guiding the People’, in Martina Lauster and Günther Oesterle (eds.), Vormärzliteratur in europäischer Perspektive 2 (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 1997), pp. 251–63.
Bellos, David, ‘Momo et les Misérables’, in Julien Roumette (ed.), Les Voix de Romain Gary (Paris: Champion, 2016).
Bellos, David, ‘Sounding Out Les Misérables’, Dix-Neuf Journal 20.3 (2016).
Blix, Göran, ‘Le Livre des passants: l’héroïsm obscur dans Les Misérables’, Revue des sciences humaines 302.2 (2011), pp. 63–75.
Bouchet, Thomas, Le Roi et les barricades. Une histoire des 5 et 6 juin 1832 (Paris: Seli Arslan, 2000).
Brombert, Victor, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Brunet, Étienne, Le Vocabulaire de Victor Hugo, 3 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1988).
Chevalier, Louis, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York: Howard Fertig, 1973).