Les Miserables

Victor Hugo

August 26, 1997

'"Because things are unpleasant," said Jean Valjean, "that is no reason for being unjust toward God."

There was a silence. Every heart was oppressed....

"It is nothing to die; it is horrible not to live."'

These dying remarks of the hero of Les Miserables, found on page 1458 of a very long novel, sum up his life. Horribly treated for the smallest injustice: stealing a loaf of bread to feed hungry children; this great ox of a man, a great intellect, a quiet, discrete observer of everything, wends his way through life, an angel to the innocents oppressed by the fallen creation and mankind's amplification of it. But he did indeed live.

Beginning on December 2, 1996 and ending on August 17, 1997, I endured the depressing twists of fate, learned a great deal about the battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the barricades of 1832 and skimmed a great number of metaphors, sometimes whole chapters of them, which would be meaningful to a 19th century Parisian or a fluent speaker of French. I am neither and aspire to be neither. We traveled through the Intestine of Leviathan (the sewers of Paris) the cloaca with Valjean and his future son-in-law, whom he therefore hated, Marius. We come to the inescapable end of the tunnel, are released by the villain Threnadier only to be arrested at last by Javert. But the soul of Valjean is so many planes above both of these normal cogs of society that they are both dispensed in fairly short order, Javert by his own will and Threnadier to America to trade slaves.

Without even reviewing the book, several striking images stay with me. The Bishop of Dinge in the first section. He is such a quiet, righteous, good man that one begins the episode thinking that the novel is a prayer book. He is the epitome of selfless servanthood in action who nonetheless is shamed by A Citizen, a revolutionary of 1789 who has somehow escaped the purge and dies in social isolation near Dinge, the bishop his unworthy confessor.

Then follows the affair of Fantine, whose first twenty or so years were happy. It is serial-syrupy, I nearly lost interest in the book at this stage, but there was a point. She played, along with friends, the role of mistresses to schoolboys never suspecting that they would be abandoned by them to return to respectable lives back in their own provinces. She had been as a wife to her lover and was left with the child Cosette, though barely able to support even herself. She leaves her child in the care of Threnadier where she is reduced to slave status in the cut-throat inn. Fantine goes off to work in another city, sending support for the child, all of which is all stolen by the Threnadier family.

Valjean, meanwhile, released and blessed by the Bishop despite a theft of candlesticks, has become hugely prosperous and the mayor of that other city, under the name M. Madeline. Javert is inspector there and he and the mayor cross horns over the treatment of the minimum wage worker descended to whore Fantine all because of idle and errant gossip. Also, Madeline reveals himself to be the missing convict Valjean by rescuing the elder Fauchelevant from under an immense broken wagon. Fantine convalesces in a nunnery, pining for Cosette whom she will never see again. A Valjean look-alike is picked up in the countryside, a nobody, and is about to be sent up for life, the rest of Valjean's term. Valjean faces the choice that marks the entire narrative, to live safely and comfortably, recompensing from his great wealth any small infraction he has committed against society, or to follow his conscience and go to do the right thing, even though the look-alike is already old and useless and hardly worth saving by the standards of the harsh, uncaring society.

Fighting against his natural man and the natural elements, he struggles up to the point of confession against all odds, and performs as he must. He has returned and is arrested by Javert at the deathbed of Fantine, but then decides to escape with his fortune, seek out Cosette, and save her from a life of misery.

They become father and daughter though he is more the age of a grandfather. They escape Threnadier and the police to a nunnery where old Fauchelevant is the gardener. Cosette is raised and trained and they leave to live a life of anonymity hiding in the bowels of Paris. The chaste and thrifty lawyer Marius falls in love with her at sight and many interspersed chapters are spent bringing them together. He then goes with his comrades to a barricade and is saved through the sewers by Valjean, who hates him because he represents the end of his life with Cosette. But it was inevitable and he knows it. He alone has the strength and the National Guard uniform to pull it off. He is tipped off by a love note mis-delivered, one that was intended to be posthumous from Marius. It was another of those decisions: self or right?

The son of Threnadier, Gavroche, picks up two small children abandoned in the street and houses them in the great elephant, surrounded by rats, protected only by wire mesh. At least it is comparatively dry and warm inside. He accidentally helps his criminal father escape from prison to be a further harassment to Valjean. Marius is pledged by his own father's dying breath to serve Threnadier as his life had been saved by the grave robbing scoundrel in the trench after Waterloo.

At Waterloo there was a trench twelve feet deep. As the horses charged, they went right in and all were lost until three columns piled up high enough for a fourth column to ride over them. Baron Pontmercy was near the top and was saved by the expedient of losing everything of value he had on him at the time to the battle-scavenger Threnadier. In a different place, a well on the battlefield was poisoned forever by throwing dead bodies in until it was filled. Late that night groans were heard from underground. Perhaps all the dead were not quite so when the bodies were disposed.

Descriptions of imprisonment, involuntary of criminals and voluntary of religious devotees led me to question the sanity of humanity. Descriptions of death, overboard at sea or in quicksand in the cloaca leave a lasting sickness in the pit of the stomach.

It was a hard read while I was home with the flu the week of January 6, 1997, the day all the trees blew down and the power was off. It was altogether depressing to read nearly anytime. It took emotional energy rather than giving it. It was often a struggle to pick up and a relief to put down. But it was necessary to learn the fate of all the characters, Cosette, Marius and his politically opposite family, Javert, all the Threnadiers, friends and other characters. Within ten pages of the end it was not clear that Threnadier would not recapture and re-enslave Cosette and that all of Madeline's fortune would not go to him as well just through the routine injustices of life in this world. And it was not clear that Hugo, in the interest of representing reality as harshly as reality is, wouldn't have it just that way.

The horror of it all is that, though a novel, it is all true of the19th century underworld and is all true in metaphor of the late 20th. And throughout the ordeal, I wrestled with God in my own contemporary life, "what is the use of God who doesn't talk, who doesn't direct, whose every act can be explained away by the faithful as well as the faithless no matter what he does?" What use is God? The Infinite, Hugo would say.

Hugo is broad; he brings his whole world into a big book. He even steps into it himself editorially a few times. "This author," (I'm paraphrasing) "stood at this very spot by a column while bullets whizzed by for over ninety minutes on that afternoon." Or an entire page asking all the rhetorical questions about Bounaparte, ending with the separate paragraph, "We think not." The editorial “we.”

I am glad it is over, and I am given pause by the remark of the saint Valjean, gone on to glory, his remains marked here only by an overgrown rock with faded penciled poetry on it.

"Because things are unpleasant," said Jean Valjean, "that is no reason for being unjust toward God."