Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [465]
Cosette and Marius fell on their knees, overwhelmed, choked with tears, each grasping one of Jean Valjean’s hands. Those august hands moved no more.
He had fallen backwards, the light from the candlesticks fell upon him; his white face looked up towards heaven, he let Cosette and Marius cover his hands with kisses; he was dead.
The night was starless and very dark. Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.
ENDNOTES
Part I: Fantine
Book One: An Upright Man
1 (p. 14) a senator of the empire... wrote to M. Bigot de Préameneu: The Senator who complains of Myriel’s asking 3,000 francs annually for “carriage expenses” had been rewarded with a rich estate for supporting Napoléon’s quasi-legal coup d‘état of the dix-huit Brumaire (May 18,1804), by means of which he became Emperor. The name of the Minister of Public Worship, Bigot, means a narrow-mindedly, excessively religious person.
2 (p. 21) Some admire it, like Le Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria: Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), a far-right Ultramontanist, advo cated for restoring supreme authority in all church matters to the Pope. He was the leading polemicist against the French Revolution, characterizing its disorders as Evil being forced by God to cleanse itself with its own hands (through the deaths of rival revolutionary leaders during the Reign of Terror in 1793). He believed that constitutions and all human institutions derive from God. The English writer Edmund Burke was his Anglo-Saxon counterpart. Cesare de Beccaria (1738-1794), an economist and criminologist, wrote the influential Traité des délits et des peines (A Treatise on Felonies and Their Punishment), which had great influence on eliminating the death penalty in certain places, and in securing a more humane treatment for prisoners. Hugo greatly admired his work.
3 (p. 26) This man . . . had been a member of the National Convention: The Convention Nationale, a revolutionary legislative body, ruled France from September 21, 1792, till October 6,1795. It proclaimed the First French Republic, defended France against royalist insurrections in the Vendée (the Loire valley and Brittany) and the South, forced the coalition of European monarchs to sign a peace treaty, and condemned the King to death for treason after he tried to flee France secretly to join these Allied Powers. The old conventionist whom Myriel goes to visit had served in this assembly. He did not vote for the death of the king, but royalists considered every member of the Convention to be a bloodthirsty regicide.
4 (p. 32) “What do you think of Bossuet chanting the Te Deum over the dragonnades?”: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), Bishop of Meaux and the most influential French cleric during the Classical Age, supported and blessed the Dragonnades, the systematic persecution of Protestants (then called Huguenots or Réformés) by royal troops, in several regions of France before and after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed religious tolerance (1681-1685). Most of the Protestants fled abroad. Today we would call these Catholic actions “ethnic cleansing.”
Book Two: The Fall
5 (pp. 37-38) the stone bench which General Drouot mounted on the fourth of March, to read... the proclamation of the Golfe Juan: General Antoine Drouot (1774-1847), one of Napoléon’s most loyal supporters, followed him into exile on the island of Elba. When the Emperor escaped to France, he landed at the Mediterranean beach resort le Golfe-Juan, near Vallauris, and proclaimed his return to power. The statement was read aloud in various towns along his route north.
Book Three: In the Year 1817
6 (p. 76) Paris has no longer the same environs.... a city which has France for its suburbs: Fécamp is an Atlantic beach resort near Le Havre, about 170 miles from Paris; Saint-Cloud is a park on the Seine