Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [466]
7 (p. 78) Love is a fault; be it so. Fantine was innocence floating upon the surface of this fault: Despite his frequent use of the symbolism of light and darkness to connote good and evil, respectively, Hugo’s moral portraits are always complex and subtle. Until near the end of his life, the virtuous Jean Valjean must struggle against impulses to resentment and selfishness; the vile Thénardier in other circumstances might have become a decent if not a virtuous man rather than a monster; and Fantine, the “fallen woman” condemned by her hypocritical society, becomes an unwed mother through innocent devotion. Later she prostitutes herself only to save her child.
Book Five: The Descent
8 (p. 112) It is a mournful task to break the sombre attachments of the past: The word “sombre” has special meanings in Hugo’s cosmology. It refers not to a dark (evil) but to a provisionally darkened state, to the human condition in which moral insight has been obscured by what the Cabalists called “occultation.” In order to preserve human free will and the resulting opportunities for meritorious and redemptive choices, God “withdraws” the fullness of His essence from the material world. If God revealed Himself fully, we would have no choice but to do His will. The stars are the masks of God. Once reincarnated as animals, plants, or inanimate objects, however, souls see God clearly and suffer redemptively from their distance from Him. See the poems “Pleurs dans la nuit” and “Spes” in Hugo’s poetry collection Les Contemplations (VI, 6 and 21).
Book Seven: The Champmathieu Case
9 (p. 155) Forms Assumed by Suffering during Sleep: Like other romantics, but more richly than most, Hugo depicts “second states” of consciousness-supernatural visions, dreams, madness, and hallucinations caused by insomnia, terror, starvation, or illness—to represent his characters’ intuitions of a spiritual super-reality.
10 (p. 156) Obstacles: The repeated breakdowns of Jean Valjean’s carriage, and the delays occasioned by various obstacles on the road tempt him to abandon his plan to exonerate the innocent Champmathieu and to condemn himself to life in prison instead. These delays exemplify the tentatio probationis (temptation as an ordeal) that tests and refines one’s faith—as opposed to the tentatio subver sionis (temptation to submit to evil). For an example of the latter, on an outwardly similar, difficult journey, see Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux (1772), with Satan as a luscious, amorous woman seeking sex before marriage to the hero.
11 (p. 172) When he was tried, God was not there: During Jean Valjean’s original trial, “God was not there” both literally (the image was gone) and spiritually (mercy and forgiveness were unavailable to the prisoner). Compare the last paragraph of “Fantine”: “Happily, God knows where to find the soul.”
Book Eight: Counter-stroke
12 (p.193) Without a wrinkle in his duty or his uniform: This phrase is an example of the daring rhetorical figure called hendiadys (“one from two”). When criticized by classicists for using this device in his poetry (for example, vêtu de candeur et de lin blanc—“clothed in candor and in white linen”), Hugo triumphantly produced many examples from classical Greek and Roman literature, which he knew far better than did his detractors.
13 (p. 197) she distinctly saw an ineffable smile beam on those pale lips ... full of the wonder of the tomb: Suggested strongly here by the dead Fantine’s smile, Hugo’s faith in the Afterlife will be expressly articulated by Eponine as she dies at the end of chapter 4 (6), book fourteen, part IV (“We do meet again, don’t we? ... Promise to kiss me on the forehead when I am dead. I shall feel it.”), and once again by the author, when Jean Valjean dies: “Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.