Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [467]
Part II: Cosette
Book Two: The Convict Ship Orion
1 (p. 214) Some of the newspapers... held up this commutation as a triumph of the clerical party: Moved by blind partisanship, some left-wing commentators inaccurately see the commutation of Jean Valjean’s death sentence as undue interference by the Church in secular affairs. “The clerical party” refers to the Congrégation, which throughout the 1820s was feared to be a Catholic secret society controlled by the Pope, seeking to end the “Gallican liberties” that allowed French rulers rather than the Pope to make many decisions regarding the French Catholic Church, and to dominate European politics. For a fully developed dramatization of this supposed international Jesuit conspiracy, see Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830).
Book Three: Keeping the Promise to the Dead Woman
2 (p. 252) “Monsieur owes twenty-six sous”: After preparing a padded bill for Jean Valjean’s room and supper, for twenty times the proper amount (which he can implicitly blame on his wife, because Jean Valjean did not see who drew up the bill), Thénardier suddenly reverses his strategy. He realizes that Jean Valjean badly wants to take Cosette with him. He quickly adjusts. By now telling his guest what he truly owes, Thénardier lays the groundwork for portraying himself as a scrupulous person, who could not possibly hand over a child in his care to a stranger... without receiving a substantial bribe.
Book Four: The Old Gorbeau House
3 (p. 268) as he was fifty-five: Ten years later, at the conclusion, Jean Valjean is described as being eighty. To salvage chronological coherence, we must assume that Hugo means his emotional sufferings had suddenly aged him so that he looked like eighty.
There are autobiographical elements in Hugo’s characterization of Jean Valjean’s relationship with Cosette. The author loved his grand-children deeply, and devoted a volume of poetry to them, called L‘Art d’être grand-père (1877).
Book Five: A Sinister Hunt Requires a Silent Pack
4 (p. 277) The sufferings of the first six years of her life had introduced something of the passive into her nature: The critic Nicole Savy severely criticized Cosette as a nonentity (see “For Further Reading”). She is correct, but at this juncture, Hugo clearly explains why this is so. To be sure, Hugo’s female characters often lack substance—but the masterful depiction of the monstrous Mme Thénardier, for example, proves him capable of imagining a woman with a forceful personality.
Part III: Marius
Book Three: The Grandfather and the Grandson
1 (p. 359) the God-man: Commonplace in English, but usually unid iomatic in French, this combination of two nouns modifying each other is Hugo’s métaphore maxima, which is typically associated with moments of religious revelation; he used it frequently in his visionary poetry from Les Contemplations (1856) on. It blurs two familiar categories into a new, unprecedented one.
Book Four
2 (p. 367) the first of these two places of rendezvous was near the working-men, the second near the students: Left-wing alliances of workers with students, usually no more than a distant dream in the United States, have been much more common in France, in part because nearly free access to higher education in France narrows the financial gap between the two groups, while militantly Socialist or Communist labor unions narrow the ideological gap with some intellectuals. “Les Événements” of 1968 provide a prime example.
3 (p. 370) You cannot pick the mark out of a nation as you can out of a handkerchief: Feuilly’s respect for national sovereignty means that he, like all the other members of “Les Amis de l‘ABC,” opposes Napoléon’s politics of conquest. One can readily predict a confrontation with Marius, who has come to idealize his Napoleonic father. This evolution, and Marius’s later move toward democratic ideals, echoes Hugo’s own political trajectory in his youth, as Marius’s passionate love for Cosette echoes Hugo’s love for Adèle Foucher before her betrayal.
Book Seven: Patron-Minette
4 (p. 415) the descending