Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [468]
Book Eight: The Criminal Poor
5 (p. 433) “Sometimes I go away at night.... When one has not eaten, it is very queer”: Hugo, who was relatively insensitive to women, had diffi culty portraying them in interesting ways. This paragraph is an exception. Eponine describes an altered state of consciousness, brought about by starvation, in which her hallucinations show her haunted by guilt, and fearing death on the gallows. The stars seem accusing spotlights focusing on her; but they seem to be guttering out like candles (as did the stars around Satan when he fell into the Pit in La Fin de Satan). For God to be absent would be even worse than His accusing presence. The horses would be those of the mounted police pursuing her.
6 (p. 464) Nos amours ... devrait durer toujours: Our love lasted for an entire week; / How briefly the moments of joy descend! / A love that short was not worthwhile to seek! / The time of our love should have known no end! / Should have known no end! Should have known no end!
7 (p. 474) “No more than before”: Hugo can dramatize the combination of an emotional reaction and of perfect self-control only with an absurdity With the next remark, “Marius did not hear this answer,” Hugo drops the pretense of seeing everything through the young man’s eyes, in order to dramatize the intensity of Marius’s reaction to the revelation of Thénardier’s identity. “Could anyone have seen him ... in that darkness” introduces an episodic observer who is incapable of observation, because Hugo wants to intensify “the reality effect” of the events by multiplying the numbers and the viewpoints of the spectators.
8 (p. 477) David desired to immortalise that feat of arms: Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) dominated French painting for the last forty years of his life. He was Napoléon’s official painter, working in the “Neoclassic Stoic” style that evoked heroic feats under the ancient Roman Empire and the Roman Republic. He never would have bothered to immortalize the deeds of an obscure person such as Thénardier, even if the latter had been a soldier rather than a scavenger. To exalt his importance, Thénardier promotes Pontmercy by at least one grade in rank (from Colonel to General), and by two grades of nobility (counts outranked viscounts, who outranked barons).
9 (p. 481) all this... was awkward for Marius, and painfully astonished him: This detail prepares for the final chapters. Until just before the very end, Marius feels uncomfortable with Jean Valjean, and will suspect him of having stolen the 600,000 francs he offers Cosette, and of having murdered Javert at the barricade to exact revenge. Thus, having married Cosette, Marius will progressively discourage Valjean from seeing her.
Part IV: The Epic on the Rue Saint-Denis and the Idyll of the Rue Plumet
Book One: A Few Pages of History
1 (p. 499) A capital error which led that family to lay its hand upon the guarantees “granted” in 1814.... our rights: As early as 1830, Hugo had bluntly warned the French monarchs at least to accept gracefully the compromise of constitutional monarchy, comparing the People, on the march, to a rising tide:
Rois, hatez-vous! Rentrez dans le siècle où nous sommes,
Quittez l‘ancien rivage!—À cette mer des hommes
Faites place, ou voyez si vous voulez périr
Sur le siècle passé que son flot doit couvrir !
[Kings, hasten to reenter our age, / Leave ancient shores!