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a

Napoléon was crowned Emperor on December 2, 1804, in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.

b

Madame Baptistine and Madame Magloire serve to contrast the contemplative with the active life; their names, respectively, suggest the spiritual and the material.

c

Created as an administrative unit in 1789, a canton (roughly equivalent to a township) is larger than a commune (municipality) and smaller than an arrondissement (roughly equivalent to a county, and a subdivision of a département).

d

An ultra-royalist believes that kings rule by God’s will; a Voltairean is a Deist, who believes that God does not intervene in human affairs.

e

Myriel believes in universal, free primary education; until the Guizot Law of 1833, some 38 percent of French communes had no primary schools at all. In 1870, about 30 percent of peasants were still illiterate.

f

The prosecuting attorney uses libel, slander, and forgery to persuade a woman to denounce her lover; he is more criminal than the man he condemns.

g

A camail is a blue or purple ornament worn by a bishop over his vestments.

h

By “pontifically,” Myriel means “as a bishop should: humbling himself to exalt God.”

i

Unless God protects a house, they who guard it watch in vain.

j

The Provost’s Court was a tribunal that passed judgment on the accused without giving them the right of appeal; it served Royalist vengeance after Napoléon’s fall in 1815.

k

Myriel feels the joy of political progress was tainted by revolutionary atrocities; the conventionist feels this joy was blasted by the Restoration of the monarchy in 1814.

l

Myriel counters the claim that the Revolution was “the consecration of humanity” by alluding to the Reign of Terror in 1793, when the King and Queen, and 20,000 others, were guillotined.

m

The conventionist quotes Christ’s “let the little children come unto Me,” and implies that the class system under the monarchy invalidates the monarchy’s claims to be truly Christian.

n

Hugo makes Jean Valjean’s life parallel the history of France: he is imprisoned during Napoléon’s dictatorship, and hides in the convent during the rule of the reactionary Charles X; when he is free, France also is freer.

o

Lot’s wife, spared by the angels who destroyed Sodom in a rain of fire, disobeyed them, looked back at the city, and was turned to salt.

p

Hugo often described his most saintly characters with a glowing or gleaming countenance, transfigured by grace as was Moses descending from Sinai.

q

This description of fleeing a holy dwelling by climbing over a wall constitutes an advance mention, with the situation reversed, of Jean Valjean finding refuge for himself and Cosette in Paris by climbing over the wall of a convent.

r

Chimneysweeps were called “little Savoyards,” because only children were small enough to climb into chimneys to clean them, and because many such children came from Savoy in eastern France.

s

The hallucination of menacing bushes comes from Jean Valjean’s guilty conscience, and anticipates Eponine’s impression that the bare trees are gallows.

t

Comparisons between Jean Valjean and Satan or (later) Christ seem melodramatic, but they underline that damnation or salvation is at stake.

u

French tradition distinguished sharply between the femme sensible, who has had only one love affair outside marriage, and the femme galante, who has had more.

v

The Directory (1795-1799) was the transitional government between the Revolution and Napoléon’s assumption of the supreme power.

w

The grisettes, poor young working women who wore gray smocks, were traditional targets of seduction attempts by students and young male professionals.

x

In ancient Greek and Roman literature, an eclogue was a poem about the idealized loves of imaginary shepherds and shepherdesses; Hugo’s tone is sarcastic. ‡The sentence means “are people who jest always hard-hearted?”

y

Vestals were virgin priestesses who served the temples of the gods in ancient Greece.

z

Khair ed-Din Barbarossa (1466?-1546) was a notorious