Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (141 page)

Hugo knew English and English literature fairly well; one of his sons translated all of Shakespeare’s plays into English. Here he alludes to Hamlet’s comparison of human life to “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

This wailing baby will reappear as Gavroche. Mme Thénardier’s monstrous nature appears in her total indifference to her three sons. Her cruelty gives the lie to her husband’s scruples, the next morning, about giving up Cosette.

Hugo puns by calling Thénardier a
filou-sophe
instead of
philosophe. Filou
means “crook”; the whole invented word implies “someone who knows and loves crime.”

Here and in many other places, Hugo portrays himself as an investigative reporter who researches documents and questions witnesses.

The garrulous Thénardier, always lying, contrasts dramatically with the taciturn, invariably truthful Jean Valjean.

In this scene, frequent notations of posture, gesture, and voice quality reflect Hugo’s keen sensitivity to theater.

As Cosette proceeds farther into the darkness, her fear (“there were perhaps ghosts”) acquires a hallucinatory intensity (“she distinctly saw the ghosts”).

Hugo, typically, contrasts and dramatizes the microcosm (the “atom,” the human scale) and the macrocosm (the cosmos, the infinite).

A thousand crowns is 3,000 francs, double the amount agreed on.

Hugo suggests that Fauchelevent has been transformed by divine grace.

In French,
c‘est là
le
bon écrou:
that [death] is the best lock-up.

The Communion of Saints has transferred merit from both the nuns and M. Madeleine to Fauchelevent.

Fauchelevent mishears
surnoms
as surtouts.

Cemeteries are locked at night to prevent grave robbing, desecration of tombs, and the sale of cadavers for dissection.

Le Bon Coing
in French; puns with
Le Bon Coin,
meaning the cozy comer.

In French,
il le coiffait
—literally, “he did his hair”; figuratively it means “he seduced him [into drinking] by putting the idea in his head.”

Le Prytanée was a military academy.

Idiom for “he didn’t say who was going to pay.”

“Dead and Buried” translates the idiom
[être cloué] entre quatre planches,
“to be nailed up inside four planks” (four sometimes is an indefinite number in French).

They who were sleeping in the dust of the earth, shall awake; some into the life eternal, and others into disgrace, that they shall see forever.

Hugo characteristically introduces an episodic observer here, but this time not an expert one. Such figures anchor the story in a social nexus, a human community, that connects readers and characters.

Catharine was Cosette’s magnificent doll, purchased by Jean Valjean. This paragraph again explains the origins of the girl’s timid, self-effacing character.

As he does in dozens of other places in the novel, Hugo strongly implies that Providence has intervened to help redeem Jean Valjean.

the spiral is a common image in nineteenth-century French literature to signal the presence and effects of altered states of consciousness.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a national holiday on August 15, refers to her being taken up directly into Heaven at the moment of her death, and before her mortal body could suffer any corruption (decay).

The disclaimer means that Hugo feels more skeptical and critical than Jean Valjean. He admires many nuns as individuals, but condemns the monastic life.

Such spiritual development characterizes the Idealistic Novel; compare Flaubert’s tale “A Simple Heart,” or several of George Sand’s novels.

Gamin
is “street urchin,” a meaning that is now archaic.

Plautus and Terence, ancient Roman writers of comedies, use the word “homuncio,” as does the satirist Juvenal; the most famous example, in the sense of “test tube baby” that we find here, appears in part II of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
Faust
(the Homunculus).

A pun: Pont des Arts is a bridge in Paris;
arrhes
is earnest money paid to bind a contract.

“Agreeable” in conjunction with the word “useful” in the next chapter title alludes to the ancient Roman definition of the desiderata for literary satire: the
gamin
Gavroche is satire personified.

A ship’s cheapest cabins are in the hold, below the decks; a theater’s are in the top balcony.

A term jokingly used for the upper balconies of a theater, because they seem so close to Heaven.

Muche
is perhaps from the variant form of
musse-pot,
“in hiding.” Hugo disliked the famous actress Mlle Mars, who complained of and sometimes refused to use the informal language in his plays.

the last two paragraphs characterize the gamin as an eiron (debunker, deflator of pretentions), and thus as the natural enemy of the bourgeois
alazon,
or self-satisfied braggart.

The term “red spectre” described a bloodthirsty revolutionary, in the eyes of the Royalists; the reference is to Colonel Pontmercy, Marius’s gentle, courageous, devoted father, an idealization of Hugo’s.

Baron
was an honorific title ranking just above
chevalier
and just below
vicomte
(the lowest rank of land-owning nobility). Napoleon awarded it widely to honor meritorious achievement; his enemies, the Royalists, therefore had no inclination to honor it.

Pistoles
were 10-franc coins.

“A B C” in French is pronounced ah-bay-say, exactly like the French word
abaïssé,
“the abased.”

Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, harbinger of the Revolution, put all five of his children up for adoption. (The evil Thénardiers also will have five, but they at least keep two.)

The beginning of wisdom (Latin).

Because my name is lion (Latin; the implication is “I am entitled to the largest share”): a well-known proverb taken from a fable.

If Caesar had given me / Glory and war / And I had to abandon /The love of my mother, / I would say to great Caesar: / Take thy sceptre and car, / I prefer my mother, ah me! / I prefer my mother.

Throughout the novel Hugo emphasizes the grandeur of moral courage, which may show itself in obscure deeds and in humble lives.

Note Hugo’s tidy construction: the meeting of Marius and Cosette, whose story will dominate the remainder of the novel, occurs exactly in the middle of the third of five parts.

The Italian painter Raphael (1483-1520) captures the ideal spirituality of woman; the French sculptor and architect Jean Goujon, her material beauty: Cosette—at least in Marius’s eyes, combines both.

The “pale, bluish light” represents a perception of the ideal. Flaubert had fiercely satirized this association in
Madame Bovary
(1857).

An autobiographical reference: at age fifteen, Hugo himself had allowed the much older Neufchâteau, a member of the Académie Française, to take credit for Hugo’s brilliant article on Alain-René Lesage’s early eighteenth-century novel, in exchange for patronage in his nascent literary career.

Marius is so emotionally overwrought by being in love that he responds intensely to the most banal potboiler of the popular boulevard theater.

Marius would love to be able to flaunt some distinction so as to impress Cosette.

Marius imagines the handkerchief to be a love token left for him by Cosette: in fact, it is a trap set by Jean Valjean, to test the young man’s feelings.

Hugo alludes to the French proverb
l‘appétit vient en mangeant,
“eating gives you an appetite”—that is, having a little makes you want more.

Idealizing Cosette and her “father,” Marius assumes that they must be rich; lodgings on the lower floors above ground level cost more.

Ugolino, in Dante’s early-fourteenth-century
Inferno,
was punished for having devoured his children to survive when he and they were imprisoned together. Thénardier, who sacrifices his own children for paltry profits, illustrates the social form of such supreme egotism.

Lacenaire was a famous contemporary criminal and murderer.

François-Noël Babeuf (1760-1797) and Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) both justified massacres with their egalitarian theories, before they themselves died in the Revolution. Cartouche and Schinderhannes were criminals who killed from pure hate.

For Hugo’s understanding of Satan’s rebellion, his fall, and Hell, see his long visionary poem
La Fin de Satan
(unfinished; c.1859-1860), which correlates the cosmic drama with the phases of the French Revolution.

“The cave Ignorance” and “the mole Crime” are further examples of Hugo’s
métaphore maxima
(maximal metaphor) that modifies one noun with another—contrary to French grammar—to produce a synthetic concept that reflects supernatural truths.

“To take on Paris hand to hand” imitates the challenge that Honoré de Balzac’s flawed hero Eugène de Rastignac cries out to the city at the end of
Le Père Goriot
(1834):
à nous deux maintenant,
“the two of us will have it out now.”

Let it gleam or let it glimmer, / The bear returns into his cave. The equivalent of Ground Hog Day is a long-standing international tradition.

Marius’s point of view, gently mocked by Hugo; to attend to his material needs seems unworthy of his devotion to Cosette.

The city gate, where tolls
(l‘octroi)
were levied for importing certain merchandise; these entrance duties were suppressed throughout France in 1949.

“The cops came. They just missed nabbing me at the half-circle [-shaped road intersection].” “I saw them. I beat it out of there.”

“Colin Maillard,” who is “it” in the child’s game Blind-Man’s Buff, tries to catch and identify one of the other players. Marius can’t figure out who they are.

Eponine, once favored over Cosette, now contrasts dramatically with Jean Valjean’s radiant ward, having become prematurely aged, ill, and morally degraded.

That she feels at home in a man’s bedroom suggests that she has engaged in prostitution. What follows makes it clear that her father is offering to sell her body.

I’m hungry, dad. /The food is gone. / I’m cold, ma. / No coat to put on. / Shiver, girl! / Cry, little boy.

The agrammatical
métaphore maxima,
modifying one noun with another, indicates the effects of supernatural intervention.

Thénardier has misspelled four of the five names of Napoléon’s great victories—he wants to imply that he fought in them, but his spelling exposes his lack of familiarity with those campaigns.

“Vanity of vanity, says the preacher; all is vanity,” Ecclesiastes 12:8. The Bible rejects attachment to worldly things; Thénardier, in contrast, bitterly resents not having received more recognition from the world of men.

A pun on the French
s‘exécuter
(comply) and
exécuter
(kill).

Two people don’t get together in an isolated place in order to say the rosary (Latin).

Thénardier, who plans to blackmail Jean Valjean for 200,000 francs, apparently plans to try to get away with giving only 500 to each of his accomplices.

Fumistes
also means cruel tricksters.

The French uses the idiom
Je mets de l‘eau dans mon vin
(“I’m watering down my wine”).

La bourgeoise
is equivalent to “my old lady.”

The Hand of Providence, which willed that democracy would ultimately triumph in France.

Days of triumph for the Revolution and for Napoléon, respectively.

Alludes to Julius Caesar’s famous
alea jacta est
(“the die is cast”) when he crossed the Rubicon with his troops, in defiance of a standing order by the Senate.

A round table did not allow for one person to sit at the head, symbolically superior to the others seated there.

Agostín Iturbide (1783-1824), a Mexican general, was proclaimed Emperor of Mexico in 1822, and executed by firing squad two years later.