Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do. (page 11)

 

Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched. (page 122)

 

“In the winter, it is so cold that you thresh your arms to warm them; but the bosses won’t allow that; they say it is a waste of time. It is tough work to handle iron when there is ice on the pavements. It wears a man out quick. You get old when you are young at this trade. A man is used up by forty. I was fifty-three.” (page 175)

 

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child. (page 329)

 

The jostlings of young minds against each other have this wonderful attribute, that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What may spring up in a moment? Nobody knows. (page 379)

 

All the problems which the socialists propounded, aside from the cos mogonic visions, dreams, and mysticism, may be reduced to two principal problems. First problem: To produce wealth. Second problem: To distribute it. (page 505)

 

Social prosperity means, man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

(page 505)

 

He did not even know at night what he had done in the morning, nor where he had breakfasted, nor who had spoken to him; he had songs in his ear which rendered him deaf to every other thought; he existed only during the hours in which he saw Cosette. Then, as he was in Heaven, it was quite natural that he should forget the earth. (page 581)

 

Marius felt Cosette living within him. To have Cosette, to possess Cosette, this to him was not separable from breathing. (page 590)

 

The book which the reader has now before his eyes is, from one end to the other, in its whole and in its details, whatever may be the intermissions, the exceptions, or the defaults, the march from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from brutality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; goal: the soul. Hydra at the beginning, angel at the end. (page 698)

 

Without cartridges, without a sword, he had now in his hand only the barrel of his carbine, the stock of which he had broken over the heads of those who were entering. He had put the billiard table between the assailants and himself; he had retreated to the comer of the room, and there, with proud eye, haughty head, and that stump of a weapon in his grasp, he was still so formidable that a large space was left about him.

(page 703)

Published by Barnes & Noble Books
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New York, NY 10011

 

 

Les Miserables
was published in French in 1862. Charles E. Wilbour’s English
translation was revised and edited by Frederick Mynon Cooper
and published later that same year.

 

Published in 2003 with new Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology,
Inspired By, Questions, and For Further Reading.

 

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright © 2003 by Laurence Porter.

 

Note on Victor Hugo, The World of Victor Hugo and
Les Miserables,
Inspired by
Les Miserables,
and Comments & Questions
Copyright @ 2003 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

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colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-066-2 ISBN-10: 1-59308-066-2

eISBN : 978-1-411-43255-0

LC Control Number 2003108030

 

Produced and published in conjunction with:
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
322 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

 

Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

 

Printed in the United States of America

 

QM

 

5 7 9 10 8 6

Novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist, idealist politician, and leader of the French Romantic movement from 1830 on, Victor-Marie Hugo was born the youngest of three sons in Besançon, France, on February 26,1802. Victor’s early childhood was turbulent: His father, Joseph-Léopold, traveled frequently as a general in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, forcing the family to move throughout France, Italy, and Spain. Weary of this upheaval, Hugo’s wife, Sophie, separated from her husband and settled with her three sons in Paris. Victor’s brilliance declared itself early in the form of illustrations, plays, and nationally recognized verse. Against his mother’s wishes, the passionate young man fell in love and secretly became engaged to his neighbor, Adèle Foucher. Following the death of Sophie Hogo, and self-supporting thanks to a royal pension granted for his first book of odes, Hugo wed Adèle in 1822.

In the 1820s and 30s, Hugo came into his own as a writer and figure-head of the new Romanticism, a movement that sought to liberate literature from its stultifying classical influences. His preface to the play
Cromwell,
in 1827, proclaimed a new aesthetics inspired by Shakespeare and Velázquez, based on the shock effects of juxtaposing the grotesque with the sublime (for example, the deformed hunchback inhabiting the magnificent cathedral of Notre-Dame). The play
Hernani
incited violent public disturbances among scandalized audiences in 1830. The next year, the great success of
Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
confirmed Hugo’s primacy among the Romantics.