Les Miserables (abridged) (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (9 page)

Because the relative cost of items differed greatly from their cost today, 1 franc—the most common unit of currency—equaled between 5 and 30 U.S. dollars in today’s purchasing power. Rent was cheap; clothing, transportation, and food were expensive (farms had no tractors or combines; flour was ground in mills by water power; each loaf of bread was made by hand). A worker who earned less than 1
franc
a day was being severely exploited. The Thénardiers’ rent in the Gorbeau tenement is 20 francs a quarter (7 a month), the equivalent of $200 a month. Bishop Myriel makes 15,000 francs a year (say, $150,000) with free lodging, but gives all but 1,500 to the poor. Jean Valjean accumulates a fortune of 600,000 francs in manufacturing, making Cosette a multimillionaire. The formidable Patron-Minette gang is happy to risk six to ten years’ imprisonment in a double kidnapping-torture-ransom scheme, in exchange for a chance at 500 francs apiece.

Napoléon’s last name becomes highly significant in this novel. As First Consul and then as Emperor, he ruled from 1799 till 1814, with another three months
(Les Cent Jours)
after his escape from exile in 1815 until he was defeated at Waterloo. Louis XVIII took over as King in 1814, and was succeeded by Charles X from 1824 to 1830. After Charles X was ousted by a revolution, he was replaced by the constitutional monarch Louis Philippe from 1830 to 1848. Those who supported the institution of the monarchy, and particularly those who believed in the divine right of kings to rule, always said
Buonaparte
(pronouncing the final e as an extra syllable) to emphasize the Emperor’s foreign origins (he was born in Corsica before that island became French) and therefore to imply his illegitimacy. Those who say
Bonaparte
in the French manner, without pronouncing the final e, are already suspect to the legitimists; and those who say
L’ Empéreur,
betraying lingering admiration and nostalgia for his grandeur, label themselves as enemies of the throne and the church. Thus the presiding judge (under a monarchist regime) at the Champmathieu trial, although he admires Monsieur Madeleine, issues an order for his arrest because the mayor said “Bonaparte,” showing that his political convictions are left of center. And Fauchelevant, speaking with the Mother Superior in the convent, catches himself just in time as he is about to refer to Napoleon as
“L‘Empéreur.”
Fortunately for him and Jean Valjean, his slip “L’Emp-” goes unnoticed.

Even more serious, in the relationship between Marius and his grandfather M. Gillmormand, is Marius’s admiration for his father, le Baron (the title reveals a person ennobled by Napoleon) de Pontmercy, who fought in Napoléon’s armies as a colonel. The Revolution brought Napoleon to power, and Pontmercy is therefore associated in the monarchist Gillenormand’s mind with the revolutionary excesses of the Reign of Terror in 1793, which began with the execution of the King and Queen in January, and eventually killed 20,000 people (fewer than the right-wing repression of the Paris Commune in 1871).

Railroads were beginning to be constructed in France in the 1830s, but they are not mentioned in
Les Misérables.
All transportation is in horse-drawn carriages, on muleback (Bishop Myriel), or on foot.
Fiacres
are enclosed public cabs in Paris, holding up to six passengers, and drawn by a single horse.
Diligences
are stagecoaches, drawn by two to four horses; they provide transportation between towns, and transport packages (like UPS) and mail. Outside of cities, nearly all roads were unpaved and unlighted. Fresh horses and drivers are maintained at relay stations along the stage routes, including some that can be rented by individual travelers. These vehicles would travel at a slow trot, about 6 miles an hour on good roads, and could go up to 50 miles a day—even farther if the teams were changed. The major unit of distance, the league, was 4 kilometers (2.5 miles). Some other types of vehicles were the
calèche
(with four wheels, a raised front bench, and a hood sheltering the back seats), the
carosse
(a luxurious enclosed vehicle with four wheels, used by noble and wealthy families), the
cabriolet
(a light, two-wheeled vehicle), and a
tilbury
(a
cabriolet
with just two seats). The
cacolet
was a basket containing two seats with backs, placed over the back of a beast of burden such as a donkey, as opposed to the saddle, which had no back and held only one person.

The original translator left a number of words in French, without italics, to capture shades of meaning and to add a foreign flavor. We have left the following in French as well:

Laurence M. Porter
has published twelve books and a hundred articles and book chapters on Francophone studies, comparative literature, critical theory, French culture, and every period of French literature. These include a comprehensive book,
Victor Hugo
(1999), and several other articles and chapters on Hugo, including one on Hugo’s novels published by Legenda, the Humanities Research Institute at Oxford University, England. He was an NEH Senior Research Fellow in 1998, and has held other grants from the Ford Foundation, NEH, and USIS. He teaches French at Michigan State University; he won the Distinguished Faculty Award in 1995. He serves on the Editorial or Advisory Boards of
Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, and Women in French Studies.

I gratefully acknowledge the permission from the Gale Research Company of Detroit, Michigan, to reproduce elements of Chapter Eight, “The Masterpiece,” from my book
Victor Hugo
(New York: Twayne/Macmillan, 1999), which form a portion of the preface to this edition of
Les Misérables.
Marjorie Porter helped substantially to clarify my writing, and John Rauk, the current Chair of Romance and Classical Languages at Michigan State University, kindly allowed me to defer one course from spring 2003 to next year, which made it possible to complete this edition—as well as tracking down an allusion from Horace.

In the complex structure of
Les Misérables,
each of five long parts is divided into several books, and each book into several chapters. Hugo wrote simultaneously as an idealist who used a classical dramatic progression and as a realist who digressed into sociological essays. The idealist composed a vast drama of redemption in five acts, which correspond with the five parts of the novel. Part I presents the initial situation: society scornfully rejects two potentially virtuous, self-sacrificial characters, the former convict Jean Valjean and the prostitute Fantine. Part II introduces the complication that initiates the main action: Jean Valjean tries to protect Fantine’s orphaned daughter, Cosette, while fleeing the police. Part III, the moment of resolve, depicts the young Marius, who will learn to work for the political liberation of society through collective effort, after Valjean has been shown trying to achieve economic progress to be shared by all. Part IV, the climax, shows Marius risking his life behind the revolutionaries’ barricade, while Valjean knowingly sacrifices his happiness to save Marius’s life, allowing the youth to marry Cosette. Part V, the denouement, traces Valjean’s spiritual apotheosis, which will inspire Marius and Cosette. As a realist, Hugo shows how the glorious spiritual motivations mentioned above become entangled with selfish impulses, and he grounds his depiction of character in serious historical and sociological research.

In this abridged edition, the following long sections have been cut: the history of a religious order (part II, books six and seven); a linguistic examination of the secret languages of thieves (part IV, book seven); and the historical background of the 1832 insurrection in Paris (part IV, book ten). The titles of omitted books are enclosed in square brackets in the table of contents on pages 5—6 below.

Some entire chapters and opening sections of chapters have been cut. Chapter names come from the unabridged version, but chapters have been numbered to preserve an uninterrupted sequence. Above a chapter title, a larger number in parentheses, following a smaller number, is the chapter number in the unabridged version: for example, 5 (7).

Within the text, plain prose summaries
in italics
for chapters or other pieces of text that have been cut allow the reader to follow the action without reading all of Hugo’s subplots and side remarks.

So long as civilisation shall permit law and custom to impose a social condemnation that creates artificial hells on earth, complicating our divine destiny with a fatality driven by humans; so long as the three problems of the age—man degraded by poverty, woman demoralised by starvation, childhood stunted by physical and spiritual night—remain unsolved; as long as people may be suffocated, in certain regions, by society; in other words, taking a longer view, so long as ignorance and misery endure on earth, books such as this cannot but be useful.

IN 1815, M. Charles François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—. He was a man of about seventy-five, and had occupied the bishopric of D—since 1806. Although it in no manner concerns, even in the remotest degree, what we have to relate, it may not be useless, were it only for the sake of exactness in all things, to indicate here the reports and gossip which had arisen on his account from the time of his arrival in the diocese.

Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.

M. Myriel was the son of a counsellor of the Parlement of Aix who had acquired noble rank by belonging to the legal profession. His father, intending him to inherit his place, had contracted a marriage for him at the early age of eighteen or twenty, according to a widespread custom among parliamentary families. Charles Myriel, notwithstanding this marriage, had, it was said, been an object of much attention. He was well built, although rather short, he was elegant, witty, and graceful; all the earlier part of his life had been devoted to the world and to its pleasures. The revolution came, events crowded upon each other; the parliamentary families, decimated and hunted down, were soon dispersed. M. Charles Myriel, on the first outbreak of the revolution, emigrated to Italy. His wife died there of a lung complaint with which she had been long threatened. They had no children. What followed in the fate of M. Myriel? The decay of the old French society, the fall of his own family, the tragic sights of ‘93, still more fearful, perhaps, to the exiles who beheld them from afar, magnified by fright—did these arouse in him ideas of renunciation and of solitude? Was he, in the midst of one of the reveries or attachments which then consumed his life, suddenly struck by one of those mysterious, terrible blows which sometimes overwhelm, by smiting to the heart, the man whom public disasters could not shake, by affecting his private life? No one could have answered; all that was known was that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.

In 1804, M. Myriel was cure of B—(Brignolles). He was then an old man, and lived in the deepest seclusion.

Near the time of the coronation,
^a
a trifling matter of business belonging to his curacy—what it was, is not now known precisely—took him to Paris.

Among other personages of authority he went to Cardinal Fesch on behalf of his parishioners.

One day, when the emperor had come to visit his uncle, he happened to pass by the worthy priest, who was waiting in the anteroom. Napoleon noticing that the old man looked at him with a certain curiousness, turned around and said brusquely:

“Who is this goodman who is looking at me?”

“Sire,” said M. Myriel, “you behold a good man, and I a great man. Each of us may profit by it.”

That evening the emperor asked the cardinal the name of the cure and some time afterwards M. Myriel was overwhelmed with surprise on learning that he had been appointed Bishop of D—.

When M. Myriel came to D—he was accompanied by an old lady, Mademoiselle Baptistine, who was his sister, ten years younger than himself.

Their only domestic was a woman of about the same age as Mademoiselle Baptistine, who was called Madame Magloire, and who after having been the servant of M. le cure, now took the double title of femme de chambre of Mademoiselle and housekeeper of Monseigneur.

Mademoiselle Baptistine was a tall, pale, thin, sweet person. She fully realised the idea which is expressed by the word “respectable;” for it seems as if it were necessary that a woman should be a mother to be venerable. She had never been pretty; her whole life, which had been but a succession of pious works, had produced upon her a kind of transparent whiteness, and in growing old she had acquired what may be called the beauty of goodness. What had been thinness in her youth had become in maturity transparency, and this etherialness permitted the angel within to shine through. She was more a spirit than a virgin mortal. Her form was shadow-like, hardly enough body to convey the thought of sex—a little earth containing a spark—large eyes, always cast down; a pretext for a soul to remain on earth.

Madame Magloire was a little, white, fat, jolly, bustling old woman, always out of breath, caused first by her activity, and then by the asthma.
^b

M. Myriel, upon his arrival, was installed in his episcopal palace with the honours ordained by the imperial decrees, which class the bishop next in rank to the field-marshal. The mayor and the president made him the first visit, and he, for his part, paid like honour to the general and the prefect.