Les Misérables
As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own
country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other
nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I
become more and more patriotic for humanity.
This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance of
the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French,
Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say more,
human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.
Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of composition
which modify everything, even the conditions, formerly narrow, of taste
and language, which must grow broader like all the rest.
In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great delight,
with having transgressed the bounds of what they call “French taste”; I
should be glad if this eulogium were merited.
In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal
suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a
man, and I cry to all: “Help me!”
This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it for you and
for your country. If I have insisted so strongly, it is because of one
phrase in your letter. You write:—
“There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: ‘This book, _Les
Misérables_, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French
read it as a history, we read it as a romance.’”—Alas! I repeat,
whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since
history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery
has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length
arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked
limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the
grand purple robe of the dawn.
If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening some minds and
in dissipating some prejudices, you are at liberty to publish it, sir.
Accept, I pray you, a renewed assurance of my very distinguished
sentiments.
VICTOR HUGO.
FOOTNOTES:
1 (return) [ Patois of the French Alps: _chat de maraude_, rascally
marauder.]
2 (return) [ Liège: a cork-tree. Pau: a jest on _peau_, skin.]
3 (return) [ She belonged to that circle where cuckoos and carriages
share the same fate; and a jade herself, she lived, as jades live, for
the space of a morning (or jade).]
4 (return) [ An ex-convict.]
5 (return) [ This parenthesis is due to Jean Valjean.]
6 (return) [ A bullet as large as an egg.]
7 (return) [ Walter Scott, Lamartine, Vaulabelle, Charras, Quinet,
Thiers.]
8 (return) [ This is the inscription:—D. O. M. CY A ETE ÉCRASÉ PAR
MALHEUR SOUS UN CHARIOT, MONSIEUR BERNARD DE BRYE MARCHAND A BRUXELLE
LE [illegible] FEVRIER 1637.]
9 (return) [ A heavy rifled gun.]
10 (return) [ “A battle terminated, a day finished, false measures
repaired, greater successes assured for the morrow,—all was lost by a
moment of panic, terror.”—Napoleon, Dictées de Sainte Hélène.]
11 (return) [ Five winning numbers in a lottery]
12 (return) [ Literally “made cuirs”; _i. e._, pronounced a _t_ or an
_s_ at the end of words where the opposite letter should occur, or used
either one of them where neither exists.]
13 (return) [ Lawyer Corbeau, perched on a docket, held in his beak a
writ of execution; Lawyer Renard, attracted by the smell, addressed him
nearly as follows, etc.]
14 (return) [ This is the factory of Goblet Junior: Come choose your
jugs and crocks, Flower-pots, pipes, bricks. The Heart sells Diamonds
to every comer.]
15 (return) [ On the boughs hang three bodies of unequal merits: Dismas
and Gesmas, between is the divine power. Dismas seeks the heights,
Gesmas, unhappy man, the lowest regions; the highest power will
preserve us and our effects. If you repeat this verse, you will not
lose your things by theft.]
16 (return) [ Instead of _porte cochère_ and _porte bàtarde_.]
17 (return) [ Jesus-my-God-bandy-leg—down with the moon!]
18 (return) [ _Chicken: _ slang allusion to the noise made in calling
poultry.]
19 (return) [ Louis XVIII. is represented in comic pictures of that day
as having a pear-shaped head.]
20 (return) [ Tuck into your trousers the shirt-tail that is hanging
out. Let it not be said that patriots have hoisted the white flag.]
21 (return) [ In order to re-establish the shaken throne firmly on its
base, soil (Des solles), greenhouse and house (Decazes) must be
changed.]
22 (return) [ _Suspendu_, suspended; _pendu_, hung.]
23 (return) [ _L’Aile_, wing.]
24 (return) [ The slang term for a painter’s assistant.]
25 (return) [ If Cæsar had given me glory and war, and I were obliged
to quit my mother’s love, I would say to great Cæsar, “Take back thy
sceptre and thy chariot; I prefer the love of my mother.”]
26 (return) [ Whether the sun shines brightly or dim, the bear returns
to his cave.]
27 (return) [ The peep-hole is a _Judas_ in French. Hence the
half-punning allusion.]
28 (return) [ Our love has lasted a whole week, but how short are the
instants of happiness! To adore each other for eight days was hardly
worth the while! The time of love should last forever.]
29 (return) [ You leave me to go to glory; my sad heart will follow you
everywhere.]
30 (return) [ A democrat.]
31 (return) [ King Bootkick went a-hunting after crows, mounted on two
stilts. When one passed beneath them, one paid him two sous.]
32 (return) [ In olden times, fouriers were the officials who preceded
the Court and allotted the lodgings.]
33 (return) [ A game of ninepins, in which one side of the ball is
smaller than the other, so that it does not roll straight, but
describes a curve on the ground.]
34 (return) [ From April 19 to May 20.]
35 (return) [ _Merlan:_ a sobriquet given to hairdressers because they
are white with powder.]
36 (return) [ The scaffold.]
37 (return) [ Argot of the Temple.]
38 (return) [ Argot of the barriers.]
39 (return) [ The Last Day of a Condemned Man.]
40 (return) [ “Vous trouverez dans ces potains-là, une foultitude de
raisons pour que je me libertise.”]
41 (return) [ It must be observed, however, that _mac_ in Celtic means
_son_.]
42 (return) [ Smoke puffed in the face of a person asleep.]
43 (return) [ Je n’entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des
orgues, peut atiger ses mômes et ses momignards et les locher criblant
sans être agité lui-meme.]
44 (return) [ At night one sees nothing, by day one sees very well; the
bourgeois gets flurried over an apocryphal scrawl, practice virtue,
tutu, pointed hat!]
45 (return) [ _Chien_, dog, trigger.]
46 (return) [ Here is the morn appearing. When shall we go to the
forest, Charlot asked Charlotte. Tou, tou, tou, for Chatou, I have but
one God, one King, one half-farthing, and one boot. And these two poor
little wolves were as tipsy as sparrows from having drunk dew and thyme
very early in the morning. And these two poor little things were as
drunk as thrushes in a vineyard; a tiger laughed at them in his cave.
The one cursed, the other swore. When shall we go to the forest?
Charlot asked Charlotte.]
47 (return) [ There swings the horrible skeleton of a poor lover who
hung himself.]
48 (return) [ She astounds at ten paces, she frightens at two, a wart
inhabits her hazardous nose; you tremble every instant lest she should
blow it at you, and lest, some fine day, her nose should tumble into
her mouth.]
49 (return) [ _Matelote:_ a culinary preparation of various fishes.
_Gibelotte:_ stewed rabbits.]
50 (return) [ Treat if you can, and eat if you dare.]
51 (return) [ _Bipède sans plume:_ biped without feathers—pen.]
52 (return) [ Municipal officer of Toulouse.]
53 (return) [ Do you remember our sweet life, when we were both so
young, and when we had no other desire in our hearts than to be well
dressed and in love? When, by adding your age to my age, we could not
count forty years between us, and when, in our humble and tiny
household, everything was spring to us even in winter. Fair days!
Manuel was proud and wise, Paris sat at sacred banquets, Foy launched
thunderbolts, and your corsage had a pin on which I pricked myself.
Everything gazed upon you. A briefless lawyer, when I took you to the
Prado to dine, you were so beautiful that the roses seemed to me to
turn round, and I heard them say: Is she not beautiful! How good she
smells! What billowing hair! Beneath her mantle she hides a wing. Her
charming bonnet is hardly unfolded. I wandered with thee, pressing thy
supple arm. The passers-by thought that love bewitched had wedded, in
our happy couple, the gentle month of April to the fair month of May.
We lived concealed, content, with closed doors, devouring love, that
sweet forbidden fruit. My mouth had not uttered a thing when thy heart
had already responded. The Sorbonne was the bucolic spot where I adored
thee from eve till morn. ’Tis thus that an amorous soul applies the
chart of the Tender to the Latin country. O Place Maubert! O Place
Dauphine! When in the fresh spring-like hut thou didst draw thy
stocking on thy delicate leg, I saw a star in the depths of the garret.
I have read a great deal of Plato, but nothing of it remains by me;
better than Malebranche and then Lamennais thou didst demonstrate to me
celestial goodness with a flower which thou gavest to me, I obeyed
thee, thou didst submit to me; oh gilded garret! to lace thee! to
behold thee going and coming from dawn in thy chemise, gazing at thy
young brow in thine ancient mirror! And who, then, would forego the
memory of those days of aurora and the firmament, of flowers, of gauze
and of moire, when love stammers a charming slang? Our gardens
consisted of a pot of tulips; thou didst mask the window with thy
petticoat; I took the earthenware bowl and I gave thee the Japanese
cup. And those great misfortunes which made us laugh! Thy cuff
scorched, thy boa lost! And that dear portrait of the divine
Shakespeare which we sold one evening that we might sup! I was a beggar
and thou wert charitable. I kissed thy fresh round arms in haste. A
folio Dante served us as a table on which to eat merrily a centime’s
worth of chestnuts. The first time that, in my joyous den, I snatched a
kiss from thy fiery lip, when thou wentest forth, dishevelled and
blushing, I turned deathly pale and I believed in God. Dost thou recall
our innumerable joys, and all those fichus changed to rags? Oh! what
sighs from our hearts full of gloom fluttered forth to the heavenly
depths!]
54 (return) [ My nose is in tears, my friend Bugeaud, lend me thy
gendarmes that I may say a word to them. With a blue capote and a
chicken in his shako, here’s the banlieue, co-cocorico.]
55 (return) [ Love letters.]
56 (return) [
“The bird slanders in the elms,
And pretends that yesterday, Atala
Went off with a Russian,
Where fair maids go.
Lon la.
My friend Pierrot, thou pratest, because Mila knocked at her pane the
other day and called me. The jades are very charming, their poison
which bewitched me would intoxicate Monsieur Orfila. I’m fond of love
and its bickerings, I love Agnes, I love Pamela, Lise burned herself in
setting me aflame. In former days when I saw the mantillas of Suzette
and of Zéila, my soul mingled with their folds. Love, when thou
gleamest in the dark thou crownest Lola with roses, I would lose my
soul for that. Jeanne, at thy mirror thou deckest thyself! One fine
day, my heart flew forth. I think that it is Jeanne who has it. At
night, when I come from the quadrilles, I show Stella to the stars, and
I say to them: “Behold her.” Where fair maids go, lon la.]
57 (return) [ But some prisons still remain, and I am going to put a