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Summary
Summary
In this major new rendition by the acclaimed translator Julie Rose, Victor Hugo's tour de force, Les Miserables , is revealed in its full unabridged glory. A favorite of readers for nearly 150 years, and the basis for one of the most beloved stage musicals ever, this stirring tale of crime, punishment, justice, and redemption pulses with life and energy. Hugo sweeps readers from the French provinces to the back alleys of Paris, and from the battlefield of Waterloo to the bloody ramparts of Paris during the uprising of 1832.
First published in 1862, this sprawling novel is an extravagant historical epic that is teeming with harrowing adventures and unforgettable characters. In the protagonist, Jean Valjean, a quintessential prisoner of conscience who languished for years in prison for stealing bread to feed his starving family, Les Miserables depicts one of the grand themes in literature-that of the hunted man. Woven into the narrative are the prevalent social issues of Hugo's day- injustice, authoritarian rule, social inequality, civic unrest. And this new translation brings astonishing vivacity and depth to Hugo's immortal dramatis personae-the relentless police detective Javert, the saintly bishop Myriel, the tragic prostitute Fantine and her innocent daughter, Cosette, the dashing lover Marius, and many others whom Jean Valjean encounters on his path to sublime sacrifice.
Featuring an Introduction by the award-winning journalist and author Adam Gopnik, this Modern Library edition is an outstanding, authoritative translation of a masterpiece, a literary high-wire act that continues to astonish, stimulate, enlighten, and entertain readers around the world.
Author Notes
Victor Hugo was born in Besançon, France on February 26, 1802. Although he originally studied law, Hugo dreamed of writing. In 1819, he founded the journal Conservateur Litteraire as an outlet for his dream and soon produced volumes of poetry, plays, and novels. His novels included The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables. Both of these works have been adapted for the stage and screen many times. These adaptations include the Walt Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the award-winning musical sensation Les Miserables.
In addition to his literary career, Hugo also held political office. In 1841, he was elected to the Academie Francaise. After political upheaval in 1851, he was exiled and remained so until 1870. He returned to Paris in 1871 and was elected to the National Assembly, though he soon resigned. He died on May 22, 1885.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
To begin with the central problem: the exorbitant length. Les Miserables is one of the longest novels in European literature. But length is not just a question of pages, it's also a question of tempo. And this is why Les Miserables is longer than the arithmetic of its length. In his essay "The Curtain", Milan Kundera writes how "aesthetic concepts began to interest me only when I first perceived their existential roots, when I came to understand them as existential concepts . . ." A form is not free-floating; it is not purely a technical exercise, an external imposition. It is intimately, intricately linked to what it describes. "In the art of the novel," Kundera adds, "existential discoveries are inseparable from the transformation of form." And the most obvious transformation Victor Hugo effects in the novel's form is sheer gargantuan size. This megalomania was a conscious choice on Hugo's part. To describe his work in progress, he jotted down a list of hyperbolic adjectives: "Astounding, extraordinary, surprising, superhuman, supernatural, unheard of, savage, sinister, formidable, gigantic, savage, colossal, monstrous, deformed, disturbed, electrifying, lugubrious, funereal, hideous, terrifying, shadowy, mysterious, fantastic, nocturnal, crepuscular." The size was the centre of Hugo's discovery in the art of the novel. And this is visible immediately: it's visible, to the perturbed reader, in the second of this novel's many sentences. The beginning, it turns out, is not a beginning at all. "There is something we might mention that has no bearing whatsoever on the tale we have to tell - not even on the background." Les Miserables begins with a digression from a digression (thus resembling Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary , which a few years earlier had begun with a digression, too.) Here, at the start, Hugo was trying to set up a narrative convention, derived from the novel's deep theory. When the book was finished, Hugo tried - and failed - to write a preface. The preface would have begun like this: "This book has been composed from the inside out. The idea engenders the characters, the characters produce the drama, and this is, in effect, the law of art. By having the ideal, that is God, as the generator instead of the idea, we can see that it fulfils the same function as nature. Destiny and in particular life, time and in particular this century, man and in particular the people, God and in particular the world, this is what I have tried to include in this book; it is a sort of essay on the infinite." The subject of one of the longest novels in European literature is - what else? - the infinite. That is why its tempo is so explicit with slowness, syncopated with digression. But in this novel there is no such thing as a digression. Everything is relevant - since the subject of this book, quite literally, is everything: "This book is a tragedy in which infinity plays the lead," writes Hugo. "Man plays a supporting role." "When the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression," Hugo wrote later on. But how can the subject of the novel ever be lost sight of, if the lead character is infinity? In that case, nothing will ever be a digression. Yes, the length of this novel is important. Its quantity is its quality. It represents an answer to a central artistic question, which was not an answer the tradition of the novel has ever quite believed in since. This is one reason why Hugo's novel is so strange, and so valuable. "Really, universally, relations stop nowhere," Henry James would write, 40 years later, in his preface to the New York Edition of his early novel Roderick Hudson , "and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so." Life was infinite, argued James, but the novel therefore required a form which gave the illusion of completeness. James, after all, had learned the art of the novel from Flaubert. According to this modernist tradition, the novel was an art of miniaturisation, and indirection. Hugo, however, had come up with a new solution, no less artful than the solution proposed by Flaubert and James. He wanted to create a novel which would try to represent everything by pretending that it did, in fact, represent everything. It would be wilfully ramshackle and inclusive - both on the level of form, and on the level of content: an essayistic novel, or a novelistic essay. "The eye of the drama must be everywhere at once," wrote Hugo. For every plot, seen from the angle of Hugo's style, was infinite. In some ways, the plot of Les Miserables is simple. It is the story of an escaped convict, Jean Valjean, who determines to reform after being saved by the Bishop of Digne; Javert, the policeman who wants to see him rightfully punished according to the law; a dead prostitute, Fantine, and her illegitimate daughter, Cosette, who is entrusted to Valjean's care; an evil inn-keeping couple, the Thenardiers, and their urchin children, Eponine and Gavroche; and Marius, who falls in love with Cosette, and who is the son of a Napoleonic hero who died believing wrongly that he had once been saved on the field of Waterloo by Thenardier, who was in fact a scavenging thief. This might sound tightly plotted, taut with melodrama. It might sound like a good plot for a musical. But no one can read Les Miserables for the cleverness or subtlety of its plot. It is not a novel which prides itself on believability. This might seem surprising - since one natural assumption, perhaps, is that improbability in a novel should diminish with length. In Tolstoy's War and Peace , if people coincide, or marry each other, it still seems probable. Every decision retains its fluidity. And yet in Les Miserables this isn't true. In this gargantuan novel, everything seems utterly improbable. Every plot operates through coincidence. Normally, novelists develop techniques to naturalise and hide this. Hugo, with his technique of massive length, refuses to hide it at all. In fact, he makes sure that the plot's coincidences are exaggerated. It could be argued that the persistent weakness of the plotting is its strength. This, after all, is how coincidence often happens in real life - thinly. But the overwhelming impression is of schlock. And so it might be right to remember that Hugo's original title for his novel was Les Miseres , not Les Miserables : which echoed Eugene Sue's recent bestseller, Les Mysteres de Paris . Hugo's novel would offer miseries, not mysteries. But it would be part of the same urban pulp tradition. Schlock, however, can make existential discoveries too. One way in which Hugo emphasises the coincidences in his novel is the persistent failures of recognition. This occurs on the level of the characters - where a father does not recognise his son, or a criminal does not recognise the very person he has been pursuing for years. And it occurs on the level of the narration, where the narrator withholds the name of a character throughout an entire episode. Partly, perhaps, this adds to suspense: it creates moments of dramatic irony. But really it's to create a bifocal effect. Hugo wants a plot that is at once about total randomness, and also total predetermination. The novel, therefore, is written from two perspectives. The perspective of mankind, and the perspective of God - or Destiny. "We chip away as best we can at the mysterious block of marble our lives are made of - in vain; the black vein of destiny always reappears." Hugo is echoing Hamlet here: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will . . ." His aim is to stress the weird mixture of freedom and predetermination which is the essence of his novel. Les Miserables is a game with destiny: it dramatises the gap between the imperfections of human judgments, and the perfect patterns of the infinite. The reason for including so much of the world's matter was to work out how mystical the world was. As he put it in Les Miserables : "How do we know the creation of worlds is not determined by the falling of grains of sand? Who, after all, knows the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely big and the infinitely small, the reverberation of causes in the chasms of a being, the avalanches of creation? A cheese mite matters; the small is big, the big is small; everything is in equilibrium within necessity - a frightening vision for the mind." He wanted pattern. But he wanted it only after subjecting the form to its limits, stuffing it with random accreted details - like the man fighting at the barricades, who "had padded his chest with a breastplate of nine sheets of grey packing paper and was armed with a saddler's awl". Meaning could be revealed only by slowing down the tempo of each scene: pausing it in the infinity of its detail. What is relevant? This is the meaning of Hugo's long novel and its slow tempo - heavy with detail. How can you know what fact will emerge, and destroy you? How can you know what will become a trap, and what will not? We live our lives so blissful in our ignorance of an infinity which could invade us at any moment. Hugo's form, predicated on length, on digression and detail, is a deliberate accretion of overlapping examples: his scenes are all variations on the same theme. That is why the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has described how Hugo's main scenes are "irresistible traps" - volcanic craters, where chaos suddenly acquires logic. (And yet, how strenuously do Hugo's characters try to resist the traps of the world!) Whether Hugo is writing about the historical battle of Waterloo or the fictional journey to Arras, his scenes obey the same constraints: a mass of infinite detail, which coalesces to form a trap, an unstoppable destiny. According to Hugo, the battle of Waterloo was determined by the weather. "If it hadn't rained during the night of June 17-18, 1815," writes Hugo, "the future of Europe would have been different. A few drops of water, more or less, brought Napoleon to his knees. So that Waterloo could be the end of Austerlitz, Providence needed only a bit of rain, and a cloud crossing the sky out of season was enough for a whole world to disintegrate." It looks like an essay on Waterloo; just as Valjean's story looks like a story about the tribulations of an escaped convict. In both cases, however, the true subject is chance: "the immense strokes of luck, good or bad, that are calibrated by an infinity that escapes us". Hugo's length does not just represent a philosophy: it is also a politics. In Les Miserables , there is a correlation between the infinite and the unknown; and another correlation between the unknown and the miserable - the destitute. This is why Hugo can move so fluently from a detail to its moral or political halo. Everything is linked by his thematic network. Perhaps it's a pity, therefore, that all that survived of his preface to the novel was a single, dogmatic sentence: "As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilisation and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century - man's debasement through the proletariat, woman's demoralisation through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness - are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless." Hugo's epigraph limits his novel too neatly. It's true that the same triad of the needy - which corresponds to Valjean, Fantine and Cosette - is restated by two characters in the novel. But Hugo was not simply a political writer. How could he be? His subject was the infinite. In an abandoned section on prostitution, Hugo wrote: "The portion of fate that depends on man is called ' misere ', and it can be abolished. The portion of fate that depends on the unknown is called ' douleur ', and this must be considered and explored with trepidation." He was an ontological pessimist, and a historical optimist. This was why Flaubert was unfair to mock Hugo for "the Catholic-socialist dregs . . . the philosophical-evangelist vermin" who admired his novel. Hugo's novel was grander than its politics. It was not so limited. Many years earlier, in his preface to a collection of poetry, Inner Voices , dated June 24 1837, Hugo had said that the poet's duty was to elevate political events to the dignity of historical events. This fluidity between the political and the historical is central to Les Miserables . Hugo wanted to transform politics into history, and rewrite history so that it included the unknown, the ignored, the forgotten - a version of history that would inevitably, therefore, be both an exercise in philosophy and an exercise in politics. Les Miserables , let's remember, was a historical novel on its first publication. But what is a historical novel? With Les Miserables it allowed Hugo to rewrite history: to show how far history is fiction; how far fiction had always been taciturn about the mass of its editing. In his chapter "The Year 1817", a four-page list of minute events, Hugo concludes: "History neglects nearly every one of these little details and cannot do otherwise if it is not to be swamped by the infinite minutiae. And yet, the details, which are wrongly described as little - there are no little facts in the human realm, any more than there are little leaves in the realm of vegetation - are useful." It is this devotion to the infinitely unknown that makes Hugo so meticulous in giving the reader Valjean's prison numbers; and why Valjean's name is almost a tautology. Valjean is everyman: the anonymous, the ignored. That is the secret of his repetitive name (like Nabokov's criminal hero in his novel Despair : Hermann Hermann, a misprint for Mr Man Mr Man). And it is also why Hugo is so careful to set the novel in the suburbs of Paris. It was the communist surrealist Louis Aragon who stated that "with Victor Hugo, Paris stops being the seat of the court to become the city of the people". Hugo was expert at describing the formless suburbs: "that funny, rather ugly semi-rural landscape, with its odd, dual nature, that surrounds certain big cities, notably Paris. To observe the urban outskirts is to observe the amphibian. End of trees, beginning of roofs, end of grass, beginning of pavement, end of furrows, beginning of shops, end of ruts, beginning of passions, end of divine murmuring, beginning of human racket . . ." Hugo's novel restores real life to the truth of its infinite length. Before he describes the barricades of the 1832 revolution, Hugo returns to his theory of history, which is really a theory of detail. "The events we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and living reality that the historian sometimes neglects for want of space and time. But this is where, and we insist on this, this is where life is, the throbbing, the shuddering of humanity. Little details, as I think we may have said, are the foliage, so to speak, of big events and are lost in the remoteness of history." Hugo himself had already provided an example of this foliage - in his description of the battle of Waterloo. He had reinstated an episode which more prudish historians preferred to omit, describing the final desperate resistance of some French soldiers: "They could hear in the crepuscular gloom that cannons were being loaded, wicks were being lit and gleamed like the eyes of tigers in the night, making a circle around their heads, all the shot-firers of the English batteries approached the cannons, and then, deeply moved, holding the moment of reckoning hanging over these men, an English general - Colville according to some, Maitland according to others - cried out to them: 'Brave Frenchmen, give yourselves up!' Cambronne replied: 'Shit!'" This word shit - which Hugo called "the miserable of words" - electrifies the long network of metaphors and themes in the novel. It relates the battle of Waterloo and its themes of chance and destiny to the sewers through which Valjean wanders after he has left the barricades; and it links the sewers to the underground slang, the argot, which Hugo delights to record in his prose. Most prison songs, after all, came from a great long cellar at Chatelet - "eight feet below the level of the Seine". But it also invigorates the moral and political structure of the novel. Les Miserables is based on an ethics which believes in the triumph of the defeated. At the novel's climax, Hugo describes how Marius "began to have an inkling of how incredibly lofty and solemn a figure this Jean Valjean was. An unheard-of virtue appeared to him, supreme and meek, humble in its immensity. The convict was transfigured into Christ." The novel possesses a logic of conversion. It is there in Javert's conversion towards the end of the novel: his sense of "some indefinable sense of justice according to God's rules that was the reverse of justice according to man". And it is there in that miserable word "Shit!". After describing Cambronne's last stand, Hugo describes the meaning of this word "Shit!", as shouted to the English at Waterloo. "To say that," he writes, "to do that, to come up with that - this is to be the victor." It was really Cambronne who won at the battle of Waterloo. That is Hugo's crazy, novelistically persuasive theory: Cambronne, who had made "the last of words the first". The triumph is truly his. In Hugo's list of Parisian gangsters active in the 1830s, there is a stowaway: "Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, or Hotwhack, Springlike, Golightly Brujon. (There was a whole dynasty of Brujons; we can't promise not to say more about this later.) "Boulatruelle, the road-mender we have already met. "Laveuve, or the Widow. "Finistere. "Homere Hugu, a black man. "Mardisoir, or Tuesday night." Homere Hugu, a black man! This alias is not the only one Hugo adopts in the novel, which is punctuated by stashed versions of the name Hugo. But Homere Hugu sums up his prose style in Les Miserables : a first-person warped autobiographical voice which improvises a slang version of epic. This voice is the great formal invention of Hugo's novel - the support to the novel's length: a narrator who is unembarrassed by sententiae: sentimental interjections, melodramatic addresses to historical characters, one-word paragraphs, chains of adjectives linked only by their sound, characters who freeze into rants. A narrator devoted to the prolix, the comprehensive. For the world of Les Miserables is one which has been comprehensively transformed into language. It is a new world, with its own conventions. And the gigantism of its plot operates through the range of Hugo's vocabulary. Nothing escapes Hugo's omnivorous collage, not the argot of the criminal underworld, nor songs in dialect, nor the scraps of paper scribbled with revolutionary notes which Hugo loves quoting - incomprehensible fragments, like imported nonsense poems. This novel invents the idea of language as history, as deposit, as waste. It is a huge act of restitution: an exercise in the ignored. Yes, Les Miserables is a microcosmic, metaphoric novel. So that even Baudelaire - the modernist poet, the poet of dense economy - could write in Le Boulevard , on April 20 1862, that it was "a novel constructed like a poem". Its length is a formal property. Its style is saturated in its length. But then again, Baudelaire didn't know the lengths to which Hugo would still go. In April 1862, after all, Baudelaire had only read Part I: Fantine. The rest was still to be published. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo is published by Vintage Classics this month. To order a copy for pounds 18 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-lesmisfinal.1 In an abandoned section on prostitution, [Victor Hugo] wrote: "The portion of fate that depends on man is called ' misere ', and it can be abolished. The portion of fate that depends on the unknown is called ' douleur ', and this must be considered and explored with trepidation." He was an ontological pessimist, and a historical optimist. This was why [Gustave Flaubert] was unfair to mock Hugo for "the Catholic-socialist dregs . . . the philosophical-evangelist vermin" who admired his novel. Hugo's novel was grander than its politics. It was not so limited. At the novel's climax, Hugo describes how Marius "began to have an inkling of how incredibly lofty and solemn a figure this [Jean Valjean] was. An unheard-of virtue appeared to him, supreme and meek, humble in its immensity. The convict was transfigured into Christ." The novel possesses a logic of conversion. It is there in Javert's conversion towards the end of the novel: his sense of "some indefinable sense of justice according to God's rules that was the reverse of justice according to man". And it is there in that miserable word "Shit!". After describing [Cambronne]'s last stand, Hugo describes the meaning of this word "Shit!", as shouted to the English at Waterloo. "To say that," he writes, "to do that, to come up with that - this is to be the victor." It was really Cambronne who won at the battle of Waterloo. That is Hugo's crazy, novelistically persuasive theory: Cambronne, who had made "the last of words the first". The triumph is truly his. - Adam Thirlwell.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I. Monsieur Myriel In 1815, Monsieur Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was bishop of Digne.1 He was an elderly man of about seventy-five and he had occupied the seat of Digne since 1806. There is something we might mention that has no bearing whatsoever on the tale we have to tell--not even on the background. Yet it may well serve some purpose, if only in the interests of precision, to jot down here the rumors and gossip that had circulated about him the moment he first popped up in the diocese. True or false, what is said about people often has as much bearing on their lives and especially on their destinies as what they do. Monsieur Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Aix parliament, a member of the noblesse de robe.2 They reckoned his father had put him down to inherit his position and so had married him off very early in the piece when he was only eighteen or twenty, as they used to do quite a lot in parliamentary families. Charles Myriel, married or no, had, they said, set tongues wagging. He was a good-looking young man, if on the short side, elegant, charming, and witty; he had given the best years of his life thus far to worldly pursuits and love affairs. Then the Revolution came along, events spiraled, parliamentary families were wiped out, chased away, hunted, scattered. Monsieur Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy soon after the Revolution broke out. His wife died there of the chest infection she'd had for ages. They had no children. What happened next in the destiny of Monsieur Myriel? The collapse of the old society in France, the fall of his own family, the tragic scenes of '93,3 which were, perhaps, even more frightening for émigrés4 watching them from afar with the magnifying power of dread--did these things cause notions of renunciation and solitude to germinate in his mind? Was he, in the middle of the distractions and amorous diversions that filled his life, suddenly hit by one of those mysterious and terrible jolts that sometimes come and strike at the heart, bowling over the man public calamities couldn't shake, threatening as these did only his existence and his fortune? No one could say; all that was known was that, when he came back from Italy, he was a priest. In 1804,5 Monsieur Myriel was the curé of Brignolles.6 He was already old and lived like a real recluse in profound seclusion. Around the time of the coronation, a small parish matter--who can remember what now?--took him to Paris. Among other powerful persons, he called on Cardinal Fesch,7 Napoléon's uncle, to petition him on his parishioners' behalf. One day when the emperor was visiting his uncle, the worthy curé, who was waiting in the anteroom, found himself in His Majesty's path. Napoléon, seeing the old boy give him the once-over with a certain curiosity, wheeled round and said brusquely: "Who is this little man staring at me?" "Your Majesty," said Monsieur Myriel, "you see a little man, and I see a great man. Both of us may benefit." That very night, the emperor asked the cardinal what the curé's name was and some time after that Monsieur Myriel was stunned to learn that he'd been named bishop of Digne. But, when all's said and done, what was true in the tales told about the first phase of Monsieur Myriel's life? No one could tell. Few families had known the Myriel family before the Revolution. Monsieur Myriel had to endure the fate of every newcomer in a small town, where there are always plenty of mouths blathering and not many brains working. He had to endure it even though he was the bishop, and because he was the bishop. But, after all, the talk in which his name cropped up was perhaps nothing more than talk; hot air, babble, words, less than words, pap, as the colorful language of the Midi8 puts it. Whatever the case, after nine years as the resident bishop of Digne, all the usual gossip that initially consumes small towns and small people had died and sunk without a trace. No one would have dared bring it up, no one would have dared remember what it was. Monsieur Myriel arrived in Digne accompanied by an old spinster, Mademoiselle Baptistine, who was his sister and ten years his junior. They had only one servant, a woman the same age as Mademoiselle Baptistine, called Madame Magloire. Having been the servant of Monsieur le curé, she now went by the double title of personal maid to Mademoiselle and housekeeper to Monseigneur.9 Mademoiselle Baptistine was a tall, pale, thin, sweet person, the personification of that ideal expressed by the word respectable; for it seems a woman must be a mother to be esteemed. She had never been pretty, but her entire life, which had been merely a succession of holy works, had ended up laying a sort of whiteness and brightness over her; as she aged, she had gained what you could describe as the beauty of goodness. What had been skinniness in her youth had become transparency with maturity; and this diaphanous quality revealed the angel within. She was more of a spirit than a virgin. She seemed a mere shadow with scarcely enough of a body to have a gender; just a bit of matter bearing a light, with great big eyes always lowered to the ground, an excuse for a spirit to remain on earth. Madame Magloire was a little old lady, white skinned, plump, round, busy, always wheezing, first because of always bustling about and second because of her asthma. When he first arrived, Monsieur Myriel was set up in his episcopal palace with all the honors required by imperial decree, which ranked bishops immediately after field marshals.10 The mayor and the president of the local council were the first to visit him, and on his side, he made his first visits to the general and the chief of police. Once he had moved in, the town waited to see their bishop on the job. II. Monsieur Myriel Becomes Monseigneur Bienvenu The episcopal palace of Digne was next door to the hospital. The episcopal palace was a vast and handsome town house built in stone at the beginning of the previous century by Monseigneur Henri Puget, doctor of theology of the faculty of Paris and abbé of Simore,1 who had been bishop of Digne in 1712. The palace was truly a mansion fit for a lord. Everything about it was on the grand scale, the bishop's apartments, the drawing rooms, the bedrooms, the main courtyard, which was huge, with covered arcades in the old Florentine style, and the gardens planted with magnificent trees. It was in the dining room, which was a long and superb gallery on the ground floor opening onto the grounds, that Monseigneur Henri Puget had, on July 29, 1714, ceremoniously fed the ecclesiastical dignitaries, Charles Brûlart de Genlis, archbishop prince of Embrun, Antoine de Mesgrigny, Capuchin bishop of Grasse, Philippe de Vendôme, grand prior of France, abbé of Saint-Honoré de Lérins, François de Berton de Crillon, bishop baron of Vence, César de Sabran de Forcalquier, lord bishop and lord of Glandève, and Jean Soanen, priest of the oratory, preacher in ordinary to the king, lord bishop of Senez.2 The portraits of these seven reverend fathers embellished the dining room and the memorable date of July 29, 1714, was engraved there in gold lettering on a white marble panel. The hospital was a low, narrow, single-story house with a small garden. Three days after his arrival, the bishop visited the hospital. When his visit was over, he politely begged the director to accompany him back to his place. "Monsieur le directeur, how many sick people do you have in your hospital at the moment?" "Twenty-six, Monseigneur." "That's what I counted," said the bishop. "The beds are all jammed together," the director went on. "That's what I noticed." "The living areas are just bedrooms, and they're difficult to air." "That's what I thought." "Then again, when there's a ray of sun, the garden's too small for the convalescents." "That's what I said to myself." "As for epidemics, we've had typhus this year, and two years ago we had miliary fever--up to a hundred were down with it at any one time. We don't know what to do." "The thought did strike me." "What can we do, Monseigneur?" said the director. "You have to resign yourself to it." This conversation took place in the dining-room gallery on the ground floor. The bishop fell silent for a moment, then suddenly turned to the hospital director. "Monsieur," he said, "how many beds do you think you could get in this room alone?" "Monseigneur's dining room?" cried the astonished director. The bishop sized up the room, giving the impression he was taking measurements and making calculations by eye alone. "It could easily hold twenty beds!" he mumbled, as though talking to himself. Then he spoke more loudly. "Look, my dear director, I'll tell you what. There has obviously been a mistake. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms. There are three of us here and we've got enough room for sixty. There's been a mistake, I'm telling you. You've got my place and I've got yours. Give me back my house. This is your rightful home, here." The next day, the twenty-six poor were moved into the bishop's palace and the bishop was at the hospital. Monsieur Myriel had no property, his family having lost everything in the Revolution. His sister got an annuity of five hundred francs, which was enough for her personal expenses, living at the presbytery. Monsieur Myriel received a salary of fifteen thousand francs from the government as bishop. The very day he moved into the hospital, Monsieur Myriel decided once and for all to put this sum to use as follows. We transcribe here the note written in his hand. household expenditure For the small seminary 1500 livres Mission congregation 100 livres For the Lazarists of Montdidier 100 livres Seminary of foreign missions in Paris 200 livres Congregation of the Saint-Esprit 150 livres Religious institutions in the Holy Land 100 livres Societies of maternal charity 300 livres For the one at Arles 50 livres For the betterment of prisons 400 livres For the relief and release of prisoners 500 livres For the release of fathers of families imprisoned for debt 1000 livres Salary supplement for poor schoolteachers in the diocese 2000 livres Upper Alps public granary 100 livres Ladies' Association of Digne, Manosque, and Sisteron,3 for the free education of poor girls 1500 livres For the poor 6000 livres My personal expenses 1000 livres total 15000 livres The whole time Monsieur Myriel held the see of Digne, he made almost no change in this arrangement--what he called, as we shall see, "taking care of his household expenses." Mademoiselle Baptistine accepted the arrangement with absolute submission. For this devout spinster, Myriel was both her brother and her bishop, the friend she grew up with and her superior according to ecclesiastical authority. Quite simply, she loved him and revered him. When he spoke, she listened, and when he took action, she was right behind him. Only the servant, Madame Magloire, grumbled a bit. As you will have noticed, the bishop kept only a thousand livres for himself which, added to Mademoiselle Baptistine's pension, meant fifteen hundred francs a year. The two old women and the old man all lived on those fifteen hundred francs. And when some village curé came to Digne, the bishop still managed to find a way of entertaining him, thanks to the assiduous scrimping and saving of Madame Magloire and Mademoiselle Baptistine's clever management. One day, when the bishop had been in Digne for about three months, he said, "With all that, things are pretty tight!" "They certainly are!" cried Madame Magloire. "Monseigneur hasn't even claimed the money the département owes him for the upkeep of his carriage in town and his rounds in the diocese. In the old days, that was standard for bishops." "You're right, Madame Magloire!" the bishop agreed. And he put in his claim. A short while later, after considering this application, the department council voted him an annual stipend of three thousand francs, under the heading, Bishop's Allowance for Carriage Upkeep, Postal Costs, and Travel Expenses Incurred in Pastoral Rounds. The local bourgeoisie was up in arms over this and an imperial senator,4 who had been a member of the Council of Five Hundred5 promoting the Eighteenth Brumaire and was now provided with a magnificent senatorial seat near Digne township, wrote a cranky little private letter to the minister of public worship, Monsieur Bigot de Préameneu.6 We produce here a genuine extract of a few lines: "Carriage upkeep? Whatever for, in a town with less than four thousand people? Travel expenses incurred in pastoral rounds? To start with, what's the good of them anyway? And then, how the hell does he do the rounds by post chaise in such mountainous terrain? There are no roads. One has to proceed on horseback. Even the bridge over the Durance at Château-Arnoux7 can barely take a bullock-drawn cart. All these priests are the same. Greedy and tight. This one played the good apostle when he first turned up. Now he acts like all the rest. He must have a carriage and a post chaise. He must have luxury, the same as the old bishops. Oh, these bloody clergy! Monsieur le comte, things will only come good when the emperor has delivered us from these pious swine. Down with the pope! [Things were not good with Rome at that point.]8 As for me, I'm for Caesar alone." And so on and so forth. Madame Magloire, on the other hand, was delighted. "Hooray!" she said to Mademoiselle Baptistine. "Monseigneur put the others first but he's wound up having to think of himself, finally. He's fixed up all his charities. Here's three thousand livres for us. At last!" The same night, the bishop wrote a note, which he handed to his sister. It went like this: carriage upkeep and travel expenses Beef broth for the sick in the hospital 1500 livres For the society of maternal charity of Aix 250 livres For the society of maternal charity of Draguignan 250 livres For abandoned children 500 livres For orphans 500 livres total 3000 livres And that was Monsieur Myriel's budget. As for the cost of episcopal services, redemptions, dispensations, baptisms, sermons, consecrations of churches and chapels, marriages and so on, the bishop took from the rich all the more greedily for giving it all to the poor. It wasn't long before offerings of money poured in. The haves and the have-nots all knocked on Monsieur Myriel's door, some coming in search of the alms that the others had just left. In less than a year, the bishop became treasurer of all works of charity and cashier to all those in distress. Large sums passed through his hands, but nothing could make him change his style of life in the slightest or get him to embellish his spartan existence by the faintest touch of the superfluous. Far from it. As there is always more misery at the bottom of the ladder than there is fraternity at the top, everything was given away, so to speak, before it was received, like water on thirsty soil. A lot of good it did him to be given money, he never had any. And so, he robbed himself. The custom being for bishops to put their full baptismal names at the head of their mandates and pastoral letters, the poor people of the area had chosen, out of a sort of affectionate instinct, the one among all the bishop's various names that made the most sense to them, and so they called him Monseigneur Bienvenu--Welcome. We'll do likewise whenever the occasion arises. Besides, the nickname tickled him. "I like that name," he said. "Bienvenu pulls Monseigneur into line." We are not saying that the portrait of the man we offer here is accurate; we will restrict ourselves to the claim that it is a passing likeness. Excerpted from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.