The Les Misérables Reading Companion: Recent Episodes
Briana Lewis
The Podcast about Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. In each episode, I will comment on a section of the book, to make it a bit less daunting, and hopefully help you enjoy it a bit more. I am a professor, but this podcast is created with a non-academic, non-expert, non-French-speaking audience in mind--that is, anyone who'd like to dive into this classic!
Here's some more information about Victor Hugo's Poor Children's Dinners.
Now that we're "done" (we'll never be done) with Les Misérables, is there something else you'd like to see in this feed? Let me know at the links above!
It's been a pleasure reading with you....
Here's what the last page of the manuscript looks like:
(source)
You can see here that Hugo originally had a different epitaph, which he crossed out. It reads:
"Il dort paisible après un sombre et long martyre.
Quand il n'eut plus son ange, il mourut sans rien dire;
La chose simplement d'elle-même arriva,
Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s'en va."
The last two lines of this draft are the same as in the definitive version, but the first two are different. They translate approximately as:
"He sleeps peaceful after a dark and long martyrdom.
When he no longer had his angel, he died without saying anything."
As you may be able to tell, the other big difference between the first two lines in the draft and the final version is that this draft doesn't have the poetic features I discussed in the podcast episode; they're relatively regular alexandrines that don't create the uneasy feeling through their rhythm and internal rhyme.
In addition to writing, Hugo could do other things with ink--here are some of his drawings, along with a bit of discussion of them.
Today, too, there's nothing in particular outside the text to send you to for further exploration.
I think it's interesting that this starts to be the case at this point--the novel, like Jean Valjean's life, starts to contract, and be more closed in on itself, rather than expanding in every direction into the real world....
No particular extras for this, but, if you watched the recent adaptation of Les Misérables on the BBC/PBS, you might be entertained to look back at my comments on their episode 6, as they pertain to this scene, now that you've read it.....
Here's Juliette Drouet...
...in 1832:
...and in 1883:
For more information about her -- and there's lots more that I didn't have time to include! -- there are a number of books in both French and English.
And here's a picture of the Church were Marius and Cosette are married, which I've also marked on our Google map:
Just one extra tidbit today: the promised information about the corbeille de noces, or corbeille de mariage.
I've added the location of Javert's reflection and his final moments to our Google map, in the Part V layer.
For those who are interested, the reference to Racine I mentioned is in Act II scene 2 of Phèdre, here in French, and in English.
And here's a period lithograph about the Fampoux train derailment in 1846:
As you may have noticed, it’s taken me a minute to get my final thoughts on this miniseries adaptation of Les Misérables in order--there were a few reasons for that, some more related to general professoring than to podcasting. But I also wanted to take my time and think through what I have to say, both about episode 6 and about the series in general. For the most part, what I have to say about episode 6 pertains to the series in general, so I’m going to take them together.
Overall, this series has allowed us to see a number of scenes that give readers of the book a kind of pleasure of recognition, and that continued in the final episode: the leaders of the uprising asking breadwinners not to hurt their families by sacrificing themselves, Gavroche’s song (including some of the original French lyrics) in his final scene, the fall of the barricade and the final moments of Enjolras and Grantaire, Jean Valjean’s struggle through the sewers, and especially the subsidence, Marius’s visit from Thénardier.
But there are some very serious absences from that list, and therein lies my disappointment. We saw so many other Very Important Scenes in episode 6, and many of them had the same liabilities that have become increasingly troublesome with each episode of this series.
One relatively simple example is that, in an effort to make Cosette’s turmoil visible on screen, it got lost in over-the-top melodrama, and she became a bit too much of a bratty teenager--a disservice to Hugo’s spiritual treatment of the love between her and Marius. In the book, we’re on their side, even though we know it hurts Jean Valjean, and while we understand his caution at people haunting around his house/garden/adoptive daughter, we know more about Marius than he does, and we can’t help but feel he’s wrong to separate them--which he figures out by the end as well. Here, I kinda wanted to send her to her room and lock her in there too. It would, after all, be the only sensible choice for a 19th-century parent whose daughter puts on a bright red dress and goes running through lines of soldiers with her hair down. clutches pearls
I will say in passing, before I leave Cosette entirely, that I nonetheless appreciated that she had a brain in this adaptation--she was the one who put all the pieces of the puzzle together and figured out that Jean Valjean was the mysterious hero who had rescued Marius. In the book, she is too infantilized even to witness that conversation. This was a departure, but one that I, with my 21st-century biases, didn’t mind.
The biggest liabilities in episode 6 continued to be the way Jean Valjean, Javert, and their relationship were written. To be clear, this is ABSOLUTELY NOT a criticism of Dominic West or David Oyelowo--both actors were superb, but David Oyelowo in particular did such stunning work that, during Javert’s derailment, I found myself (fleetingly) not caring about the problems with how it was set up. He would absolutely have my Emmy vote (if I got one) for that scene alone.
But the way I see it, the problem with both of these characters and the relationship between them was this: in the book, the psychological place where each character ends up is deeply rooted in larger philosophical issues about what the law, goodness, and morality are, and in how they understand their relationship to those things--issues that are difficult to develop on screen, I’ll grant, but not, I don’t think, impossible. In any case, this adaptation didn’t try--either consciously, perhaps to simplify the story for TV audiences, or out of a shallow reading of the novel--and instead, rewrote the characters’ motivations and psychological profiles to make their end points make sense another way. For Javert, that meant making him obsessed with Jean Valjean in particular, with him as a sort of fetishized criminal whose capture is more important than all others--and so it becomes Javert’s relationship with Jean Valjean, not with law and order itself, that is upended at the barricade, taking away a lot of the depth and significance of what follows.
As for Jean Valjean, this adaptation took away a significant part of how the character speaks to the novel’s central questions by never really transforming him. In the book, he has saint-like levels of generosity and longsuffering, and superhuman strength and guile to apply to them, so that in the end, when he still seems to see himself as a criminal, a misérable, and when all of society--including, until the last possible second, Cosette and Marius--seems to agree, we are baffled, and more than a little outraged. We are left feeling that the whole social structure--you know, law and custom--that makes someone like him end up as he does--you know, in a state of social damnation--IS WRONG. But, of course, Hugo wants us to think that. He told us that in the Preface that I not-so-subtly cited two sentences ago. The feeling of indignation for Jean Valjean at the end is carefully constructed by Hugo to show us precisely this. But this adaptation didn’t want to sit with that feeling, it seems, so it gave us a Jean Valjean who remained angry and dangerous, who had a reason, in the end, to think and to articulate to Marius that it wasn’t safe to have him around. He continued to be someone who was capable of going to the barricade “with half a mind to kill” Marius, just as, during his night at the Bishop’s house, he was torn between crushing the Bishop’s skull and kissing his hand. In the 17 years between his interactions with these two unconscious men, this Jean Valjean apparently didn’t evolve. But the one in the book became an entirely new man, one who could, apart from a bit of misdirection on Hugo’s part that we found mostly unsuccessful, be trusted with the injured Marius’s life. The result is that when Javert pursues this Jean Valjean relentlessly, or when Jean Valjean exiles himself from Marius and Cosette’s life, it seems to make some sense, because it’s not ridiculous to see him as the “very dangerous man” that he was when he left the bagne. But much of what the book has to say about the law, through Jean Valjean and Javert in particular, hinges precisely on that being ridiculous, on there being an almost unfathomable discrepancy between who we know Jean Valjean to be and what he is in the eyes of the law (and of Javert, and to a great extent of Jean Valjean himself).
In order to do all that in a way that corresponds more to the book, I will freely grant that an adaptation would need more time, especially with the part of the story that we saw in episode 6, and probably with other portions too, to set up these dénouement scenes. The proof of that, in this adaptation, was that a similar strategy succeeded quite nicely in the relationship between Marius and Gillenormand. Where often Gillenormand is written out of adaptations altogether, and if he is included, he’s flattened out into his royalist beliefs to give Marius something to rebel against, here, they kept very close to the pair’s full complement of emotional baggage--the differences in culture between the pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary/Romantic character types, the deeply personal matters of Gillenormand having kept Marius’s father from him, insulted his legacy, and made the end of Colonel Pontmercy’s life so pitiable, and, arguably least importantly, the political differences of opinion. That is difficult to do in an adaptation too, especially for modern non-French audiences that may not be well versed in the politics of the era--but this adaptation took the time and energy, and pulled it off quite nicely. It’s unfortunate that it couldn’t devote the same care to Jean Valjean.
Finally, and perhaps relatedly, Jean Valjean’s death scene felt “off” in a couple of ways, even though it remained affecting. It felt rushed--we lost the slow decline, like a pendulum winding down (as it’s described at one point), that we have in the book. And I was distracted by the unnecessary return to Digne--the choice to bring the story full circle geographically was an interesting idea, I guess, and the location was beautiful, but it didn’t make sense (did the Bishop, what, leave him some property down there or something?), and didn’t fit the overall grimness of Jean Valjean’s death. In his death, just like in the end of his life, we should be left feeling that he was cheated, like fate got it wrong, apart from the tiny recompense that was Cosette’s appearance to comfort his last moments. Instead, he’s retired to this kind of Eden, still working blissfully in the garden, although he knows he will die soon, and his comfort arrived before his decline really began. He seemed to get at least a part of his reward here on Earth. Again, it seems like this adaptation succumbed to the temptation to take the edge off our feeling of injustice at Jean Valjean’s end, where Hugo asks us to sit with it in all its unease.
But the final image of this adaptation did get just a bit of that unease back, because it reminded us of Gavroche’s two little brothers, who made a fleeting appearance in an earlier episode. They are indeed two of the only surviving characters in the novel, and this is the right way to imagine them, when all is said and done. Hugo doesn’t emphasize their continued existence in misère in this same way, but we did of course see, buried in the middle of the barricade sequence--just after Gavroche’s death--them continuing to apply his lessons to survive on the streets. Here, by making that the final image, this adaptation reminds us that the novel’s problems aren’t solved, that Jean Valjean only saved one little orphan girl, and that all of the characters’ other efforts against misère were for naught. So long as these problems shall exist--in Hugo’s century or in any century--this story, in any form, may not be without use.
No particular extras today... but my final thoughts on Les Misérables on PBS will be along soon....
I think we all learned a lesson tonight: Hugo didn’t know that cinema would be invented within a half-century of when he wrote Les Misérables, but he did write for the stage, and if he’d known about cinema, he would have wanted in. So when adapting him, in action scenes and interactions between characters, just get out of his way.
The most effective scenes we saw tonight, in my opinion, were those that looked the way Hugo wrote them: Cosette finding the letter (as she was afraid of being in the house with just Toussaint--nice keeping that detail in), the scene between Gillenormand and Marius, the image of Mabeuf atop the barricade, the powder-keg scene, Éponine’s death. Also effective was the way they portrayed the general situation in Paris in the spring of 1832: the unrest and feeling that something big was coming, and the cholera epidemic, which most adaptations leave out--juxtaposing teen romance, revolutionary idealism, and violent gastrointestinal upset is, after all, a tricky business. But here, I think we really got a good sense of what was going on in Paris at the time.
But. BUT. There are a few choices that are being made consistently here that are becoming bigger problems all the time.
The first of these is in the relationship between Jean Valjean and Cosette. This was an issue at least last week, if not earlier: Jean Valjean seems angry with her for her desire to be freer and know more about the world, and this adaptation is suggesting that his feelings and unreasonableness are the only things keeping her from running free. Here, she seemed to think that too--and, in a cringe-worthy teen-movie moment, she declared “I hate you!” as a result. Now, I know that the nineteenth-century restrictions on women are hard to portray--they’re just underlying assumptions, something everyone would have known without discussing. But even she didn’t put all of that on Jean Valjean. Meanwhile, his protection of her in the book has two sources: his knowledge of how easily she could end up like her mother--which would not have been remotely unreasonable--and the fact that she is all he has, and he doesn’t want her to leave him alone in the world. But this never expresses itself as anger toward her, or the kind of aggressive exposure to the world that we saw last week when he intentionally took her to be horrified by the men being transported to the bagne. In the book, it’s always a kind of wise and tragic resignation, that I wish we got to see here.
Related to that is Jean Valjean’s tendency toward ill-temperedness and meanness in this adaptation, which is deeply unfair to his character. Tonight, that showed up when he met Gavroche. In the book, Jean Valjean is kind to him there, and gives him a coin for his trouble in delivering the letter. Here, he forcefully takes the letter from him and frightens him off--not at all unlike what he did to Petit-Gervais. The Jean Valjean in the book would not have aggressed another tween boy without serious emotional consequences. Here, it’s as if that seminal moment outside of Digne is just….gone. If we can remember it for 1000 pages of the book, I think we can remember it for 4 hours of TV--follow-up to the insult to TV audiences that was last week’s brothel scene, I guess.
And of course, we still have Javert’s unreasonable obsession with Jean Valjean--to the point where he brushed off the threat of insurrection, only interested in pursuing this petty criminal from a decade earlier--even to the point where he assumed Jean Valjean would be the insurrection’s leader. Maybe this is meant to be thought of as symbolic--if it were, as the Law’s relentless pursuit of Jean Valjean as one and the same as its support of the status quo and power structures in place, then thinking of Jean Valjean as a prime example of what’s going on at the barricade is not entirely wrong. Hugo would have called them both workers in the upper mine, and imagining Jean Valjean as the head of that work crew would be fair enough. But we don’t seem to be operating in those sorts of symbolic ways here--in any event, I haven’t seen anything to signal that we are. Instead, it seems like an effort to simplify Javert, to explain his relentlessness as specific to Jean Valjean, rather than as a feature of the inexorability that he represents--that is, this obsession seems like it’s here to avoid the symbolic meanings of the character in the novel. I find that to be an unfortunate thinning of what he’s all about.
And on a somewhat more personal note, I was quite disappointed by Éponine’s scene in front of the rue Plumet gate. It stripped her of her power. She screamed almost immediately (whereas, in the book, she never had to) and what scared the bandits off (3, not 6) was a dog barking, not even her. She did eventually tell her father she wasn’t afraid of him, but only after the danger was over. This is another scene that is excellent as Hugo wrote it--not sure why we couldn’t see it that way here…. I’ll just have to keep waiting until someone does it justice.
But I will give this episode credit for keeping the various plotlines intact and in sync across a part of the plot where the novel is at its most complicated. That’s no easy task, and other than some funkiness with the overall timeline early on, the chronology of multiple-plot structure has been very well managed here.
We’ll conclude next week, with lots of plot to go--looking forward to it!
OK, so let’s just get this out of the way: THERE IS NO BROTHEL SCENE IN LES MISÉRABLES. Also, Éponine is not in the business of free peep shows to the neighbors, and Hugo worked very hard to make every interaction between Marius and Cosette pure as the driven snow, even down to their thoughts about each other. In short, I did NOT dig the tawdry efforts to unnecessarily sex this story up.
There. Now we can move on.
Two things I thought this adaptation did exceptionally well tonight were the politics and the ambush. The political context of Les Misérables, as we’ve discussed on the podcast, is a complicated one, and it can be difficult for adaptations to work all that exposition in. This one has done what’s necessary in that area relatively seamlessly, such that Marius’s conversations with Gillenormand, when they have their falling-out, and with the revolutionaries in the café Musain can happen very much as they do in the book (until it becomes about the brothel, for some reason--that reason being, apparently, that we want to insult TV audiences by assuming they can’t pay attention this long without a little sexy-sexy--but I said I’d move on….). The ambush, too, worked much as it did in the book, and it was cool to see that action scene play out--it may as well have been built for the screen, but adaptations sometimes shorten it up, and it was nice to have time to get it right, in a six-hour adaptation.
The one flaw in the ambush wasn’t really in the ambush itself, it was in what they’ve done so far with Jean Valjean’s character. Part of what’s impressive about his show of force in the book is that he is generally quiet, gentle, generous, and taciturn, and his ability to dominate the Patron-Minette gang creates a contrast. By making him grumpier and more prone to outbursts of anger here--which he has been all along--what he did in the ambush was just another one, and it took away its punch.
And, relatedly, I’m finding myself quite bugged by the shift in character motivations around Cosette, Jean Valjean, and their relationship--it changes both characters, but, again, chiefly Jean Valjean’s. If he is the one who decides to leave the convent, deciding to offer her choices before she demands them, then he is being, again, thoughtful, generous, selfless. Here, it’s her idea--which is interesting in a way, and gives her a kind of agency that the character in the book is capable of, but rarely gets--but Jean Valjean’s repsonse is kind of appalling: he sets out to spite and punish her, showing her, on purpose, the worst of the world that she wants so badly to see, intentionally upsetting her so that she’ll wish she never wanted freedom or knowledge. That’s hardly the Jean Valjean we know.
I can sympathize with wanting to find a way to avoid shading the edges of incest the way the book does. That’s WAY uncomfortable. But I can think of two or three better ways than this.
I also think we lost something in the openness of this Jean Valjean with Cosette about her mother. In the book Fantine becomes very nearly unnameable, especially as Cosette reaches adolescence--because her story is to horrible, or because her sacrifice is too sacred, or both. Having Jean Valjean and Cosette talk openly about her is so 21st century, first of all, but also, it banalizes the story--which is exactly the reason it’s treated as a holy story in the book. This, too, might be related to giving Jean Valjean a reason other than really nervous-making jealousy to not want Cosette to meet boys, but I think the cost is too high.
Motivation continues to be an issue with Javert, too--he shows up so implausibly often in Jean Valjean’s path that it’s tempting to explain that by creating the obsession we’re seeing here, where he’s still thinking about him when he hasn’t made a peep in 10 years (like, 6 or 7 years, really). But that’s just not how it works in the book. Javert is the embodiment of the Law, and the Law will never release Jean Valjean. But it’s not obsessed with him, exactly. It’s just in the nature of the Law to be a relentless problem for someone like him. That’s a bit literary, but I think a film could do it.
Still, I loved seeing Gavroche, and Mabeuf, and the Friends of the ABC tonight. I think we’ve got each of them right, so far, and as with the exposition around the politics and the ambush, I’m grateful for the time we have here to include them. Hope we’ll see more of them next time!
Here's the 1830 map again for your convenience, if you'd like to try to locate Jean Valjean's approximate trajectory through the sewers.
And the details of that journey are too much for our Google map (and my mapping skills), but I have marked, in the new Part V layer, the point where Jean Vajean enters the sewer and where he leaves it, as well as la Madeleine, which he (significantly) passes along the way.
Some themes seem to be emerging, as we’re half way through the series....
Lily Collins continued to do amazing work tonight, and the headline, I think, was Fantine’s death scene, which was stunning all around. Apart from the metal bar that connects this scene to the one by the Bishop’s bedside in the book, and provides the physical threat here (see below my growing relationship with Jean Valjean as physical threat in this adaptation), it kept very closely to the book, including Javert’s insistence on technical fact and legality being the last straw that Fantine could not support.
As with the Thénardiers last week, I appreciated how human Champmathieu was here. Hugo writes his distressed female characters, his drunks, and his very poor/benighted characters all similarly, with the incoherent floods of words that we’ve discussed in the podcast as signaling a disconnect from reality or an inability to make the world around them into a clear narrative. The problem is that this can make the characters hard to adapt—turning those floods of words into long monologues on screen doesn’t convey what the scenes need. This adaptation has handled this well—boiling down what the characters say, and giving the actors something they can work with.
There were a couple of occasions where I felt changes were made to create opportunities for action—by arresting Jean Valjean in the courtroom to create a bit of action in Montreuil(-sur-mer), and in the scene in the woods between Jean Valjean and Thénardier. I think both of those could have done more interesting things if they had chosen subtlety. Imagine the tension of a sequence where Jean Valjean is allowed by a stupefied crowd to walk out of the courtroom, and has to stay ahead of Javert until he’s done what he needed to do, as in the book.... Or the opportunities for the actors that a gun-free, headlock-free scene between Jean Valjean and Thénardier would have been....
At the root of that, it seems to me, is the ongoing need this adaptation seems to have to make Jean Valjean prone to outbursts of anger. The Jean Valjean we know in the book draws his strength from simply knowing he’s strong, both physically and mentally. He doesn’t have to fight a pissant like Thénardier, and he commands the space in the courtroom once he starts speaking because his force and depth of character shine through. He doesn’t need to shout. I do wish we could see the other version of Jean Valjean.
In having him physically fight Thénardier, we also lost the moment where he gave Thénardier the note from Fantine. That’s surprisingly significant to the plot—Thénardier is one of the only people who knows of his connection to Fantine, and that makes him more dangerous. When he gives him the note, which Thénardier keeps, he has physical proof of that connection, and that hangs (silently, mostly) over all the subsequent scenes between Thénardier and Jean Valjean.
And why did we have to make Jean Valjean’s very significant nine-month delay in getting to Montfermeil into two years?! That seemed quite gratuitous to me, when the nine months between Fantine’s entrusting Cosette to Jean Valjean (Annunciation) and his fetching her (Christmas) were so clear. They’re commonly understood to represent Jean Valjean’s symbolic pregnancy. Maybe here he’s an elephant—aren’t they pregnant for two years?
But nonetheless, the Thénardiers continue to be unimaginably terrible people, which is right. I thought Thénardier’s offer to send Cosette to Jean Valjean's room worked—this is not the first adaptation to do such a thing, even though it’s not in the book, and I think the reason for that is the way it sits beneath the surface in the book later, when Éponine and Azelma are teenagers, and gives an explicit sense of Thénardier’s relationship with everyone weaker than himself. I also appreciated the detail of them almost leaving Gavroche behind. The circumstance there reminds us (although it isn’t exactly the same) of the way the two little brothers wound up abandoned, and this was a nice nod to that.
I appreciated the way Mère Innocente kept her wit, intelligence, and power here. The other changes to the convent were understandable—in the book, he takes a LONG time getting in there, and we have the whole detour with the false burial farce—so I don’t mind the departures from the plot, although I missed seeing Fauchelevent again. But I didn’t love having Jean Valjean kick down the door to the nuns’ chapel at the moment when he should have been standing in reverence of them. We get that reverence back later in a scene that’s quite nice, but that seemed like another cheap action move that cost more than it provided.
I’ll be intrigued to see what we do next. We didn’t see Marius this week, but it looks like he’ll be back next time, as the melodramatic young man we know and love.....
I was really interested in how HUMAN the Thénardiers were when we met them tonight. In the book making them monsters has its own advantages (and helps us understand the trauma of being a child misérable), but it makes it hard to see ourselves or people in the real world in them. But the actors must have gotten a handle on their motivations, because they’re both true to the book and seem believable as human beings (albeit terrible ones) here.
They did a few interesting things with Fantine here (in addition, of course, to Lily Collins’s amazing performance—such a gut-wrenching role in any form!) The broad, relatively bare landscape where she and Cosette were traveling reminded me a bit of Jean Valjean’s dream, and less abstractly, really highlighted how difficult it would have been to travel like that alone, on foot, with a small child. When she arrived in Montreuil-sur-mer, the focus on the gutter was interesting—both the English expressions that involve being “in the gutter” and the real function that that gutter served—that of a sewer—are foreshadowing for the character.
I wasn’t thrilled to see how Jean Valjean and Fantine’s relationship was made so direct when she was working in the factory. An important part of her being fired in his name but without his knowledge is that his moral principles are applied in a way that becomes immoral when it causes harm. Here, he becomes like Javert: he applies a “law” to the point of forgetting kindness and humanity. But I did appreciate that they kept the sources of “information” about her intact—the public scribe and the Thénardiers—and its character as unreliable rumor that Mme Victurnien seems to want to believe.
I’m also not sure where we’re heading with messing up Marius’s timeline. He should be old enough to go by himself to see his father when he dies, and I’m not certain this could plausibly have the same emotional effect on a child this young....? Even though it does come to him in person in his father’s last words.
And of course, Fantine’s “descent” was excruciating here—more quickly than in the book, but more viscerally. (Who here, other than me, has a dentist appointment soon??) Lily Collins was outstanding (did I say that already?), and thanks to a bit of modern technology, we did not get to forget about those missing teeth, and felt the full irreversibility of that choice. It was strange that all of the suggestions—or maybe just the one suggestion, that Fantine either ignored or misunderstood the first time—came from the public scribe. In the book, he’s just a vessel—for her information, and then for a whole bunch of wine that gets her info out of him. But here, he acts a bit as her confessor, and then pushes her into the abyss in this way, which is unsettling.
For me, having her spit on Madeleine as soon as he arrived on the scene changed things quite a bit. In the book, of course, this happens after he insists she be freed, making it a reaction not unlike the one I so enjoyed last week, Jean Valjean’s anger at the Bishop’s mercy. Mercy is hard to accept, and both of those moments express that. In addition to which, we should remember that that scene was drawn from Hugo’s life, with Hugo in Madeleine’s place—except the spit, which was fictional. Hugo had the woman he rescued spit on “him” after he rescued her, taking the glory away from himself, and in a way, accepting (indirect!) responsibility for her being in that state in the first place.
Finally, we’ll have to wait until next week to see how this adaptation concludes the Champmathieu affair, but I was alarmed to see Jean Valjean let Javert resign, and not stop him—this Jean Valjean is a bit less skilled than in the book—he loses his cool easily, has a bit of a temper, and in this case, seemed to get wrapped up in himself before he could stop Javert from resigning. I bet Javert isn’t going to wind up off the police force, so I wonder how they explain that....
As for the Tempest in a Skull, that’s always a hard scene for an adaptation, as it all happens in Jean Valjean’s head. I can imagine a spectacular series of hallucinations that might convey it, but we didn’t do that here tonight (just as we didn’t last week with Petit-Gervais). I was, however, intrigued by the coin burning into his hand like the stigmata—interesting touch.
Looking forward to seeing where we go with this next!!
Opening at Waterloo, in a HUGE visual spectacle would be Hugo-approved. He saw Waterloo as an entryway into the novel, whereas a lot of adaptations (understandably) leave it out. And making one of the first few spoken lines be Pontmercy’s “It’s all over” was an intriguing choice—for Hugo the Battle of Waterloo was just that: an ending that was really a beginning.
Really interested in the choice to put this in chronological order. Although, the chronology is a bit wonky—if the first scenes in Paris were supposed to be late 1815, after Pontmercy came back from war (in June) and recovered, and Jean Valjean’s scenes in prison were simultaneous to that, then he got out of prison a year later? He should have been released 4 months later, in October 1815. And Tholomyès left Fantine, as the book makes abundantly clear, in 1817. It doesn’t matter a lot in the grand scheme, I suppose, apart from that situating Jean Valjean’s release in 1815 was not an accident, and I don't quite see what's gained here by disrupting the timeline.
I think this adaptation added a lot of texture to Tholomyès’s character. We recognize something familiar about him in this, which is less the case in the book. Here, he’s a type that we can feel like we’ve met—and against which we’ve warned, or should warn, every young woman we know! I found I reacted quite viscerally to him here, which is good.
They established Javert’s character well here. Showed him standing on the edge, looking down at the men in the quarry and, in one shot, only watching them by implication—they weren’t in the shot, and all that was behind him was the water—which, of course we remember representing the masses in the book, in the man overboard metaphor, etc. He doesn’t see the individual humans he’s guarding, just the phenomenon of them. And then, of course, his speech to Jean Valjean was built on lots of lines from the book.
On the other hand, I’m not at all sure about the firing squad scene. It makes a point, but I don’t think 1) Javert could have simply called for such an execution on his own authority, or 2) that execution would have taken place by firing squad. I don’t know for sure, but it seemed off to me. But it was VERY effective to have that scene, where Javert was eyeing Jean Valjean in particular, juxtaposed with Gillenormand’s line (in the next scene) “Order is restored,” referring to the monarchy. Even if the firing squad scene wasn’t historically on the up and up, it was an effective way to show the violence of “restoring order”—another notion that Hugo would definitely sign off on, particularly after the start of the Second Empire. (“L’ordre est rétabli” -- “Order is restored” is the title of a section of his poetry collection Les Châtiments, which was dedicated to his ire against Napoleon III and the Second Empire.)
It was interesting to see that people distrusted Jean Valjean not only because he was a stranger and looked poor, but also because he was so strong. His strength made the people in the street in Digne all the more afraid of him. This adaptation emphasized that dynamic—that the only thing he has to offer as a worker is a liability socially.
I thought Jean Valjean’s reaction to the Bishop was really good. In the sense that it was bad. In other words, most adaptations don’t let you see Jean Valjean as angry and resistant to the Bishop’s kindness—he’s hungry and needs a place to stay, and mostly keeps quiet during dinner. But not here—here, we get to see how difficult the Bishop’s work is in getting through to him. Jean Valjean has reason to be hostile, even against someone like the Bishop. And then again, when he gives him the candlesticks, his first reaction is anger—in the book, he reacts negatively to this at first too. But adaptations often don’t take the time to unpack the fact that we like the Bishop, but Jean Valjean does not. That takes time and nuance to establish.
I was, on the other hand, disappointed in the scene in the Bishop’s bedroom and the scene in the field outside of Digne. LOTS of potential in both of those scenes for a visual medium, but this adaptation left most of it on the table, just showing us Jean Valjean from the outside, and advancing the plot. We didn’t get to see the visions he saw and work though them with him, which would have let us into his inner life in an interesting way.
They also gratuitously dropped Fantine’s group in Paris from two fours to two threes—making the “galloping horses” carrying the men away quite a bit less apocalyptic. That was unfortunate.
But overall, very interesting so far, and quite enjoyable to see more detail about Fantine’s story in particular, as well as get a sense of Marius’s background. The choice to straighten out the timeline is interesting—makes for more movement as we jump from story to story. And it’s all been visually rich and fascinating. Looking forward to next week!
I’m going to be commenting on #LesMisPBS here for the next few weeks, so in preparation, I thought I’d say a few words about adaptation. People who like a particular book often dismiss adaptations, à la, “A movie can never be as good as a book.” And that might be true. Most books, and certainly this book, are a more immersive experience than a movie, and they have more time to create a complex, multilayered world. Books can repeat themselves more, and take more twists and turns, without testing people’s patience. People generally tolerate a wider range of plots and narrative arcs in books than movies. Books can have more minor characters and subplots because we have more time to get to know them, and can re-read passages to refresh our memories about them. So adaptations usually streamline, eliminate flourishes and duplications, and focus on telling a story in a way that fits audiences’ expectations. But commentary on an adaptation gets really boring really fast if that’s all it says, and I probably won’t spend much time picking at these kinds of decisions. What I try to think about when it comes to adaptations is how the artists involved accommodate the shift from one medium to another. I tend to want adaptations to keep the overall thrust of the characters and story intact, and not to change their meaning(s) drastically without a good reason. (And sometimes there is a good reason.) But within limits, of course an adaptation will be different from the original.
But mostly, it’s about this: just as a book can do things that a movie can’t, a movie can do things that a book can’t. (This is a bit of an obvious thing to say, but it’s the point from which most of the interesting comments on an adaptation come from.) So what particular tools are in a movie’s toolbox? Briefly, the non-verbal--things like images, sounds and music. In the case of Les Misérables, this can be a great opportunity, because a lot of Hugo’s narration is visual and auditory, and in ways that are interesting and creative. Filmmakers can not only use his physical descriptions as a guide, but they can (if they choose) emphasize the things that are strange about them. Think of the description of the Gorbeau House, or the Petit-Picpus convent. These places are weird in ways that an adaptation could really take advantage of. Hugo is also unusually adept at using what the characters see and hear (which may or may not be entirely real) to tell us something that can’t be seen--when Jean Valjean sees the light pass across the sleeping Bishop’s face, for example, or hears the voices speaking to him during the Tempest in a Skull chapter. Éponine hidden in shadow outside the rue Plumet gate. Jean Valjean in prison “looking up” and “seeing” all of society above him, crushing him. Marius reading about Napoleon’s (and his father’s) exploits and “seeing” them come to life. We could go on and on. Each of these examples is told through the point of view of one of the characters and presented as something they perceive, but its meaning is larger than that. The narrator bypasses the characters to do this sometimes too, calling upon the reader’s senses to do the same thing. Some of these are the same descriptions of places that just seem weird at first—turns out, they’re weird because Hugo has prioritized some other meaning over creating a place that seems real. But sometimes it’s subtler than that. For example, in the rue Plumet garden, we have that description where it’s bursting with life, and everything is trying to reproduce. That’s not so weird for a garden in spring, and it gives the place descriptive richness, certainly. But it also tells us something about Marius and Cosette that would be unseemly (especially in the 19th century) to say another way.
A good, smart, adaptation, in my opinion, would take advantage of these opportunities to get more of the book into its interpretation. Each of these would take just a few seconds of the film to establish, it seems to me, and those few seconds would do most of what the corresponding passages in the book do. A picture, in this case, really could be worth a thousand words.
Another category that might be interesting in #LesMisPBS, given what the creators have said in the media about it, is how they refer to modern-day issues. I don’t expect much outright anachronism, but they seem to see connections to our world today, so I’ll be interested to be on the lookout for them.
In which I explain what the holdup is, and what you can do while you're waiting for me to get my act together.
A whole new view of what's below Paris's streets. It's not pretty, but that's what's great about it.
For more reading about Paris's sewers, consider David Pike's Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945. (Cornell UP, 2005) and Nicholas Papayanis's Planning Paris before Haussmann. (Johns Hopkins UP, 2004).
And here again the Preface to Cromwell, in French and in English.
And, finally, here's a picture of our (revolutionary?) souvenir from a visit to the Paris sewers! A vestige of the old sewer in the new sewer, of which Paris remains a bit proud.
Nothing in particular in the way of informative extras today, so I'll give you just a taste of the vast fandom that Enjolras and Grantaire have online.
I promised to once again link to the fable of The Wolf and the Dog, here, La Fontaine's version in French, which Hugo would likely have known best, and here, Aesop's version, translated into English.
And here is the full text of "Souvenir de la nuit du 4." The text is here in French first, and, although translating poetry is always a tricky business, this same page also offers an English translation of the poem, if you scroll down.
If you want to learn more about 1848, and are a fan of this genre, I once again recommend the Revolutions podcast. Series 7 covers the Revolution(s) of 1848.
Here again is that 1823 map, which makes the Saint-Antoine and Temple faubourgs clearly visible.
Here's a painting of the Place de la Bastille in June 1848, barricade included:
And here's a photo of some June 1848 barricades:
If you're interested in learning more about the fascinating life of George Sand, this book is a good place to start. Or, for a shorter commitment, encyclopedia articles here and here.
If you're interested in the details of the matter of the discrepancy between the letter Marius reads and the one Jean Valjean sees in the mirror, here is the manuscript page with Marius's version, and here's the one with the version Jean Valjean sees.
Just one extra to offer you today: here again are the Google map and the 1830 map, if you want to trace Marius's route to the barricade.
First, some pictures of barricades.
This page has a series of pictures of historical barricades built during various uprisings in Paris. It's a tradition that continues to this day.
And some pictures of how Hugo's barricade has been imagined:
Once Les Misérables came out, representations of the June Rebellion were heavily influenced by the novel. For example, this one, from 1870.
On Broadway:
In the 2012 movie musical:
I also promised you some geographical detail about this part of Paris. You can locate it on our Google map in the Part 3 layer, and on the 1830 map here.
And finally, my delightful artwork, representing the immediate area around our characters' stronghold:
A few different online treats for this week.
First, this blog might be useful again for those interested in the geographical details of this section's events.
Here is the Les Misérables-inspired poster from May 1968:
And here, again, is the Delacroix painting that Gavroche came to resemble particularly strongly in this section:
Here is a link to a blog where you will find excellent and detailed map work on these sections of Les Misérables.
And here is the promised 1830 map, for a better view of the streets around Les Halles, where much of the action of the next few sections will take place.
No particular extras this week.
Instead, here's one of the zillions of renditions of the part of the musical that corresponds to the section of story we're starting this week.
If you'd like to learn more about Éponine's song in this section, browse the complete works of Pierre-Jean Béranger. The lyrics are (of course) in French, and each song has a little player that lets you hear the tune. Here is Ma Grand'mère, which we see her sing here.
Here's our little buddy Gavroche, showing us around his world in the 2012 movie musical.
I've put a couple of places from this section (l'Orme-Saint-Gervais and the Place de la Bastilee) on our Google map. If you look at the 1823 map and the 1830 map, you can see mention of the Elephant.
Here are pictures of the three successive sites that were at Place de la Bastille. First, the prison:
"Prise de la Bastille," Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel
Then, the Elephant:
As it might have been - artist unknown
1865 drawing for Les Misérables, by Gustave Brion
And today, the July Column:
Just one link for the extras today: to Blaise Pascal's Pensées, in French and in English.
We mentioned the chaining of the convicts at Bicêtre here again, so I will again link to Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) in French and in English; the chapter describing such a chaining is chapter 13.
Bicêtre is on our Google map in the Part 2 layer, and in the current Part 4 layer, I have added the approximate spot where Jean Valjean and Cosette watched the chained convicts pass, at the Barrière du Maine.
All we have in extras again today is maps: our Google map, with the three new houses on it, and maps from 1823 and 1830 to compare it to.
Since we've mentioned The Sorrow of Young Werther again, here is a link to the text in English.
And we have a few new places on our Google map, many of which will make more sense on the 1823 map.
Linking again to our Google map, now with a Part 4 layer containing a marker in the area of the faubourg Saint-Antoine. This neighborhood is labeled on the 1823 map.
And here is a clip from the 2012 movie musical, where, at around 1:40, Gavroche sums all this up much more succintly than Hugo or I could!
Nothing in particular for the extras this week, but here's a picture of Marius looking in on his neighbors, from the 1958 adaptation by Jean-Paul Le Chanois:
Here are the chapters of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) that first brought us Hugo's spider metaphor, in French and in English (here and here).
The locations in this episode are not new to us, so they're already on our Google map, but you'll have look for them in the Part II layer.
And finally, here's a website with some pictures of the sort of small pistol that is probably quite similar to the ones that Javert would have given to Marius in this section.
Here's my most excellent illustration of the various ways the novel visualizes the world below. (Sorry.)
And here are a couple of examples of entries from the Encyclopédiethat have a bit more to say than we might expect: Sovereign (in French and in English) and Reason (in French and in English). If you'd like to browse more, you can do that in French or in English as well.
All of the drama between Marius and Cosette in this section takes place in the Luxembourg gardens. This will not be the last time we see this spot either, so I've marked it on our Google map, even though it's pretty easy to locate in Paris without a marker.
Here's an image of a young Hugo, closely matching the description of Marius, albeit somewhat better fed:
Here (French only) is an example of some of Hugo's earliest well-known poetry glorifying Napoleon, after warming to his father and his father's beliefs.
I've added the locations of Mabeuf's two main residences mentioned here to our Google map.
And here are links to a trailer and a clip of the French film adaptation that I mention here, as well as full information about it.
Lots of politics today, a subject that it's hard not to distort when simplifying or summarizing. I prioritized what you need to know for Les Misérables, but if you want to know more in this area, I recommend looking beyond Hugo's rather idiosyncratic view. There are lots of good books on this topic; I suggest a general history of France, or something focusing on the "long nineteenth century" (1789-1914) to start with. For the more listening-inclined, I will again recommend the Revolution's podcast; there are series on the (first) French revolution and on the Revolution of 1830, with a lot of the politics of this period explained in the latter in particular. He also has an extensive bibliography on the topic on his website. For those who like a visual chronology, here is a concise summary of the 19th century in France from a political perspective.
I have also added the locations of the Friends of the ABC's two main haunts, Corinthe and the Café Musain, to our Google map.
And here are links, if you're interested, to the Henri Murger novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (French) / Bohemians of the Latin Quarter (English).
Not a ton in the way of visual extras today, but perhaps you'd like to peruse what Marius was reading?
Here's an idea of what Le Moniteur would have looked like. Marius was likely reading later editions as well, but a full archive does not seem to be digitized. This is an issue from January 1799.
Here's an example of a Bulletin de la Grande Armée. This is the first one, from 1805.
Here is the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. It was published in multiple volumes; this is the link to volume 1.
First, a bit of extra info about Gillenormand...
I mentioned that he was mis-costumed in the 2012 movie; the novel says that he had kept the style of the Incroyables of the final years of the 18th century. Here's what that looked like:
But here's Gillenormand in the 2012 movie musical. This style is more 19th-century--note the hairstyle and facial hair, the hat, and the lapels.
And, I have added a few locations to our Google map for Part III.
We meet fan-favorite Gavroche and the gamin de Paris, the character type that he doesn't quite exemplify.
Here's a pen and ink drawing of Gavroche, drawn by Victor Hugo himself. The writing at the bottom says "Gavroche, at 11 years old."
I've added Gavroche's stomping grounds, per the first paragraph of chapter 13 (III,1,xiii), to our Google map, the first marker in the layer for Part III.
Here is an early representation of the gamin de Paris, in Eugène Delacroix's 1831 La Liberté guidant le peuple / Liberty Leading the People:
Here are a few images of Marianne, the most common allegorical representation of the French Republic:
Artist anonymous, on display in the French Senate building
French Government Logo
At the start of the Third Republic (1871)
Brigitte Bardot as Marianne in 1969
And a couple of images of Joseph Bara, the drummer in the Revolutionary army who became a gamin-like symbol of the nation:
La Mort de Bara (The Death of Bara), Jean-Joseph Weerts, 1880
Marble Sculpture by David d'Angers, 1838 (source)
For those who may be interested here is a book with a lot more information about child abandonment in 19th century France.
And here is more info about the film I mentioned, Les Enfants du Paradis / Children of Paradise (1945)
Here, once again, is the Google map of Paris, with the Vaugirard cemetery added. And here again is the 1823 map to compare it to.
And, as promised, some designs for safety coffins:
1868
1885
1894
I try my hand at live commentary on the 2012 movie-musical adaptation of Les Misérables.
Here is a video of Colm Wilkinson (whom we just saw as the Bishop), performing Jean Valjean's soliloquy "Bring Him Home" from later in the show.
As for the video of Anne Hathaway, of course, since Matt Lauer was exposed and fired from the "Today" show, the Internet has come to see the moment I was thinking with new eyes. Many of the readily available versions of it have edited it to make it about him and put it in the larger context of his patterns of behavior, etc. This one was published in 2012 and, while it includes some commentary about him, it allows us to see her full answer and showcases her impressive clarity about the connections between Fantine's story and our culture today. (Skip to about 1:08 if you don't want to listen to Sam Seder's intro.)
Once again this week, no particular multimedia extras. Episode 23 will come with some cool stuff though--stay tuned!
The podcast (and I) will be on vacation for a couple of weeks; I hope to have the next episode ready for you on June 12, but won't be surprised if it's the 13th.
In the meantime, I may try to make something a little different to hold you over. Not sure just yet if I can pull it off.....
No particular extras for this week's episode, but I did mention in passing the Preface to Cromwell, linked to most recently in episode 20's extras....
Next week, we'll return from this heavily philosophical digression to one of the most charming sections of the novel!
I mentioned Chateaubriand's René; here it is in French and in English.
Another famous example of the convent as a place of retreat from the rigors of worldly love is in the late-eighteenth-century novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) by Choderlos de Laclos. It's a lot of novel for that one thing, but it's darkly enjoyable in its own right. (And, of course, there is the 1988 movie, which is relatively faithful to, if simplified from, the novel.)
And finally, here again is the Preface to Cromwell, in French and in English.
Will our hero escape the clutches of the police? And what kind of strange place will his safe haven turn out to be?
This section put a bunch of new places on our Google map, and will make it especially useful, I think, to look at the 1823 map.
Here is a link to the memoirs of Vidocq (in French and in English), which were a sensation in 1828. And the man himself:
Eugène François Vidocq, portrait by Achille Devéria
And here, two of the Contes Fantastiques of Théophile Gautier: "La Morte Amoureuse" in French, translated as "Clarimonde" in English; and "Le Pied de momie" in French, "The Mummy's Foot" in English.
And Gautier, in all his bohemian splendor (a bit later in life than the publication of these stories):
Today's extras are heavily geographical:
Here, once again, is our Google map, now with layers organized by section in the text, to make it a bit easier to zero in on the markers that interest you.
And here, for reference in the much-changed Paris, is an 1823 map of the city. It is far less interactive, but if you're interested in the details of what you're reading in the novel, this is the place to try to follow along. The locations we're discussing today are on the southern edge of the city.
Here are a few examples of artists' interpretations of Cosette with her pail. There are LOTS more images of Cosette here; the page is in French, and at the beginning it's about about the Poor Children's Dinners that Hugo hosted at his home in Guernsey. Scroll down a bit, and you'll begin to recognize Cosette.
1892, G. Guay
1905, M. Paul Dufresne
And of course, here is the scene from the 2012 movie musical of Les Misérables that is most closely associated with Young Cosette. Note now they filmed her "behind bars" through the gate, recalling the association between her forced labor and Jean Valjean's (who wouldn't have been literally behind bars, but symbolically, in the vernacular of the film's audience). Also, now that we've thought about the various meanings of the big beautiful doll, which we see for a moment here, it's especially poignant when she has the rag she's using for a doll whisper in her ear....
For those who might be interested in old sailing warships here is a bit more information about the Orion.
And if you'd like to read the section of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) where the Greek word ἈΝΆΓΚΗ and the spider metaphor make their first significant appearance, you can find it here (book 7, chapters 4 and 5): in French and in English. The novel's Preface (in French and in English) sets this word up as the foundation on which the whole novel is based.
We think about just what, exactly, this long digression about Waterloo is doing in this book.
Congratulations! It looks as though Part II book 1 was not your "Waterloo!" (Sorry, I had to.)
Here again is the map, to which I've added the location of Waterloo. While I was there, I also added the location of Hauteville-House, Hugo's home on Guernsey, the other main place where he worked on the final version of Les Misérables. The marker for the House on the map includes a link to more information about it.
The Lion's Mound is a major tourist destination today for those interested in the history of the battle.
In Chapter 16 here, Hugo suggests that Napoleon was, in his early days, a genius of war in the Romantic sense of "genius"--drawing on inspiration the way artists did, with the result being energy, creativity, vitality. Jacques-Louis David's famous painting of Napoleon, here in the original version painted in 1799 (there were several versions), reflects a similar image of the young Emperor.
Nothing in particular for the extras today, so I thought I'd share links to some other folks who are reading and talking about Les Misérables online these days.
Have a look at #lesmisreadalong on Twitter; they're taking inspiration from the fact that the novel has a total 365 chapters to read one each day for 2018. They're in the middle of the Waterloo section now, so as you embark on that next, you might be motivated by their musings.
They're being led by Nick Senger; here's his blog.
And here are a few other bloggers who are reading along as well:
http://buttontapper.com/blog/
https://emeraldcitybookreview.com/2018/03/les-miserables-the-first-three-months.html
http://bronasbooks.blogspot.com.au/2018/03/finally-facing-our-waterloo.html
https://www.hyperborea.org/les-mis/
Here are the promised links to Jean Racine's Phèdre: in French and in English translation. The "action" scene I mention is Act V, scene 6. One can understand why Hugo would have wanted to see the monster!
We discuss horse-drawn travel, our hero's anonymity, and his final agonizing moments of indecision.
Here and here are links to pages with more information about horse-drawn vehicles, for those who might be curious. The first one is in French, but it is a simpler list of pictures accompanied by the name of the type of vehicle, and it might be more useful to you even if you can't read all the French text. The second link is a much more detailed Wikipedia page.
And here, again, is the link to the map, with all our locations up to this point marked.
We watch Jean Valjean ask "Who am I?" and two special guests chip in some thoughts about his dream.
Here are links to the full text of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid(in French and in English); I compare Jean Valjean's deliberation in I,7,iii to Rodrigue's in Act I scene 6 here.
And once again, a great many thanks to Dezirae Shukla and Alana Minor for their contributions to this episode!!
Here is the original story (in French) that is considered the origin of Fantine. An English version begins on page 42 of this ebook.
And, it also seems appropriate to give a little more information about Léonie Biard (née d'Aunet, 1820-1879). Before she turned twenty, she insisted, despite extensive objections, on accompanying her future husband on a scientific exploration in the Arctic, and her first foray into literature was a published account of the trip, Voyage d'une femme au Spitzberg (ebook at the link, in French). She met Hugo in 1843, and after the incarceration that followed the incident I describe in this episode, she became a good friend of Hugo's wife Adèle, even as the liaison continued with her husband. In the mid-1850s, she and her husband were finally legally separated, and she published several books, under her maiden name.
We talk about humans behaving like animals, and worse, as we meet Javert, and discuss Fantine's "descent."
Because what's the Internet without cat pictures?
Auguste Vacquerie, family friend and brother of Hugo's late son-in-law, was an early adopter of the practice of at-home photography.
Photographs of the many pets of Hauteville-House are rare, but here is one. Lazy housecat indeed.
And while we're still thinking about house pets, here are links to versions of the fable of the Wolf and the Dog: an English version, and Jean de la Fontaine's 17th-century French version. The Fables of La Fontaine are commonly assigned for memorization in French schools, even today.
Here is the map I've started with locations from our reading marked. As we add locations, I'll put them on this map, and re-post this link in the relevant episodes' extras.
Here is an interactive site for exploring global and historical data on literacy (and other issues, if you follow the links once you're there).
In 1895, 10 years after Hugo's death, Edmond Biré undertook to explain the chapter "L'année 1817"/"The Year 1817" line by line. Here is the result. It is in French; to my knowledge, no translation exists. But, I don't happen to think that the English-speaking world loses much by that fact--this is the sort of analysis that can't see the proverbial forest for the trees. In my opinion, at least. Still, it's an impressive monument to his persistence.
The poem "Melancholia" from Les Contemplations is often called Les Misérables in miniature. It includes a character that we might consider a "draft" of Fantine (including plot points we haven't seen yet--consider yourself warned), as well as a story similar to the horse we saw in this section. This link is in French only, I'm afraid; I haven't found a translation I like yet--that's especially challenging with poetry.
This episode didn't contain specific references to anything in particular that needs elaboration here.
The only exception might be that I made quite a few references to the musical.... for those who don't know it well, and would like to hear what I'm talking about, here and here are the first two tracks, which cover what's happened in the book so far.
Here is a picture of a galère or galley, as they operated between the 15th and 18th centuries in the French fleet in the Mediterranean. The rowing would have been done by forced labor, often convicts. However, by the time Jean Valjean was sentenced to hard labor, these ships were no longer in use. He would have lived and worked in the port.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2963199
And here is the promised link to the first chapter of Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné. It is in French, but even if you don't read French, you might enjoy having a look, and comparing it to I,2,viii of Les Misérables, "L'Onde et l'ombre," with the man overboard. The parallels are striking, even visually.
Some items I mentioned in episode 04, for your further reading and exploration:
More about Napoleon's Hundred Days, including the Golfe-Juan Proclamations
Book V of Notre-Dame de Paris (in French) and of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (in English), including the chapter "Ceci Tuera Cela"/"This Will Kill That," on the cathedral and the printing press.
The poem "À l'obéissance passive" from Les Châtiments (in French).
And, the painting Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa) by Théodore Géricault:
As promised, some resources for learning more about the French Revolution:
- A brief audio file series that hits the highlights, while remaining quite concise.
- A longer and more complete podcast series on Revolutions, including series 3, on the French Revolution, and series 6, on the July Revolution and its aftermath, which will be useful in the second half of Les Misérables.
Here's the French Revolutionary calendar for year III (1794-1795):
And here are a few images of the bonnet rouge, or Phrygian bonnet, the red hat that Revolutionaries wore:
The first image here shows a bonnet rouge with the Revolutionary cockade attached.
The second image is a self portrait by the painter Anne-Louis Girodet.
The third image is of Louis XVI--certainly not a Revolutionary!--with the bonnet rouge added. There are multiple possible interpretations of such an image.
Here are links to some things I mention in Episode 02:
Historical currency converter
The Preface to Hugo's 1827 play Cromwell, which is also considered the manifesto of his brand of Romanticism, its principles, and what he sees as its place in cultural history: in English or in French.
The novella Claude Gueux (1834). Here we see an early iteration of a story similar to Jean Valjean's, and a plea against the death penalty: in English or in French. Hugo's other novel that dealt significantly with the death penalty, Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné, was published in 1829. Some scholars, including yours truly, have argued Hugo did not initially write this book to engage with the death penalty debate, but rather as a sort of emotional and aesthetic experiment in contemplating extreme suffering and existential anxiety, but that extended consideration of the plight of the central character led Hugo to question the morality of his punishment. In 1832, Hugo added a preface connecting the work explicitly with the social and political question of the death penalty, and throughout his life, he would be a vocal opponent of capital punishment.
For example, in 1859, 3 years before he published Les Misérables and while he was working on it in earnest, he wrote an open letter regarding the impending execution of the American Abolitionist John Brown. We will never know what difference it might have made; it would arrive too late.
Victor Hugo, The Hanging of John Brown, 1860
Hugo was an artist as well as a writer, and he created many ink drawings like this one. Many were related to his crusade against the death penalty, and there are at least three others that closely resemble this one. One of these, which Hugo seemed to favor particularly, was entitled Ecce Lex (Latin: "Behold the law.")
Victor Hugo, around the time of the publication of Les Misérables
Manuscript for the Preface that we discuss in episode 01. The portion added later includes the phrase about the century's three problems, and the phrase about social asphyxia.
As promised, some recommendations about selecting an edition to read:
First of all, I will repeat and recommend as strongly as possible that you read an unabridged edition.
Even though this podcast is in English, if you think you can read it in French, by all means do. That is, without a doubt, the best version, because it’s the one Hugo wrote--he didn’t speak or write English. If your French is middling, but not fluent, it still might be worth trying. Hugo uses a lot of words--the book is about 1500 pages long, and has a varied and occasionally antiquated 19th-century vocabulary--but he aches to be understood, which means his language is not esoteric or complicated, even when his subject matter is. My students have often been surprised at how readable he is. Maybe give it a shot, and switch to a translation if it doesn’t work out.
However, this podcast will not assume that you know French. When I quote the book, I will give the French for those who may understand it, as well as my own English translation. I will be re-reading the French edition as I create my content, and the text’s Frenchness will always, inevitably, be close at hand as I comment, including some points that might offer challenges in translation, and deserve more discussion than simply reading your translator’s final choice, or mine.
As for translations, I will translate passages I use here, but am not a professional translator, and have not and will not produce a full translated edition myself. But if you know the French text is out of your reach, you have many versions to choose from, and each has its advantages and disadvantages. A couple of links to comparisons of the translations if you’d like some help choosing:
https://letterpile.com/books/Best-Translations-of-Victor-Hugos-Les-Miserables
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/706700-which-translation
https://owlcation.com/humanities/Best-Translations-of-Victor-Hugos-Les-Miserables
There are also unabridged audio editions that might pair nicely with this podcast for commuters and other devotees of the spoken word, available wherever you get your audiobooks.
We start our reading of the novel by thinking about the Bishop of Digne, and why Hugo spends so much time on him to start the novel.
An introductory episode, where I tell you a bit about my plans for this podcast, and then we turn to Hugo's brief preface to his long novel.