The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Victor Hugo · a novel in five parts · forty-eight books · A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, Brussels, with Paris, April to June 1862 · scored on Hugo’s French, read from knowledge; no text in hand, French quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and Isabel Hapgood’s complete translation (1887) for sense
Mode
Historical and social novel, popular serial and epic in one work; a convict’s redemption told with the history of an age, the essay standing beside the story
Mythos
The fall and the redemption in one life; the pursuit of grace by law; three descents and three risings, into the galleys, into a convent’s earth and into the underworld of a city’s sewers
Phase
From the bishop of Digne in 1815 through the Restoration and the July Monarchy to the insurrection of 5 and 6 June 1832, and on to Valjean’s death
Presentation
Fiction; five parts and forty-eight books under a preface dated Hauteville-House, 1862; narrative alternating with essay, history and sermon
Register
From the bishop’s sermon and the narrator’s antitheses to Thénardier’s cant, the student wit of the ABC, Gavroche’s songs and the argot of Patron-Minette
Scale
A convict, a policeman, a foundling and two families; the galleys, a factory town, a convent, a battlefield, and Paris down to its sewers and its slang
Governing Proposition
A convict freed after nineteen years in the galleys for a stolen loaf is bought for good by a bishop with his silver, and spends the rest of his life repaying it: as a manufacturer and mayor, as the guardian of a dead woman’s child, as a fugitive hidden in a convent and as the man who carries his daughter’s lover through the sewers of Paris, pursued from the first part to the last by a policeman who cannot forgive him. The wager of the novel is that society damns the poor by law and custom, that law without mercy is a complete moral system which grace refutes, and that a single conscience and the history of France can be told as one drama, the story and the historian’s essay standing side by side.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“En 1815, M. Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel était évêque de Digne.”
“In 1815, M. Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was bishop of Digne.” The novel named for the wretched opens on a bishop, and its first sentence gives a year and a title before it comes down from the title to the household: the rooms, the table, the silver, the life a churchman leads among the poor of his diocese. The convict comes only in the second book. By then the book has built the house he will enter and the man who will answer him, and the silver is already on the table.
Jean Valjean has served nineteen years in the galleys, a sentence that began with a loaf stolen for his sister’s children, and he comes out of them with a number for a name, 24601, and a hatred of the world that made him a convict. The bishop takes him in. In the night he steals the silver, and when the gendarmes bring him back the bishop says the silver was a gift, and gives him the two candlesticks as well. Then, alone with him, he names the price: “C’est votre âme que je vous achète.”
“It is your soul that I am buying from you.” (I.2). Everything that follows in Valjean’s life is a repayment of that purchase. The candlesticks go with him to the last page.
Around that debt Hugo built five parts and forty-eight books: Fantine, Cosette and Marius of eight books each, L’Idylle rue Plumet et l’épopée rue Saint-Denis of fifteen, and Jean Valjean of nine, under a preface dated Hauteville-House, 1862. He began the book in the mid-1840s, set it aside in 1848, took it up again in exile on Guernsey in 1860 and finished it in 1861; Lacroix published it in Brussels, with Paris at the same time, in instalments of volumes from April to June 1862. Through the story run the essays, and they are part of the work: the year 1817 (I.3), Waterloo (II.1), the convent of the Petit-Picpus (II.6 and II.7), the gamin of Paris (III.1), the July Monarchy (IV.1), argot (IV.7) and the sewers (V.2).
Movement II
Before Fantine is seen as a mother she is seen as a girl, at a student picnic in Paris in the essayist’s year of 1817, with Tholomyès, who will leave her. The child of that summer is Cosette, and to find work Fantine leaves her in the keeping of the Thénardiers, innkeepers at Montfermeil, who will bleed her for the child’s board. At Montreuil-sur-Mer a man under another name has made the jet-bead works prosper and the town with them, and become its mayor. He is the convict of Digne. The police inspector who watches him, and half recognises him, is Javert, a righteous man with no room in his world for a pardoned criminal.
Fantine is dismissed from the works when it is learned that she has a child and no husband, and the book follows her down by stages: she sells her hair, then her teeth, then her body (I.5). It is the preface’s second problem, “la déchéance de la femme par la faim”, the ruin of woman by hunger, given a face and a name. When at last Valjean learns what was done to her in his own factory, she is ill past saving, and he promises to bring her daughter to her.
Then word comes that a man named Champmathieu, taken for Jean Valjean, is to be tried at Arras. If the mayor is silent, an innocent man goes to the galleys and the town keeps its benefactor; if he speaks, he goes himself. The book gives the night between as a chapter, “Une tempête sous un crâne”
“A tempest under a skull” (I.7.3), and holds the trial back while it is told. In the morning he drives to Arras, walks into the courtroom and names himself. The first part ends with the town undone and Valjean in chains, given a new number, 9430: the first descent, taken again by choice.
Movement III
The second part opens not with Valjean or Cosette but with a book of Waterloo (II.1), the field walked as it is decades later and the battle told again, down to the sunken road where the cavalry fell. At night on the field a Thénardier robs the dead, and in robbing them drags from under the bodies an officer still alive, who believes himself saved by him. That officer is Marius’s father. The essay is the longest stretch of the book that the plot does not need, and the robbery is the one joint in it that the plot cannot do without.
Valjean escapes and goes to Montfermeil. Cosette, eight years old and the Thénardiers’ drudge, is sent out at night to fetch water from the spring in the wood, and the book stays with her in the dark, a child and a bucket too heavy for her, until a hand comes down and takes the bucket (II.3). He buys her from the Thénardiers and takes her to Paris. Javert finds them, and the night pursuit through the streets (II.5) ends at a wall that Valjean climbs with the child, into the garden of a convent.
There the story stops for an essay on the convent of the Petit-Picpus (II.6 and II.7), its rule, its perpetual adoration and the question of monasticism, which the plot needs only in part. Then it resumes in the strangest of the descents. To leave the convent and be let in again openly, Valjean is carried out in a coffin and buried in its cemetery, and dug up alive (II.8). He and Cosette live there for years, the convict as gardener and the foundling as a pupil, hidden from the law inside the house of perpetual prayer.
Movement IV
The third part opens with an essay on the gamin of Paris (III.1), and gives the type a body in Gavroche, the Thénardiers’ cast-off son, who lives in the streets and is nobody’s child. Then it turns to Marius, raised by his royalist grandfather, Gillenormand, who learns too late who his father was and changes his politics, falls out with the old man and lives poor among the students of the ABC. In the Gorbeau house he takes a room next door to a family called Jondrette, and through a crack in the wall watches them prepare an ambush (III.8): the Jondrettes are the Thénardiers, the gang is Patron-Minette, and the victim, come to give alms, is Valjean.
The fourth part is the longest, fifteen books, and the most divided. It opens on a history of the July Monarchy and of Louis-Philippe (IV.1), runs through an idyll in the garden of the rue Plumet, where Marius and Cosette fall in love, stops for an essay on argot (IV.7), the language of the night, and ends on the insurrection of 5 and 6 June 1832, and the epic of the rue Saint-Denis that the part’s title promises. The coincidences that bring the same few people together, at Montfermeil, in the Gorbeau house and now at the barricade, are not accidents of construction: they are the shape of a world the book believes is governed.
At the barricade Gavroche goes out under fire to gather cartridges from the dead, singing as he goes, “C’est la faute à Voltaire” and “C’est la faute à Rousseau”, “It’s Voltaire’s fault”, “It’s Rousseau’s fault”, the refrain answering each shot, until a shot does not miss (V.1). Valjean has come to the barricade for Marius. Javert, taken there as a spy, is given to him to execute; he takes him out of sight and lets him go. The pardon that the bishop gave the convict, the convict gives the policeman.
Movement V
When the barricade falls Valjean lifts the wounded Marius and goes down with him into the sewers of Paris. The book stops for its last essay, on the sewers themselves (V.2), the city’s body below the city, what it carries and what it hides, and then follows the convict through them in the dark (V.3), wading, sinking in the mire, the unconscious young man on his back, until he comes out at the river. It is the third descent and the deepest, and it is undertaken to give his daughter to another man.
At the outlet Javert is waiting. He lets Valjean take Marius home, and then he lets Valjean go. The book’s title for what follows is “Javert déraillé”
“Javert derailed” (V.4). A man whose world was the law, complete and without remainder, has been spared by a convict and has spared one in return, and his world cannot hold either act. He stands at the parapet over the Seine and goes over. The book does not make him a villain. He breaks because he was righteous, and because his righteousness had no room in it for grace.
Marius marries Cosette, and Valjean tells him what he was, and withdraws from the house, and is allowed to withdraw. Only at the end does Marius learn who carried him out of the sewer. They come to Valjean at his deathbed, and he dies by lamplight, with the bishop’s candlesticks beside him (V.9). He is buried under a stone without a name, and the last line of the verses written on it is the book’s last: “Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s’en va.”
“As night falls when the day departs.” Whether the self-effacement was sanctity or a last withholding, the book leaves open.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites harder here than on any novel of its rank, and the spine survives it with tighter joints than its reputation allows. The candlesticks (I.2) are the debt every later act repays; Fantine’s descent (I.5) is the price of Cosette; the Thénardier who robs the dead at Waterloo (II.1) is the creditor of Marius’s father, so that the battle is tied to the plot. The convent hides Valjean, and he leaves it in a coffin; the sewer carries Marius. But what is required is the event, not its length. Waterloo needs a chapter for the plot and receives a book; the convent essay (II.7), argot (IV.7) and the histories of 1817 (I.3) and of Louis-Philippe (IV.1) are compelled only in part. Hugo’s defence, that the subject is the whole age, carries their presence, not all of their length, and that length holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and the preface states it: a “damnation sociale” made by law and custom, and the three problems of the age, “la dégradation de l’homme par le prolétariat, la déchéance de la femme par la faim, l’atrophie de l’enfant par la nuit”: the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by hunger, the stunting of the child by darkness. The novel shows it working. A loaf stolen for a sister’s children becomes nineteen years in the galleys; Fantine, dismissed for an illegitimate child, goes down by stages, her hair, her teeth, her body (I.5). The deeper disclosure is that law without mercy is a complete moral system, and that grace refutes it. It holds without Hugo’s faith. Held off the top because the poor are idealised, the thesis is told as often as shown, and the rich are barely present to be judged.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Height is reached often, and in every register. The ceiling: the bishop buying a soul with silver (I.2); the night of decision and the walk into the courtroom at Arras (I.7); the child Cosette alone in the dark wood with the bucket, and the hand that takes the bucket from her (II.3); the sunken road at Waterloo (II.1); Gavroche singing between the bullets until he is shot (V.1); the sewer (V.2 and V.3); Javert at the parapet over the Seine (V.4); the death by lamplight beside the candlesticks (V.9). The dreadful is as high: the ambush in the Gorbeau house (III.8), the last stand at the barricade. These are dramatic heights, not rhetorical ones. Held below the top by the sentimental idyll of the fourth part, and by a rhetoric that sometimes inflates what it means to elevate.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth built, and built openly, so that the structure bears it. The convict redeemed is the fall and the redemption told as one life: a man given a number, 24601 and later 9430, is given back a soul by a bishop. The pursuit of grace by law runs from the first part to the Seine, and it is the plot, not a theme laid on it. Valjean descends three times and rises: into the galleys; into a coffin and the earth of a convent cemetery, from which he is dug up alive (II.8); and into the sewers, carrying the unconscious Marius on his back through the city’s underworld. The particular stays particular: he counts his money, mends his coat, is jealous of Marius. The archetypes have passed into the language, and “un gavroche” is a common noun in French. Held off the top because Cosette and Marius are types more than persons, and the narrator sometimes states the myth he has built.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance is plain: Scott’s historical novel, Balzac’s social panorama, Hugo’s own Romantic drama and Notre-Dame de Paris, and above all the popular serial of the 1840s, Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, with its convicts, its underworld and its redeemed criminal. The turn is in what Hugo made of the serial: a total book, novel and epic and essay and sermon at once, in which a convict, a prostitute and a street child are given the scale of epic heroes, and the historian’s chapter on Waterloo stands beside the melodrama as an equal. The stake was real: the book was written by a proscribed man against the Second Empire, sold for a sum then unheard of, and received by much of literary Paris with contempt. Held below the top because its materials, the redeemed convict, the policeman, the underworld and the coincidence plot, were Sue’s, and the form it chose looked backward from Flaubert’s.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form, and something is lost, though not everything. The form is the claim: that a convict’s conscience and the history of France are one drama, and that one soul’s march from evil to good is the movement of the age. The alternation of story and essay is the instrument of that claim, and the coincidence plot is the form of providence: the same few people meet at Montfermeil, in the Gorbeau house and at the barricade, because the book believes the world is ordered. Told as a plain novel of a convict, it would know less. But many of the digressions could be cut without the plot knowing less, and in those stretches the form is a container rather than an instrument. That is what holds it here, next above the lowest of the twelve.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: more than a century and a half of reading. Baudelaire reviewed it in the year of publication; Dostoevsky admired it, and the critical tradition has long linked it with his work; Victor Brombert read it as a visionary work in Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (1984), and Mario Vargas Llosa gave it a book, La tentación de lo imposible (2004). It yields on return to Christian, socialist and historical readings, and its digressions reward what the plot discards. Its open questions are real: whether Valjean’s self-effacement at the end is sanctity or a last withholding, whether Javert’s fall is defeat or conversion. Held a step down because much of its meaning lies near the surface and the narrator explains it, and those questions are fewer than in the deepest novels.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is the French novel of the nineteenth century and, as the book entered it, the European novel. Its force: it made the social novel of the poor into an epic, and showed that the popular serial, with its suspense, coincidence and pursuit, could carry history, theology and political argument at full scale. That reorganised what the popular novel could hold, though not the literary novel’s method: the formal line of the French novel ran through Flaubert, not through Hugo, and that keeps the axis from the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: translated in its first year; read by the Russians, Dostoevsky above all; a model for the social novel in many literatures. The long line of stage and screen versions is presence, weighed under The Imperishable, not here. Reach outstrips force.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is demonstrated. Form first: the text survives whole, printed in the author’s lifetime under his oversight, with nothing lost and nothing disputed. Presence: 164 years in print without a break, translated in its first year and since into most written languages, read in schools in France and widely elsewhere, and adapted for stage and screen in nearly every decade. Few novels of any century are more widely present. Charged: much of that presence is not the text but the story, carried by the musical, the films and the abridgements that cut the digressions, and fame is not proof of permanence. The surfaces of 1817 and of Louis-Philippe have dated, but they were history when Hugo wrote them, and the book is read for what they pressed on.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Hugo’s French as far as this reading carries it; the rhythm of the French sentence beyond the passages known here is neither credited nor charged. The command is of rhetoric and of the set piece: antithesis, the long enumeration, the chapter built to a single closing line, the opening that comes down from the bishop’s title to his household. The great sequences are built with mastery: the trial at Arras, held back while Valjean’s night of decision is told; the night pursuit through Paris to the convent wall (II.5); the barricade’s two days. The registers range from the bishop’s sermon to Thénardier’s cant, the student wit of the ABC and the argot of Patron-Minette. Charged: coincidences that serve the plot past belief, Marius lodging next door to the Jondrettes (III.8); declamation that sometimes replaces dialogue; and the slack of the fourth part’s idyll.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the essay on argot (IV.7) and Valjean’s deathbed (V.9); or Tholomyès’s student picnic in the first part and the sewer. One law is meant to govern them, and mostly does: the movement from night to light, conscience against the abyss, the social underworld as the place where souls are lost and saved. Argot is the language of that night, the sewer its body, Waterloo the hinge of the century that made the misérables. The comedy obeys it, Gillenormand, the students, Gavroche’s wit, and so do the dread and the essays. Charged: the melodrama and the sociology do not always share one physics. Thénardier is a demon in the plot and a social product in the essays; Cosette is an idea where Fantine was a woman; and providential coincidence sits uneasily beside a realist account of how poverty works.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Held, and on a scale few novels approach. Consciousness: Valjean’s night at Montreuil, Javert’s undoing, Marius’s political conversion. The family: chosen fatherhood at the book’s centre, Valjean and Cosette, Gillenormand and Marius, and the Thénardiers’ abandoned sons. Labour: the jet-bead works at Montreuil-sur-Mer that Valjean makes prosper, Fantine’s needlework, the galleys, the fieldwork at Faverolles. The state: police, courts, prisons, the mayoralty. History: Waterloo, the Restoration, the July Monarchy, the insurrection of 1832. The sacred: the bishop, the perpetual adoration of the Petit-Picpus, the deathbed. The city as an organism, down to its sewers and its slang. The natural order is the thinnest, the garden of the rue Plumet and the Seine. Held a step below the top because some orders are set out in essays beside the story rather than carried through it.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Encompassed at 9.5, then The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 9.3. Every order from the galleys and the jet-bead works to the convent, Waterloo, the courts and the sewers held in one book; height reached in every register, from the bucket in the wood to the parapet over the Seine; and a myth of fall and redemption built into the plot, three descents and three risings, with the pursuit of grace by law running from the first part to the last.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8, held by the length of the essays rather than their presence: Waterloo needs a chapter and receives a book, and the convent essay, argot and the histories of 1817 and of Louis-Philippe are compelled only in part. Next above it, The Living Form at 8.4, because in those stretches the form is a container rather than an instrument; then The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 8.6, for meanings that lie near the surface and a melodrama and a sociology that do not always obey one law. The rhythm of Hugo’s French beyond the passages known here is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5, by three tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, The Living Form at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.5. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, scored as the novel Hugo published in 1862: five parts, I Fantine, II Cosette, III Marius, IV L’Idylle rue Plumet et l’épopée rue Saint-Denis and V Jean Valjean, in forty-eight books, under the preface dated Hauteville-House, 1862. The digressions (the year 1817, Waterloo, the convent of the Petit-Picpus, the gamin of Paris, the July Monarchy, argot and the sewers) are part of the work and are scored as part of it; an abridgement is not the work, and the many abridged English versions are set aside. Begun in the mid-1840s, set aside in 1848, taken up again in exile on Guernsey in 1860 and finished in 1861, the novel was published by A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie in Brussels, with simultaneous issue in Paris, in instalments of volumes from April to June 1862, and was printed in Hugo’s lifetime under his oversight; the text is whole, with no lost or disputed portion. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Hugo’s French. French is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own plain English beneath; no published translation is quoted. Translation · Isabel Hapgood’s (1887) is the version best known to this reading and was used for sense, because it is complete and close; Norman Denny’s (Penguin, 1976) is known too, but it moves the convent essay and argot to appendices and so does not give the work’s order; Christine Donougher’s (Penguin, 2013) and Julie Rose’s (2008) are known only by report. None is in hand, none is quoted, and nothing in any of them is charged to the novel. The structure, the sequences and the phrases known by heart are judged in full; the rhythm of Hugo’s French sentence beyond them is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the working title, the number of chapters, the length in words, the share of the book given to digression, the names of the first English translators, the titles of several books and chapters, and the private judgments of contemporaries, are not given. Citations are by part and book, with a chapter only where it is certain: I.7.3 is Part One, Book Seven, chapter 3.