I’m still reading the posts I have to confess I’m obsessed with Les Miserables. I’ve become – or at least becoming – an amateur historian on the French Revolution I’ll read a few lines of Les Miserables, and whenever I come across a word, name, etc. I’m unfamiliar with, before you can say “Sacrebleu!” I’m surrounded in history books and highlighters! I expect to finish Les Miserables in December…of 2009

“He was terrible but not ignoble. Integrity, sincerity, honesty, conviction, the sense of duty, these are qualities which, being misguided, may become hideous, but still they retain their greatness; amid the hideousness, the nobility proper to the human conscience still persists. They are virtues subject to a single vice, that of error. The merciless but honest rejoicing of a fantastic performing an atrocious act still has a melancholy claim to our respect. Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good.”

Bobby, if you are still reading this, those are wonderful musings and observations. Thank you. Yes and the accused, Champmathieu, says he was given for his work 30 sous, less than a proper rate for a day’s work, because he was old, 53. That was old. I was struck particularly by the description of Champmathieu, a man so deprived in life ( which was probably common- ” Paris is like a swamp”) that he could barely talk. ( page 250 ff.) ” I am one of those who don’t eat everyday”….I don’t know how to say things, I never had any schooling, I am one of the poor.”

And then the description of Javert ( p.267-268) ending with this after which I took a deep breath:

“He was terrible but not ignoble. Integrity, sincerity, honesty, conviction, t he sense of duty, these are qualities which, being misguided, may become hideous, but still they retain their greatness, amid the hideousness, the nobility proper to the human conscience still persists. They are virtues subject to a single vice, that of error. The merciless bu honest rejoicing of a fantastic performing an atrocious act still has a melancholy claim to our respect. Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good.”

1. Did Jean Valjean actually steal the child’s money?

Jean Valjean was in a sort of trance/dream state before, during, and after the encounter with the boy. (BTW. Did anyone notice that prior to the boy’s arrival, just as JVJ was falling into his “meditation” he was recalling memories of when he was a boy, and that “These memories were almost intolerable to him.” Anyway, can one truly be culpable of stealing if one is unaware he’s stealing, or only realizes after regaining “consciousness”? Also, the money rolled across the ground and landed at JVS’s feet, the same money, coincidentally, “which, up to that time,” Little Gervais (while continually singing, mind you) “had caught with a good deal of adroitness on the back of his hand.”

2. Does “Little Gervais” even/ever exist?

When JVJ sits behind the bush, Hugo describes the landscape as being barren, “a large ruddy plain, which was absolutely deserted. There was nothing on the horizon except the Alps. Not even the spire of a distant village.” And even when the boy approaches JVJ, we’re reminded that “The spot was absolutely solitary. As far as the eye could see there was not a person on the plain or on the path.” So where did the child come from? Why didn’t JVJ see him approaching? I also found it odd that Little Gervais (a 10 year old kid) “showed no astonishment” when he first sees JVJ, a man, Hugo said, had a “savage face”and would be “terrifying to any one who might have encountered him”. Instead, he stands before JVJ with a “childish confidence which is composed of ignorance and innocence.” If I’m right, Bishop Bienvenu is the only other person so far who has looked at JVJ without drawing back. (And notice that when the sun sets behind the boy, it “cast threads of gold in his hair and empurpled with its blood-red gleam the savage face of Jean Valjean.”) And finally, there’s the priest on horseback who, when asked by JVJ if he has seen the boy, says that he has not. But the priest then says, “If he is like what you say, my friend, he is a little stranger. Such persons pass through these parts. We know nothing of them.” Huh? And what’s with the “ancient fragment of blue earthenware which had fallen in the grass.”? It no doubt symbolizes something; but what? Anyway, until someone out there sets me straight, I’m sticking with my hypothesis, and say that the kid ain’t real.

BTW. Out of curiosity, I typed “forty sous”, the value of the coin which JVJ “stole” from the boy, into Google; there I found multiple references to a book titled The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle (a man who just so happens to resemble Chris. Hmmm?). In that book, Carlyle talks about the “Law of the Forty Sous”, which (if I read correctly) is the day’s wages of a poor person. Anyway, click here if you want to see the text.

Finally, remember the scene where Monseigneur Bienvenu is walking in the garden the morning after JVJ stole the silver and the fled. He picks up the basket that held the silver and sighs after realizing it had broken a plant. (No doubt because JVJ dropped it after taking the silver) Anyway, that plant (cochlearia des Guillons) is from the plant family which is known as Cruciferae, which means “cross-bearing”.

I think JVJ stole the child’s coin with the intent subconsciously to shock himself, to have that reality in front of him to face, to actually feel the result in his heart, to test, to push himself to that point of seeing himself from his evolved consciousness, to be sure of it-if it was really real or whether he could dismiss his encounter with the bishop and continue on the old self-destructive trajectory. This is Frost’s fork in the road I think.

My blood pressure rose when JVJ almost drove that spike into the bishop’s head. By then the Bishop’s “magic” was already working on him. But that was the first test. The second was the child’s coin soo after. I wanted Hugo to make that child reappear further down the road and have his coin returned, his faith in humanity unspoiled- I did not want that child to go off into the world like that. Life is cruel though.

Backing up, I think the contrast between Jean ValJean and what he had become after all those years, how he looked upon the world, society, with the countenance of the bishop who, no matter what, never seemed to lose his faith in the human heart, the inherent goodness of spirit- is amazing, brilliant. This is wonderful dichotomy, a split in which the heart must go one way or the other, yes or no to life. There are so many Jean Valjeans in this world in need of big doses of goodness to help heal. Alas. What a better world we would have. It’s so current.

Les Miserables is a book so rich in character, place, and action that it beggars description. No one view of the book can take it in, no one reading can frame it. So I’ll take the easy way out and name a favorite passage, a few pages about the overgrown garden at the little house in the Rue Plumet. Here Jean Valjean and Cossette have found temporary refuge, hidden in the heart of Paris. Jean Valjean lets the garden go to seed to make the house seem less lived in, and Hugo, in a sublime three-page rhapsody, connects these few square feet of earth to the farthest edge of the universe.

Hugo pushes us close to the garden’s lush jungle of “trunks, branches, leaves, twigs, tufts, tendrils, shoots, thorns mingled, crossed, married, confounded….The garden was…as impenetrable as a forest, populous as a city, tremulous as a nest, dark as a cathedral” In the winter the garden is “black, wet, bristling.” In summer clouds of white butterflies look like “living snow.”

Built by a minister of the Ancien Regime as a love nest for his mistress, the house has slipped out of history. Carriages roll along the boulevards beyond its walls, carrying pompous politicians to and from the Chamber of Deputies nearby, but the quiet garden neither knows nor cares.

Instead, Hugo writes, the garden converses silently with the Milky Way. “The ferns, the mulleins, the hemlocks, the milfoils, the tall weeds, …the lizards, the beetles, the restless and rapid insects,” all are caught in the “flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small.” Cosmic forces determine “the path of a molecule…the radiance of the star benefits the rose….Nothing is really small”:

Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the matching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow’s beak breaking the egg…the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which is better? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars.

What we seem to fear when we have large societies is allowing people to use discretion. We don’t trust each other enough for that. Thus the leaning towards totalitarianism. Whenever we fear we tend to rein in the rights of individual discretion. I end up asking myself what these characters fear…

But then, how’s to keep track of the motifs and themes of what Vargas Llosa calls a “total story” emerging from Hugo’s “totalizing vision.” Vargas Llosa writes: “The perspective that the narrator adopts… is not that of a man observing and describing the development and mysteries of other men, but rather that of a God who contemplates, from his divine omnipotence, the story that he has procreated. From this perspective, everything is important, everything is equally necessary…”

Or as Victor Hugo writes about the garden at Valjean’s Paris hideaway on the Rue Plumet:

The cheese-mite has its worth; the smallest is large and the largest is small; everything balances within the laws of necessity, a terrifying vision for the mind. Between living things and objects there is a miraculous relationship; within that inexhaustible compass, from the sun to the grub, there is no room for disdain; each thing needs every other thing.

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables. Norman Denny’s translation, Penguin Classics, page 764.

The two radii of the novel are, for me, the relationship between love and justice, and the statement from the gospels: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.” In other words, the central biblical paradox that highest affirmation of self is to be selfless.

Regarding the first, let me focus, this time and next, on and around the first key fulcrum of the book. The bishop has the right to exact justice from Jean Valjean for having stolen his silver. He forgoes that right, in part because he lives in the house of Christand all he owns belongs to the poor, in far more more significant part because he intuits that to demand justice and return Valjean to prison would destroy him. From that moment on, the conflict between Valjean’s love and Javert’s loveless justice is prepared. But the issue is not as simple as it may appear. In The Idiot by Dostoevski, Myshkin, who can only love, and who is told, and confesses, that he has “no sense of proportion [that is, no sense of justice],” destroys Aglaya because he can only love all unconditionally, and cannot bring justice to bear on either her or her rival Nastasya Fillipovna. Again, because he can only forgive, and cannot bear to exact justice from his male rival, Rogozhin, Myshkin is implicated in the destruction of Nastassya Filippovna as well, since he always knows he will kill her. Similarly, consider the film Camelot, which I recommend –– despite the hard to endure portrayals of Lancelot and Gwenevere –– to all lovers of Les Miserables. King Arthur, no less loving and noble than Jean Valjean, in his effort to construct a world of justice whose basic principle will be “might for right” rather than “might is right,” destroys Camelot because he can be just to everyone except the three people he loves most: Lancelot, Gwenevere, and his evil out-of-wedlock son, Mordred. These three he can only love. In Les Miserables, love, through forgiveness, forgoes the demands of justice and saves: first Valjean, later Fantine and others. In The Idiot and in Camelot, love, through forgiveness, forgoes the demands of justice and destroys. The question, ultimately, is not whether love is higher than justice, but whether love is to exact, or ignore, the demands of justice. Paul Tillich, in his indispensable little book, Love, Power, and Justice, anticipates the eternal ambiguity of the answer to this question:

A man may say to another: “I know your criminal deed and, according
to the demand of justice, I should bring you to trial, but because of my Christian love I let you go.” Through this leniency, which is identified wrongly with love. a person may be driven towards a thoroughly criminal career. This means that he has received neither justice nor love, but injustice, covered by sentimentality. He might have been saved by having been brought to trial after his first fall. In this case the act the act of being just would have been the act of love (pp. 13-14.)

Yet, as I’ll try to make clear down the line, Tillich would have praised the bishop’s forgiveness of Valjean as an act of what he calls “creative justice.” Yet again, at the most critical point in his transcendent love for his “daughter” Cosette, Jean Valjean’s love is unjust, on the verge of destroying her happiness and her beloved Marius’ life.

Mario Vargas Llosa observes that Bishop Bienvenue “is not a revolutionary, he is a saint… Any form of violence is contrary to his nature as is any political ideology and, indeed, any attempt to offer an intellectual rationalization of faith. For him, faith is a question of feelings and love rather than ideas; it is impulse, emotion, giving, action, rather than theory and doctrine.” Vargas Llosa goes on to tell a fascinating Hugo family story about the development of the bishop as a character.

[Hugo] had heated discussions with his son Charles about the character Monseigneur Bienvenu. Charles Hugo attacked the priests as “enemies of democracy” and regretted that his father was making the bishop of Digne “a prototype of perfection and intelligence.” He suggested that instead of having a priest, he should invent someone “with a liberal, modern profession, like a doctor…” Victor Hugo’s reply was blunt: “I cannot put the future into the past. My novel takes place in 1815. For the rest, this Catholic priest, this pure and lofty figure of true priesthood, offers the most savage satire on the priesthood today… I am not interested in the opinion of blind and stupid republicans. I am only concerned to do my duty… Man needs religion. Man needs God. I say it out loud, I pray every night…”

Mario Vargas Llosa,The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, page 64.

Sounds a lot like Steve Antinoff to me!

I do have a DVD on Napoleon from a recent PBS series/show that I am inspired to watch now, And of course there’s that other more recent tome by Simon Schama: “Citizens: A chronicle of the French Revolution”- waiting. I am going to pack my bags and join Peggy Sue on her cruise (to the far east?).

With a busy weekend watering my garden non-stop ( I too love my garden as does the Bishop of Digne), actually for the last two weeks let me interrupt this conversation to say that we are having a drought of sorts. Someone said it was the driest August in 100 years!

I have to say, having arrived past the Bishop part of the book that though it was slow going ( I was paying it some mind, the only way to read imo) the pace has now picked up and I am hooked. We’ll see how far I take this.

It’s such a big book that it’s not the kind of thing you can finish and then discuss. To have a real discussion about this it would seem to me that one needs to go section by section. Those who have read think more of the broad sweep and the impressions left. Those who are reading are more into the details at the moment.

That said-I did enjoy the Bishop section, the first 70 pages, though Antinoff was right to say that it was something to get through- but not boring. You want to say to Hugo: “so you mean the Bishop was a good guy?”

Alex

Alas.

That said, I thought the movie Les Miserables was great.
And speaking of film, I can’t think of Victor Hugo without recalling the film, The Story of Adele H about his daughter. I saw it years ago and it made quite an impression on me. She was so obsessivly in love that she went insane.

See:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/graphics/minard_lg.gif, via

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard,

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard-obit.

Engineer Minard’s work on clarity and truthfulness in graphic expression included this attempt during the last year of the Second Empire of Louis-Napoleon to remind France, and the world, of the catastrophe that the first Napoleon, Victor Hugo’s “Michelangelo of war”, had created through arrogance and ignorance. Hugo’s novel had appeared in 1862; Minard’s 1869 map of the 1812 Russian campaign was a warning against the coming Franco-Prussian War, in which Louis-Napoleon III was not just defeated but captured by the Germans in 1870, bringing the Second Empire to an abrupt end. The Versailles Government of National Defense signed a surrender treaty, but the Paris Commune resisted, and was brutally suppressed, in what was probably the first experience in modern urban warfare, not by the German army but by the French army which had surrendered to it. Marshal MacMahon issued a proclamation: “To the inhabitants of Paris. The French army has come to save you. Paris is freed! At 4 o’clock our soldiers took the last insurgent position. Today the fight is over. Order, work and security will be reborn.”

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune#La_Semaine_sanglante)

Minard hated war, but communicated only the cold facts of his country’s disastrous experience of it, as it was just slipping out of memory, a lifetime before. Perhaps the facts alone were not enough – and Hugo’s passions were needed, although they may have failed to communicate the vast scale of these catastrophes.

The parallels with our own disastrous Empire are obvious. We need a Minard today to remind us of the facts of our own history — esp. the facts of our recent history in southeast Asia, which should not have slipped from memory quite so fast. But we also need a Hugo to set us in motion.

Alex Brown
http://gis.uml.edu/abrown2

But her friend Harry ( he’s in his very late 80’s) took the book and last I heard he had completed 75 pages. He thinks he has the time. Actually Harry is a character straight out of Dickens. Well good for Harry!

I can’t keep up with Chris. I’ll try to keep up with Harry though. I read the intro and I am reading about the bishop. So far so good. I figure at ten pages a day it would take me three months. Don’t wait for me. Along with Zeke I too am reading Emerson. As well Chris inspired me to read Henry Miller, a kindred spirit, oh I just love him, on Greece ( Colossus of Maroussi) as we watch awful scenes of Greece burning.

Always grateful for the challenge.

Javert isn’t seeking justice. He is too full of mania to have a clear sense of justice. He can’t face the real darkness of life, so he loads it all into the figure of Valjean and tracks him single-mindedly so that he can avoid the real injustices happening all around him.

Seriously, the Hugo does look interesting. But I can’t jump in just now. I wonder how you manage to read this book three times along with all the other things you read. And how you select what is deserving of your attention?