Les miserables by Victor Hugo: Part One - Fantine

In the year 1815 Monseigneur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Dinge, He was then about seventy-five, having held the bishopric since 1806.



Les Miserables by Victor Hugo certainly takes its time getting started. No "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times," or "Happy families are all alike," here. Mr. Hugo seems confident that his readers will indulge him while he takes 150 pages setting things up. Those who do will be rewarded for their efforts.

I've decided to break up my reading of Les Miserables into parts. The book itself is broken up into five parts each of them as long as a typical novel making for 1229 pages in the Penguin Classics edition I'm reading. Les Miserables took more than a decade to write. Hugo completed it while living on the Channel Islands during a period of exile from France. He began life as a conservative royalist and ended up almost an avowed socialist. Clearly he had a lot to say, and Les Miserables was his chance to say it. Hugo is clearly making his case, laying out his critique of French society in Les Miserables; at points he simply preaches his sermon openly, but he is also telling a compelling story, one that generations have found difficult to put down. After reading Part One: Fantine, you can count me as a fan.

Fantine is the story of three people. The first is Bishop Myriel, the Bishop of Dinge and that rare person a truly upright clergyman. We are told the better part of his life story, given several examples of his charity and his moral behavior which is always guided by what is the right thing not just for a man, but for a man of God to do. He is an extreme example, certainly, but he serves to advance the plot and to advance Mr. Hugo's case against a clergy and a society that falls so short of what the New Testament expects.

One night Bishop Myriel meets the second person featured in Fantine, Jean Valjean, a convict newly paroled after serving 19 years hard labor. Valjean is unable to find work, unable to find lodgings even unable to find anyone who will sell him food because whenever he enters a town he must first register with the local police as an ex-convict and no one will do business of any kind with an ex-convict. When Valjean finds lodging with the Bishop, he cannot believe the priest is really as good as he appears to be. How can this man trust him? How can he see good in him? During the night, Valjean steals valuable silverware from the Bishop and runs away. He is caught and brought before the Bishop, accused of the theft. Rather than turn Valjean in, the Bishop gives him the rest of the silverware and two valuable silver candlesticks claiming that was his intention all along and that Valjean is innocent.

In the meantime, young Fantine has fallen in love with a wealthy man. She spends one magical summer with him, his three friends and their three girlfriends, only to be dumped when the four young men return to their wealthy families and the better lives and wives promised to them. The other three girls laugh it all off because they were not really in love after all and there will be other men. Fantine, completely in love at the time, is with child. She is abandoned to her fate by everyone. Alone in the world she leaves Paris, daughter in her arms, and heads for her hometown where she hopes to find work. Along the way she leaves her daughter in the care of what she believes is a good hearted family of innkeepers. Once home she finds work in the new factory of Monseiur Madeline, who is really a reformed and incognito Jean Valjean. Ill fortune follows Fantine everywhere and she eventually is reduced to prostitution. But Monseiur Madeline is also an upright man. At her worst moment, he takes her under his wing, provides for her care and plans to reunite her with her long lost daughter, Cosette.

This is pure melodrama in its most manipulative form. The entire first part reeks with Victorian sentimentality a walking exampler of what Virginia Woolf called a "baggy-pants monster." Hugo is trying to build a realistic novel, his attention to detail is great, but these characters are so over-the-top they defy reality, they could never really exist. But it all works. It works very well. Somehow Victor Hugo makes the reader care deeply about his characters, though they are more archetypes than people. They cannot escape the wheel of fate that they are trapped on, but this does not mean the reader won't root for them anyway. I'm reading Hugo's prose in translation, I admit, but few people can turn on the suspense or build up the excitement like he can. Part one ends with Jean Valjean racing to Arras where another man is on trail, mistakenly charged with being Jean Valjean. The roads are bad, his carriage breaks down, his horse becomes exhausted, the courtroom is so crowded he can't get in... It felt like reading the final sequence of a silent movie adventure serial with an innocent girl tied to the tracks of an oncoming train.

Fantine is only the first part of Les Miserables, but it does satisfy like a novel. There is clearly more story to tell, but the ending is an ending not a to-be-continued. So Les Miserables goes back on my shelf until next month. There are five parts to it and at the rate of one part per month I'll finish it sometime in May. That should leave me with enough time to read Tristram Shandy before the end of the year.