Les Miserables (Movie Tie-in) (9781101612774) Read online

  The translator (and here I am referring specifically to myself and Les Misérables) can, I maintain, do something to remedy these defects without falsifying the book, if he will nerve himself to treat Hugo not as a museum piece or a sacred cow but as the author of a very great novel which is still living, still relevant to life, and which deserves to be read. He can ‘edit’ – that is to say abridge, tone down the rhetoric, even delete where the passage in question is merely an elaboration of what has already been said.

  I have edited in this sense throughout the book, as a rule only to a minor degree, and never, I hope, so drastically as to be unfaithful to Hugo’s intention. I must cite the most extreme case in illustration of what I mean. This is the third book of Part One entitled ‘In the year 1817’. Hugo has sought to convey the social climate of that particular year by compiling a lengthy catalogue of personalities and events, most of them of no great importance – people and happenings, in short, that got into the news at the time. One has the impression that he did it by skimming through the newspaper headlines. What is certain is that most of his allusions would have meant nothing to any except his oldest readers even when the book was published in 1862. As for the present day, Professor Guyard has found it necessary to append sixty-two footnotes for the enlightenment of contemporary French readers – incidentally pointing out, not infrequently, that Hugo got his facts wrong. I have dealt with this section by drastically reducing it, cutting out references that would be meaningless to English readers and including only those that serve Hugo’s purpose of conveying the atmosphere of Paris in that year. The footnotes have either been incorporated in the text or abolished where they no longer applied, except in the case of a very few which had to go at the bottom of the page. I may mention incidentally that the footnotes throughout the book are to be attributed to Professor Guyard except where I specifically acknowledge them – ‘trs.’.

  This foreword is unavoidable if the reader is to know exactly what he is getting – not a photograph but a slightly modified version of Hugo’s novel designed to bring its great qualities into clearer relief by thinning out, but never completely eliminating, its lapses. It must stand or fall not by its literal accuracy, although I profoundly hope that I have been guilty of no major solecisms, but by its faithfulness to the spirit of Victor Hugo. He was above all things, and at all times, a poet. If the fact is not apparent to the English reader then this rendering of his work must be said to have failed.

  NORMAN DENNY

  While through the working of laws and customs there continues to exist a condition of social condemnation which artificially creates a human hell within civilization, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; while the three great problems of this century, the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness, continue unresolved; while in some regions social asphyxia remains possible; in other words, and in still wider terms, while ignorance and poverty persist on earth, books such as this cannot fail to be of value.

  Hauteville House, 1 January 1862

  PART ONE

  FANTINE

  Book One

  An Upright Man

  I

  Monseigneur Myriel

  IN THE year 1815 Monseigneur Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne. He was then about seventy-five, having held the bishopric since 1806.

  Although it has no direct bearing on the tale we have to tell, we must nevertheless give some account of the rumours and gossip concerning him which were in circulation when he came to occupy the diocese. What is reported of men, whether it be true or false, may play as large a part in their lives, and above all in their destiny, as the things they do. Monseigneur Myriel was the son of a counsellor of the Parliament of Aix, a member of the noblesse de robe. It was said of him that his father, intending him to inherit his office, had arranged for him to marry at a very early age, about eighteen or twenty, following the custom that was fairly widespread in parliamentary families. Charles Myriel, it was said, had attracted much gossip despite this marriage. He was good-looking although of small stature, elegant, graceful, and entertaining; his early life was wholly devoted to worldly matters and affairs of gallantry. Then had come the revolution, and in the rush of those events the decimated and persecuted parliamentary families had been scattered. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy, and here his wife died of the chest complaint that had long afflicted her. There were no children. What happened after this to Monseigneur Myriel? Did the collapse of the old French social order, the downfall of his own family, the tragic events of ’93 – perhaps even more fearful to an émigré witnessing them at a distance – inspire in him thoughts of renunciation and solitude? Amid the distractions and frivolities that occupied his life, did it happen that he was suddenly overtaken by one of those mysterious and awful revulsions which, striking to the heart, change the nature of a man who cannot be broken by outward disasters affecting his life and fortune? No one can say. All that is known is that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.

  In 1804 M. Myriel was curé of Brignolles, where, already elderly, he lived in profound seclusion.

  At the time of the Emperor’s coronation, some small matter of parish business took him to Paris. Among the influential personages whom he had occasion to visit was Cardinal Fesch, the uncle of Napoleon, and it happened one day, when he was waiting in the cardinal’s antechamber, that the Emperor passed through on his way to call on his uncle. Seeing the old priest intently regarding him, he turned to him and asked sharply:

  ‘Who is the gentleman who is staring at me?’

  ‘Sire,’ replied M. Myriel, ‘you are looking at a plain man and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.’

  That evening the Emperor asked the cardinal the priest’s name, and shortly afterwards M. Myriel learned to his great surprise that he had been appointed Bishop of Digne.

  As to the truth in general of the tales that were told about the early life of M. Myriel, no one could vouch for it. Few people remained who had known his family before the revolution. He had to accept the fate of every newcomer to a small town where there are plenty of tongues that gossip and few minds that think. He had to bear with this in spite of being a bishop and because he was a bishop. And after all, these tales were perhaps only tales, rumour and fabrication and nothing more.

  However that may be, by the ninth year of his residence as Bishop of Digne all the chatter that at first occupies small people in small places had died down and been forgotten. No one would have presumed to refer to it or even to remember it.

  M. Myriel had come to Digne accompanied by his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, an unmarried woman ten years younger than himself. Their only servant was Madame Magloire, a woman of the same age as Mlle Baptistine, who, from having been the servant of M. le Curé, now assumed the twofold office of personal maid to Mademoiselle and housekeeper to Monseigneur.

  Mlle Baptistine was tall, pale, thin and gentle, a perfect expression of all that is implied by the word ‘respectable’: for it seems that a woman must become a mother before she can be termed ‘venerable’. She had never been pretty. Her life, which had been wholly occupied with good works, had endowed her with a kind of pallor and luminosity, and as she grew older she had acquired what may be called the beauty of goodness. What had been skinniness in her youth had become, as she matured, a quality of transparency through which her saintly nature could be seen to shine. She was a spirit more than she was a virgin. Her being seemed composed of shadow, with too little substance for it to possess sex. It was a shred of matter harbouring a light, with large eyes that were always cast down; a pretext for a soul to linger on earth.

  Mme Magloire was a small, plump, white-haired old woman, always busy and always breathless, partly because of her incessant activity and also because she suffered from asthma.

  Upon his arrival in Digne M. Myriel was installed in the bishop’s palace with the honours pres
cribed by the imperial decree, which ranked a bishop immediately below a Marshal of France. The Mayor and the President of the Council were the first dignitaries to call upon him, and his own first visits were paid to the General and the prefect.

  His installation over, the town waited to see their new bishop at work.

  II

  Monseigneur Myriel becomes Monseigneur Bienvenu

  The bishop’s palace in Digne was next door to the hospital. It was a large and handsome stone mansion built at the beginning of the previous century by Henri Puget, Doctor of Theology at the University of Paris and Abbot of Simore, who became Bishop of Digne in 1712. Everything in the palace was on the grand scale, the bishop’s personal apartments, the drawing-rooms and bedrooms, the broad courtyard flanked by arcades in the old Florentine manner and the gardens planted with splendid trees. The dining-room was a long and magnificent gallery on the ground floor, giving on to the garden. It was here, on 29 July 1714, that Monseigneur Puget had entertained at a ceremonial dinner seven high dignitaries of the Church, among them Philippe de Vendôme, Grand Prior of France and the great-grandson of Henri IV and Gabrielle d’Estrées. The portraits of the seven reverend gentlemen now hung in the dining-room, together with a white marble tablet carrying the date inscribed in letters of gold.

  The hospital was a narrow, two-storeyed house with a small garden.

  The bishop called at the hospital on the third day after his arrival. Having concluded his visit he asked the director to accompany him to the palace.

  ‘Monsieur le Directeur,’ he said, ‘how many patients have you at present?’

  ‘Twenty-six, Monseigneur.’

  ‘That is a large number.’

  ‘The beds,’ said the director, ‘are very close together.’

  ‘As I noticed.’

  ‘The wards are no bigger than single rooms. They get very stuffy.’

  ‘That seems to be the case.’

  ‘And when we get a little sunshine there is scarcely room in the garden for the convalescents.’

  ‘So I imagine.’

  ‘And when there’s an epidemic – we had typhus this year and an outbreak of military fever two years ago, sometimes as many as a hundred patients – we don’t know where to turn.’

  ‘That thought also occurred to me.’

  ‘But it can’t be helped, Monseigneur,’ said the director. ‘We have to make the best of things.’

  This conversation took place in the ground-floor banqueting-hall. The bishop was silent for some moments, and then he turned abruptly to the director.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how many beds do you think could be put in this room?’

  ‘In the bishop’s dining-room?’ exclaimed the director in astonishment.

  The bishop was gazing round the room, apparently making calculations of his own.

  ‘At least twenty beds,’ he murmured as though to himself. Then he said more loudly: ‘Monsieur le Directeur, I will tell you what has happened. There has been a mistake. You have twenty-six persons in five or six small rooms, while in this house there are three of us and room for sixty. We must change places. Let me have the house that suits me, and this one will be yours.’

  On the following day the twenty-six paupers were moved into the palace and the bishop took up residence in the hospital.

  M. Myriel had no private means; his family had been ruined by the revolution. His sister’s annuity of five hundred francs had sufficed for their personal needs during his curacy. As bishop he received a stipend of fifteen thousand francs. On the day of his removal to the hospital he laid down, once and for all, how this money was to be used. The note, written in his own hand, reads as follows:

  During the time he occupied the see of Digne M. Myriel made almost no change in this order of things, which, as we see, he called ‘the disposal of my household expenses’. The arrangement was accepted with absolute submission by Mlle Baptistine. To that devout woman M. Myriel was both her brother and her bishop, her friend in nature and her superior in the Church. Quite simply, she loved and venerated him. When he spoke she bowed her head, when he acted she sustained him. Only Mme Magloire grumbled a little. The bishop, as we have seen, had kept only a thousand francs for himself, which, with his sister’s annuity, made a total of fifteen hundred francs a year. Upon this sum the two old women and the old man lived.

  Nevertheless when a village curé came to Digne the bishop found means to entertain him, thanks to the strict economy of Mme Magloire and the shrewd management of Mlle Baptistine.

  One day when he had been about three months in Digne the bishop remarked:

  ‘And yet, with all this, I am still in difficulties.’

  ‘I should think so!’ cried Mme Magloire. ‘Monseigneur has not even applied to the Department for an allowance to cover the cost of his carriage in the town and on his tours of the diocese. This was always granted to bishops in the old days.’

  ‘Of course!’ said the bishop. ‘You are quite right, Madame Magloire.’

  He made the application.

  The Departmental Council, having weighed the matter, voted him an annual allowance of three thousand francs under the heading: ‘Allotted to Monseigneur the Bishop for the purpose of his carriage and postal expenses and the cost of his pastoral journeys.’

  This caused considerable outcry among the local citizenry and it moved a certain senator of the Empire, a former member of the Council of Five Hundred who had supported the 18 Brumaire and was now the holder of a princely senatorial seat near Digne, to write an indignant private letter to M. Bigot de Prémeneu* of which the following authentic extract may be quoted:

  ‘Carriage expenses? What for, in a town of fewer than four thousand inhabitants? Postage and pastoral journeys? What is the use of these journeys? And what is the use of a vehicle for delivering letters in mountainous country with no roads? People go on horseback. The bridge over the Durance at Château-Arnoux can scarcely take an ox-cart. These priests are all the same, greedy and miserly. This one started with a show of virtue but now he’s behaving like the rest. He has to have a carriage and a post-chaise. He wants all the luxuries of the old bishops. These informal priests! Affairs won’t be properly managed, Monsieur le Comte, until the Emperor has rid us of these mountebanks. Down with the Pope!’ [There was trouble with Rome at the time.] ‘For my part, I am on the side of Caesar …’ And so on.

  Mme Magloire, on the other hand, was highly delighted.

  ‘Good,’ she said to Mlle Baptistine. ‘Monseigneur started by thinking of others, but he has to think of himself in the end. He has attended to all his charities. Now there are three thousand francs for us – and high time!’

  But that evening the bishop wrote the following note and handed it to his sister.

  Carriage and Travel Expenses

  Meat broth for the hospital patients

  1500 francs

  Maternity Society at Aix

  250 francs

  Maternity Society at Draguignan

  250 francs

  For foundling children

  500 francs

  For orphan children

  500 francs

  Total

  3000 francs

  Such was the personal budget of Monseigneur Myriel.

  As for day-to-day charities, the dispensations, baptisms, prayers, consecration of churches and chapels, marriages and so forth, the bishop exacted funds for these from the rich, doing so the more rigorously since he passed the money on to the poor. Within a short time gifts of money were flowing in. Those who had and those who had not knocked at M. Myriel’s door, the latter to seek the alms that the former had contributed. Within a year the bishop had become the treasurer of all charitable works and the cashier of all suffering. Considerable sums passed through his hands, but nothing could cause him to change his way of life or accept any trifle beyond his daily needs. Indeed, the reverse was the case. Since there is always more misery in the depths than compassion in the heights, everything wa
s given, so to speak, before it was received. It was like water on parched land. However fast the money flowed in he never had enough; and then he robbed himself.

  It being customary for bishops to preface their pastoral letters and orders with the full list of their baptismal names, the people of the region, from instinctive affection, elected to call him by the name which for them had the most meaning, Monseigneur Bienvenu. We shall follow their example and use this name when occasion arises. In any event, it pleased him. Bienvenu – or ‘welcome’. ‘It counteracts the Monseigneur,’ he said.

  We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.

  III

  A hard office for a good bishop

  Although he had converted his carriage into alms, the bishop did not on this account neglect his pastoral duties. Digne was a rugged diocese, with very little flat land, many mountains and, as we have seen, very few roads. It contained thirty-two curacies, forty-one vicarages, and two hundred and eighty-five chapels-of-ease and sub-curacies. To visit them all was a large undertaking, but the bishop accomplished it. He went on foot to near-by places, by carrier’s cart to places on the plain, and by pack-mule into the hills. As a rule the two women accompanied him, but when the journey was too difficult he went alone.

  He arrived one day at Senez, a former episcopal city, riding a donkey, his means at that moment being so scanty that he could afford no other conveyance. The mayor, welcoming him at the gates of the residence, watched with shocked eyes while he dismounted, and laughter arose from a few citizens who were standing by.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said the bishop, ‘I know what has outraged you. You find it arrogant in a simple priest that he should be mounted like Jesus Christ. Let me assure you that I do it from necessity, not from vanity.’