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Updated: May 23, 2025
Sea-sickness is a horrible malady; I perceive it, I know it to be so. I loudly draw attention to the fact; I won't be silenced. Hundreds, thousands, of other miserables take heart and join me. We can't stand it! we shan't! is the general cry.
In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: "Open to me, I come for you."
It ill became such miserables to be insolent, and Carmichael taught them humility when he began to sound the praises of Drumtochty; but he could not make townspeople understand the unutterable satisfaction of the country minister, who even from old age and great cities looks back with fond regret to his first parish on the slope of the Grampians.
"There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: 'This book, Les Miserables, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French read it as a history, we read it as a romance." Alas! I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.
They had fed on different food, were informed with a different spirit, were of iron in contrast with the poor miserables they drove to their bidding. In the afternoon I dozed for half-an-hour in one of the big chairs in the cabin. Had it not been for the violent motion of the ship I could have slept there for hours, for the hives did not trouble.
A Balzac might find in him a more human and lovable Vautrin; a Victor Hugo could make him the hero of another Les Miserables; a Charles Reade could win new renown by summoning us to put ourselves in his place. But the best service I can do him now is to give him silence. He is not quite desperate yet; should he become so, the world will know his history.
The idea of keeping "Les Miserables" away from the ladies! just as though there could be found in the whole country a sixteen-year-old maid with any pretensions to intelligence who hasn't wept over little Cosette, been in love with Enjolras and "doted on" Gavroche and Jean Valjean! So ultra nice has the world become that we must skip the Canticles.
From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us. I resume. This book, Les Miserables, is no less your mirror than ours. Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book, I understand that.
Some of the books were the lewd penny ones of the Bowery bookstands, old medical treatises, too, purchased three for a quarter and none too nice reading for the growing boy. But there he had also found a Les Miserables and The Confessions of St. Augustine, which last, if he had known it, was a rare edition, but destined for the ash pit.
One day, after we had annoyed him more than usual with our pranks, and stirred up his bile, he gave vent to his feelings "Ah, you betes Anglais," he exclaimed. "You have no sympathe vid des miserables. Vous eat ros beef vous-memes, and vous starve vos prisonniers."
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