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Updated: May 23, 2025
It took six months for my bones to become used to the hard bed, but for the next nineteen years I used to sleep as sweetly on that oak board as I ever did or now do in a bed of down, only, like Jean Valjean, in "Les Miserables," I had become so used to it that upon my liberation I found it impossible for a time to sleep in a bed. On a little rusty iron shelf, fixed in the corner, was our tinware.
Victor Hugo, the romantic, in "Les Miserables", endeavors just as honestly and earnestly to show men what they are as does Flaubert, the realist, in "Madame Bovary." And on the other hand, Thackeray, the realist, in characters like Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome, shows men what they should be just as thoroughly as the romantic Scott.
The reciprocal borrowing is easy to explain, both men, in spite of their fundamental peculiarities, having much in them that was common imagination difficult to control, fondness for exaggeration, language prone to be verbose and turgid, research of devices to astonish the reader. Hugo's Miserables is a monument of his fiction that owes much to Balzacian architecture.
The miserables were billeted off ten in a room, and there they lived, without sweepers, baths, dhobies, or any of the comforts which the climate makes necessities. Here in these dungeons children were born, only for the most part to die.
"Mad I should have been, dearest Ghita, had I lived longer without seeing you. What are these misérables of Elbans, that I should fear them! They have no cruiser only a few feluccas all of which are not worth the trouble of burning. Let them but point a finger at us, and we will tow their Austrian polacre out into the bay, and burn her before their eyes.
While woman is insisting that she is every way man's equal, entitled to share with him the wardship of this world, Detroit is putting bloomers on the statues of Dian, Boston refusing the Bacchante, Waco draping the marble figure of a child exhibited at her cotton palace, Anthony Comstock having cataleptic convulsions, "Les Miserables" excluded from Philadelphia high schools and the ICONOCLAST denounced by certain bewhiskered old he-virgins as obscene!
He would train his thoughts to scan the spaces behind the clouds, to transcend the snow-capped mountain, and to penetrate the depths of the sea. He would visualize creation, evolution, and the intricate processes of life. So he must have stars in his world. He may select Mrs. Wiggs or Les Miserables.
She afterward confessed to me that her sensation must have been akin to that of a boy who had stolen an apple and beaten the farmer in the race to the road. We all make the mistake of searching for our drama, forgetting that it arrives sooner or later, unsolicited. Bewitched. Thomas should have been the happiest man alive, but the devil had recruited him for his miserables.
Of these I recall especially Bulwer's Strange Story; Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, popularly pronounced "Lee's Miserables"; and the historical novels of Louise Mühlbach, known to the Confederate soldier as "Lou Mealbag." All were eagerly read, but Cosette and Fantine and Joseph the Second would not last forever, and we fell back on the old stand-bys.
"I must have that with me, whatever else is left out," he said with determination. It was Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," Morten's Bible. Ellen opened it at the title-page to see if it really was so necessary to travel about with such a monster; it was as big as a loaf.
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