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Updated: May 23, 2025
A gracious Providence has blessed you with success in your endeavors to impress a set of miserables, whose character and circumstances might almost have extinguished hope, and you will return to them, if with diminished pecuniary powers, yet, we may trust, through the mercy and goodness of our Heavenly Father, with powers of a far higher order unimpaired, and with the augmented respect and regard of every sound judgment ... for having borne with becoming disposition a far harder trial certainly than any stroke which proceeds immediately from the hand of God.
The prison manners and slang of the Miserables inevitably recall those of Vautrin's Last Incarnation, while, on the other hand, Hugo's salon ultra reappears in the Cabinet of Antiques. And the analogies present themselves continually.
Do you remember your Les Misérables, that early chapter where Valjean robs the child of his florin so soon after that great illuminating change of heart and mind had come to him? Well, still more important, do you remember the clue Hugo gives us to aberration? There is comfort and strength for so many a heart-breaking failure there.
Late in the autumn of 1904, a slight illness detained me for two weeks in a city several hundred miles from home. The illness itself amounted to little, and, so far as I know, had no direct bearing on later results, except that, in giving me an enforced vacation, it afforded me an opportunity to read several of the world's great books. One of these was "Les Misérables."
Victor Hugo's Les Miserables becomes a tale of the Japanese civil war; and Enjolras a Japanese student. There have been a few rare exceptions, including the marked success of a literal translation of the Sorrows of Werther. As I muse, the remembrance of a great city comes back to me, a city walled up to the sky and roaring like the sea.
"Nay thou speakest now of the miserables who were wrapt in the blazing block; but but some, without, might have fallen into thy hands, ere the assailed sought shelter in the tower. Surely surely thou didst not kill all?" The hard breathing of Ruth caught the ear of Whittal, and for a moment he turned to regard her countenance in dull wonder.
It is to something of all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men's eyes in LES MISERABLES; and this moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence with the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilisation to those who are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read.
About a fortnight later, when the grey dirty snow-slush hid the black filthy world which we saw from our windows, and when people lived in their ill-smelling beds, it came to pass that my particular amis The Zulu, Jean, Mexique and I and all the remaining miserables of La Ferte descended at the decree of Caesar Augustus to endure our bi-weekly bath.
The seeming baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir is nothing in itself; the wild ornament of Les Misérables is nothing in itself; and the restraint of Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence, only redoubled beauty the phrase so large and so precise at the same time, hard as bronze, in service to the more perfect adaptation of words to their matter.
Of all the companies' Messes, this one took the most serious view of the future, and earned for itself the nickname of "Les Misérables." The Senior Subaltern said openly that this calm preceded a storm. The papers they got Le Petit Parisian and such like talked vaguely of a successful offensive on the extreme right: Mülhouse, it was said, had been taken.
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