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Updated: May 23, 2025
Bolder spirits marched off to the smoking room Crane starting this movement with the declaration that, for his part, he would as lief drown like a rat in a trap as battling to keep up in the frigid inferno of those raging seas. A handful of miserables, too seasick to care whether the ship swam or sank, mutinously took to their berths.
A single lamp cast its dim rays over these people; and a hundred feet farther on were other halls and buildings, all filled to overflowing with these waiting miserables. A word would have sent them surging back across the dry Imperial Canal to seek safety for a few hours in our base. Would it have been safety? An immense flood of feeling overwhelmed me....
Do you want to see the battlefield of Waterloo, visit Paris in the beginning of the nineteenth century, stop over night with Louis Philippe, see the English through French spectacles, and the Frenchman through his own; do you want a glimpse of the political despotism, court intrigue, and ecclesiastical tyranny in France a hundred years ago; do you want to hear the crash of the bastile, and see Notre Dame converted into a horse-stable; do you want a picture of the "bread riots" and mob violence that terminated in the French revolution of 1848; in short do you want a tale of French life and character in its brightest, gloomiest, and intensest period, read "Les Miserables," by Victor Hugo.
The light falls upon one or two groups in the crowd of miserables whom He helped, the rest lie in dim shadow. You have to think of dozens, I suppose I should not be exaggerating if I were to say hundreds, of miracles unrecorded but known, lying behind the specimens that we have in the gospels. 'Many other things truly did Jesus, which are not written in this book.
Publisher of the Italian translation of Les Miserables in Milan. HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, October 18, 1862. You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Miserables is written for all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote it for all.
When the misèrables of the horrible and fascinating old Paris that people used to read about in the works of Eugène Sue and the elder Dumas were drawn into the streets of modern Paris by the ragings of the last revolution, people asked, "Where did these dreadful creatures come from?"
If "Les Miserables" is included in the list, what are we to say to Huysmans' "La Bas"? Just such a question I should like to propound, substituting sonata for novel. If Scarlatti wrote sonatas, what is the Appassionata? If the A flat Weber is one, can the F minor Brahms be called a sonata? Is the Haydn form orthodox and the Schumann heterodox? These be enigmas to make weary the formalists.
So that strange autumn of that strange year, 1864, wore on. The country was oppressed as by some hideous nightmare; and Government was silent. The army alone, kept heart of hope Lee's old soldiers defied the enemy to the last. They called themselves "Lee's Miserables." That was a grim piece of humor, was it not, reader? And the name had had a somewhat curious origin.
"You remember that funny little chap with the crafty eye, his talent for gambling, and his admiration for the girl of 'La Prunelle'? A queer little mixture this child who has himself alone to look to for livelihood and care, the typical race of the Paris streets, the modified gamin from 'Les Miserables.
I went inside, and when I returned he was turning over the leaves of my book. "So you are a book lover?" he mused. "Well, I would to God more men were book lovers, for then the world would be a better place to live in, or rather, the men in it would be better to live among. "Victor Hugo, 'Les Miserables'! " he went on. "To my mind, the greatest of all novelists and the greatest of all novels."
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