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"When I first knew Nat Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading Les Miserables, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, too. An American isn't inherently incapable of that, I suppose."
Sometimes they are almost lost sight of before the solemn isolation of a man against the sea and sky, as in LES TRAVAILLEURS; sometimes, as in LES MISERABLES, they merely figure for awhile, as a beautiful episode in the epic of oppression; sometimes they are entirely absent, as in QUATRE VINGT TREIZE. There is no hero in NOTRE DAME: in LES MISERABLES it is an old man: in L'HOMME QUI RIT it is a monster: in QUATRE VINGT TREIZE it is the Revolution.
Hear a story of one of these miserables, which, whatever you may think of it, is true to the letter; such letter, at all events, as is written upon the hearts of his race. He was one of the first who took to the custom of wearing beards, for, great as he was, he had a fear of the race of barbers! He built a tower in his palace, guarded by deep ditches and thick walls.
Victor Hugo pictures, in his Les Miserables, a sister of charity adroitly concealing facts from a sick person in a hospital, while refusing to tell a falsehood even for the patient's good. "Never to have told a falsehood, never to have said for any advantage, or even indifferently, a thing which was not the truth, the holy truth, was the characteristic feature of Sister Simplice."
The préfet of police would set a hundred intelligences at work to find him; the Seine might be dragged, les misérables turned over at the Morgue; a minute description of him would be in every detective's pocket; and he in M. Dorine's family tomb! Yet, on the other hand, it was here, he was last seen; from this point a keen detective would naturally work up the case.
Les Misérables, A Tale of Two Cities, Henry Esmond, The Last Days of Pompeii, The Marble Faun ... Love stories! Until her arrival in Singapore, she had never read a novel. But in the appendix of the dictionary she had discovered magic names Hugo, Dumas, Thackeray, Hawthorne, Lytton.
For God himself is in conscience lending it authority. We also owe the great dramatists and novelists a debt, in that they have portrayed and analyzed the essential facts of man's moral life. That which Shakespeare does for us in "Macbeth," Victor Hugo does in his "Les Misérables."
"No, it would only mean try and try in vain." "Here, what has come to you?" cried Aleck. "You take it all as coolly as if it were of no consequence at all. I don't believe you can understand yet how bad it all is." "Oh, yes, I can," said the midshipman, coolly; "but I've got no more miserables left in me. I used 'em all up when I was chained up by myself in the dark.
He could have all of Scott but "Ivanhoe," all of Dickens but "Copperfield," all of Hugo but "Les Miserables," cords of Fielding, Marryat, Richardson, Reynolds, Eliot, Smollet, a whole ton of German translations by George! he could leave me a poor old despoiled, destitute and ruined book-owner in things that folks buy in costly bindings for the sake of vanity and the deception of those who also deceive them in turn.
But a few years ago the whole world stood with bowed head while into the soil he loved was lowered the coffin of one who has bound the nations together in sympathy for Les Miserables of the earth. In a home on the continent broods watchfully a bald-headed giant in cavalry boots, one who has dictated arbitrarily, as premier, the policy of the empire he has largely made.
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