Notre-Dame de Paris provides even better examples. Hugo anticipates Claude Monet’s famous series of paintings of the same subject when he evokes the changing light on the façade of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Following this passage, he executes the verbal equivalent of a zoom-in shot to approach a balcony on which an engagement party has gathered. Earlier, the description circling Paris from the top of the cathedral towers (“A Bird‘s-Eye View of Paris”) anticipates the cinematic technique of the traveling shot. At the beginning of the twentieth century, polls rated Hugo as the greatest nineteenth-century French poet, but his gifts as a storyteller in his plays and novels were fully acknowledged on an international scale only when Les Misérables was produced as the first full-length feature film in France in 1909; within a few years Albert Capellani of Pathé and André Antoine of Le Théâtre-Libre produced a noteworthy series of silent films of Hugo’s works: Les Misérables (1912), the play Marie Tudor (1912), and the novels Quatrevingt-treize (1914) and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918). Lon Chaney’s celebrated performance as Quasimodo in W. Worsley’s film The Hunchback of Notre-Dame de Paris (1924) consolidated these triumphs. More recently, television versions of the plays Les Burgraves (1968) and Torquemada (1976) were triumphs. Today (November 2002), Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg’s stage version of Les Misérables (1980), inspired by the rock opera Jesus-Christ Superstar, is still running in New York and on tour in the United States. It eclipsed the record number of international productions of a musical, previously held by Cats (see Porter, Victor Hugo, pp.152—156).

We cannot fully understand the novel Les Misérables by watching film, television, or staged versions. The flawed humanity that makes Valjean’s ambiguous rehabilitation and Javert’s anguished forgiveness of him possible is lacking from the “event theater” stage, where two forces must contend in stark opposition. And the successive political and moral awakenings of the young hero Marius cannot be represented in a musical. The same leveling affects lesser characters. Thénardier onstage is merely comic, a grotesque counterpart to the sublimity of self-sacrifice and young love, whereas in the novel he degenerates morally, while more than once unwittingly serving the designs of Providence. Hugo’s moments of blatant sentimentality and melodramatic contrasts of pure good with pure evil appeal to some readers and repel others, but tempt both camps to overlook his true complexity. Whereas Les Miz rushes to judgment, Les Misérables urges us to suspend judgment, to ponder the profundity of character, history, and Providence.

Chronology

Part I (“Fantine”), book two (“The Fall”), chapter 6 mentions that Jean Valjean was 25 when, at some indeterminate date, he began supporting his widowed sister and her seven children. During the hard winter of 1795, when he had no work, he stole a loaf of bread for them, and was immediately arrested. He was imprisoned in 1796, and released after 19 years, in 1815. Cosette is born around 1817. Hugo says Jean Valjean is 50 and Cosette is 8 when he rescues her. The insurrection described at the end of part IV and the beginning of part V occurs in 1832. Cosette is 16 or 17. She and Marius marry a year or two later, and Jean Valjean probably dies within the year—no later than 1835. Hugo says he is 80 then, which would mean he had been born in 1755, but it sounds as if he had managed to support his sister and her children only for two or three years, which would make him in his late 60s in 1835. Hugo has aged him artificially, as a melodramatic way of emphasizing his emotional suffering when he loses Cosette to Marius.

Money

Hugo’s novel has many realistic elements, notably the importance of money. Precise sums are frequently mentioned, and nearly all the characters must earn, beg, or steal money in order to live. Here are the units of currency referred to in the text:

3 deniers (“the widow’s mite”) made a liard. 240 of them made a franc.

5 centimes or 4 liards made a sou.

20 sous made a franc (also referred to as a livre).

3 francs made an écu.

20 francs made a gold Napoléon or Louis (both were in circulation).

Because the relative cost of items differed greatly from their cost today, 1 franc—the most common unit of currency—equaled between 5 and 30 U.S. dollars in today’s purchasing power. Rent was cheap; clothing, transportation, and food were expensive (farms had no tractors or combines; flour was ground in mills by water power; each loaf of bread was made by hand). A worker who earned less than 1 franc a day was being severely exploited.