ÉPONINE

III. THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET

IV. HELP FROM BELOW MAY BE HELP FROM ABOVE

V. OF WHICH THE END DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING

VI. THE BOY GAVROCHE

VIII. ENCHANTMENT AND DESPAIR

IX. WHERE ARE THEY GOING?

X. 5 JUNE 1832

XI. THE STRAW IN THE WIND

XII. CORINTH

XIII. MARIUS ENTERS THE DARKNESS

XIV. THE GREATNESS OF DESPAIR

XV. IN THE RUE DE L’HOMME-ARMÉ

Part Five: Jean Valjean

I. WAR WITHIN FOUR WALLS

II. THE ENTRAILS OF THE MONSTER

III. MIRE, BUT THE SOUL

IV. JAVERT IN DISARRAY

V. GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER

VI. THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT

VII. THE BITTER CUP

VIII. THE FADING LIGHT

IX. SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN

APPENDIX A: The Convent as an Abstract Idea (Part Two, Book VII)

APPENDIX B: Argot (Part Four, Book VII)

INTRODUCTION

I

VICTOR HUGO was born in 1802 at Besançon, now capital of the department of Doubs in eastern France. His father, a career officer in Napoleon’s army, was at that time a major, but he rose eventually to the rank of general and was created a count. His various garrison appointments occasioned a number of removals, and the education of the youthful Victor-Marie was in consequence diversified, taking place in Italy and Spain as well as in Paris, at the Maison des Feuillantines. This was certainly good for him. There may be some doubt as to whether he could really read Tacitus at the age of seven, as he claimed, but he received a very thorough grounding in the humanities.

Hugo was, in short, the precocious son (the youngest of three brothers) of well-to-do middle-class parents. His literary vocation was very soon manifest. A poem written while he was still at school won a literary prize, and in 1819, with his brother Abel, he launched the Conservateur Littéraire, a review which, although it survived for only two years, achieved some prominence as a mouthpiece of the Romantic movement.

He shared with nearly all major writers the quality of abundance. The works poured out in an uneven flood, good, bad and indifferent, splendid at their best and, at their worst, lamentable: some twenty volumes of poetry, of which the best known are Les Châtiments (1853) and Les Contemplations (1856), nine novels, ten plays, mostly in verse (Hernani, Ruy Blas) and a huge amount of general writing, literary, sociological and political. Hugo was always, in the French word, engagé, deeply concerned with the social and political developments of his time.