What is certain is that most of his allusions would have meant nothing to any except his oldest readers even when the book was published in 1862. As for the present day, Professor Guyard has found it necessary to append sixty-two footnotes for the enlightenment of contemporary French readers – incidentally pointing out, not infrequently, that Hugo got his facts wrong. I have dealt with this section by drastically reducing it, cutting out references that would be meaningless to English readers and including only those that serve Hugo’s purpose of conveying the atmosphere of Paris in that year. The footnotes have either been incorporated in the text or abolished where they no longer applied, except in the case of a very few which had to go at the bottom of the page. I may mention incidentally that the footnotes throughout the book are to be attributed to Professor Guyard except where I specifically acknowledge them – ‘trs.’.

This foreword is unavoidable if the reader is to know exactly what he is getting – not a photograph but a slightly modified version of Hugo’s novel designed to bring its great qualities into clearer relief by thinning out, but never completely eliminating, its lapses. It must stand or fall not by its literal accuracy, although I profoundly hope that I have been guilty of no major solecisms, but by its faithfulness to the spirit of Victor Hugo. He was above all things, and at all times, a poet. If the fact is not apparent to the English reader then this rendering of his work must be said to have failed.

NORMAN DENNY

While through the working of laws and customs there continues to exist a condition of social condemnation which artificially creates a human hell within civilization, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; while the three great problems of this century, the degradation of man in the proletariat, the subjection of women through hunger, the atrophy of the child by darkness, continue unresolved; while in some regions social asphyxia remains possible; in other words, and in still wider terms, while ignorance and poverty persist on earth, books such as this cannot fail to be of value.

Hauteville House, 1 January 1862

PART ONE
FANTINE


BOOK ONE
AN UPRIGHT MAN

I
Monseigneur Myriel

IN THE year 1815 Monseigneur Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne. He was then about seventy-five, having held the bishopric since 1806.

Although it has no direct bearing on the tale we have to tell, we must nevertheless give some account of the rumours and gossip concerning him which were in circulation when he came to occupy the diocese. What is reported of men, whether it be true or false, may play as large a part in their lives, and above all in their destiny, as the things they do. Monseigneur Myriel was the son of a counsellor of the Parliament of Aix, a member of the noblesse de robe. It was said of him that his father, intending him to inherit his office, had arranged for him to marry at a very early age, about eighteen or twenty, following the custom that was fairly widespread in parliamentary families. Charles Myriel, it was said, had attracted much gossip despite this marriage. He was good-looking although of small stature, elegant, graceful, and entertaining; his early life was wholly devoted to worldly matters and affairs of gallantry. Then had come the revolution, and in the rush of those events the decimated and persecuted parliamentary families had been scattered. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy, and here his wife died of the chest complaint that had long afflicted her. There were no children. What happened after this to Monseigneur Myriel? Did the collapse of the old French social order, the downfall of his own family, the tragic events of ’93 – perhaps even more fearful to an émigré witnessing them at a distance – inspire in him thoughts of renunciation and solitude? Amid the distractions and frivolities that occupied his life, did it happen that he was suddenly overtaken by one of those mysterious and awful revulsions which, striking to the heart, change the nature of a man who cannot be broken by outward disasters affecting his life and fortune? No one can say. All that is known is that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.

In 1804 M. Myriel was curé of Brignolles, where, already elderly, he lived in profound seclusion.

At the time of the Emperor’s coronation, some small matter of parish business took him to Paris. Among the influential personages whom he had occasion to visit was Cardinal Fesch, the uncle of Napoleon, and it happened one day, when he was waiting in the cardinal’s antechamber, that the Emperor passed through on his way to call on his uncle. Seeing the old priest intently regarding him, he turned to him and asked sharply:

‘Who is the gentleman who is staring at me?’

‘Sire,’ replied M. Myriel, ‘you are looking at a plain man and I am looking at a great man. Each of us may benefit.’

That evening the Emperor asked the cardinal the priest’s name, and shortly afterwards M. Myriel learned to his great surprise that he had been appointed Bishop of Digne.

As to the truth in general of the tales that were told about the early life of M. Myriel, no one could vouch for it. Few people remained who had known his family before the revolution. He had to accept the fate of every newcomer to a small town where there are plenty of tongues that gossip and few minds that think. He had to bear with this in spite of being a bishop and because he was a bishop. And after all, these tales were perhaps only tales, rumour and fabrication and nothing more.

However that may be, by the ninth year of his residence as Bishop of Digne all the chatter that at first occupies small people in small places had died down and been forgotten.