Les Misérables, Victor Hugo [best love novels of all time .TXT] 📗
- Author: Victor Hugo
- Performer: 0451525264
Book online «Les Misérables, Victor Hugo [best love novels of all time .TXT] 📗». Author Victor Hugo
From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.
I resume. This book, Les Misérables, is no less your mirror than ours. Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book,—I understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.
As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity.
This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance of the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French, Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say more, human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.
Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of composition which modify everything, even the conditions, formerly narrow, of taste and language, which must grow broader like all the rest.
In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great delight, with having transgressed the bounds of what they call “French taste”; I should be glad if this eulogium were merited.
In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: “Help me!”
This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it for you and for your country. If I have insisted so strongly, it is because of one phrase in your letter. You write:—
“There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: ‘This book, Les Misérables, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French read it as a history, we read it as a romance.’”—Alas! I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.
If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening some minds and in dissipating some prejudices, you are at liberty to publish it, sir. Accept, I pray you, a renewed assurance of my very distinguished sentiments.
FOOTNOTES:
1 (return)
[ Patois of the French Alps: chat de maraude, rascally marauder.]
2 (return)
[ Liège: a cork-tree. Pau: a jest on peau, skin.]
3 (return)
[ She belonged to that circle where cuckoos and carriages share the same fate; and a jade herself, she lived, as jades live, for the space of a morning (or jade).]
4 (return)
[ An ex-convict.]
5 (return)
[ This parenthesis is due to Jean Valjean.]
6 (return)
[ A bullet as large as an egg.]
7 (return)
[ Walter Scott, Lamartine, Vaulabelle, Charras, Quinet, Thiers.]
8 (return)
[ This is the inscription:—
CY A ETE ÉCRASÉ
PAR MALHEUR
SOUS UN CHARIOT,
MONSIEUR BERNARD
DE BRYE MARCHAND
A BRUXELLE LE [illegible]
FEVRIER 1637.]
9 (return)
[ A heavy rifled gun.]
10 (return)
[ “A battle terminated, a day finished, false measures repaired, greater successes assured for the morrow,—all was lost by a moment of panic, terror.”—Napoleon, Dictées de Sainte Hélène.]
11 (return)
[ Five winning numbers in a lottery]
12 (return)
[ Literally “made cuirs”; i. e., pronounced a t or an s at the end of words where the opposite letter should occur, or used either one of them where neither exists.]
13 (return)
[ Lawyer Corbeau, perched on a docket, held in his beak a writ of execution; Lawyer Renard, attracted by the smell, addressed him nearly as follows, etc.]
14 (return)
[ This is the factory of Goblet Junior: Come choose your jugs and crocks, Flower-pots, pipes, bricks. The Heart sells Diamonds to every comer.]
15 (return)
[ On the boughs hang three bodies of unequal merits: Dismas and Gesmas, between is the divine power. Dismas seeks the heights, Gesmas, unhappy man, the lowest regions; the highest power will preserve us and our effects. If you repeat this verse, you will not lose your things by theft.]
16 (return)
[ Instead of porte cochère and porte bàtarde.]
17 (return)
[ Jesus-my-God-bandy-leg—down with the moon!]
18 (return)
[ Chicken: slang allusion to the noise made in calling poultry.]
19 (return)
[ Louis XVIII. is represented in comic pictures of that day as having a pear-shaped head.]
20 (return)
[ Tuck into your trousers the shirt-tail that is hanging out. Let it not be said that patriots have hoisted the white flag.]
21 (return)
[ In order to re-establish the shaken throne firmly on its base, soil (Des solles), greenhouse and house (Decazes) must be changed.]
22 (return)
[ Suspendu, suspended; pendu, hung.]
23 (return)
[ L’Aile, wing.]
24 (return)
[ The slang term for a painter’s assistant.]
25 (return)
[ If Cæsar had given me glory and war, and I were obliged to quit my mother’s love, I would say to great Cæsar, “Take back thy sceptre and thy chariot; I prefer the love of my mother.”]
26 (return)
[ Whether the sun shines brightly or dim, the bear returns to his cave.]
27 (return)
[ The peep-hole is a Judas in French. Hence the half-punning allusion.]
28 (return)
[ Our love has lasted a whole week, but how short are the instants of happiness! To adore each other for eight days was hardly worth the while! The time of love should last forever.]
29 (return)
[ You leave me to go to glory; my sad heart will follow you everywhere.]
30 (return)
[ A democrat.]
31 (return)
[ King Bootkick went a-hunting after crows, mounted on two stilts. When one passed beneath them, one paid him two sous.]
32 (return)
[ In olden times, fouriers were the officials who preceded the Court and allotted the lodgings.]
33 (return)
[ A game of ninepins, in which one side of the ball is smaller than the other, so that it does not roll straight, but describes a curve on the ground.]
34 (return)
[ From April 19 to May 20.]
35 (return)
[ Merlan: a sobriquet given to hairdressers because they are white with powder.]
36 (return)
[ The scaffold.]
37 (return)
[ Argot of the Temple.]
38 (return)
[ Argot of the barriers.]
39 (return)
[ The Last Day of a Condemned Man.]
40 (return)
[ “Vous trouverez dans ces potains-là, une foultitude de raisons pour que je me libertise.”]
41 (return)
[ It must be observed, however, that mac in Celtic means son.]
42 (return)
[ Smoke puffed in the face of a person asleep.]
43 (return)
[ Je n’entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des orgues, peut atiger ses mômes et ses momignards et les locher criblant sans être agité lui-meme.]
44 (return)
[ At night one sees nothing, by day one sees very well; the bourgeois gets flurried over an apocryphal scrawl, practice virtue, tutu, pointed hat!]
45 (return)
[ Chien, dog, trigger.]
46 (return)
[ Here is the morn appearing. When shall we go to the forest, Charlot asked Charlotte. Tou, tou, tou, for Chatou, I have but one God, one King, one half-farthing, and one boot. And these two poor little wolves were as tipsy as sparrows from having drunk dew and thyme very early in the morning. And these two poor little things were as drunk as thrushes in a vineyard; a tiger laughed at them in his cave. The one cursed, the other swore. When shall we go to the forest? Charlot asked Charlotte.]
47 (return)
[ There swings the horrible skeleton of a poor lover who hung himself.]
48 (return)
[ She astounds at ten paces, she frightens at two, a wart inhabits her hazardous nose; you tremble every instant lest she should blow it at you, and lest, some fine day, her nose should tumble into her mouth.]
49 (return)
[ Matelote: a culinary preparation of various fishes. Gibelotte: stewed rabbits.]
50 (return)
[ Treat if you can, and eat if you dare.]
51 (return)
[ Bipède sans plume: biped without feathers—pen.]
52 (return)
[ Municipal officer of Toulouse.]
53 (return)
[ Do you remember our sweet life, when we were both so young, and when we had no other desire in our hearts than to be well dressed and in love? When, by adding your age to my age, we could not count forty years between us, and when, in our humble and tiny household, everything was spring to us even in winter. Fair days! Manuel was proud and wise, Paris sat at sacred banquets, Foy launched thunderbolts, and your corsage had a pin on which I pricked myself. Everything gazed upon you. A briefless lawyer, when I took you to the Prado to dine, you were so beautiful that the roses seemed to me to turn round, and I heard them say: Is she not beautiful! How good she
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