Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (early reader books txt) 📕

LETTER TO M. DAELLI

Publisher of the Italian translation of Les Misérables in Milan.

HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, October 18, 1862.

You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Misérables is written for all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: “Open to me, I come for you.”

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable’s name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France. Your admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of it. Does not banditism, that raging form of pauperism, inhabit your mountains? Few nations are more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to fathom. In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin, Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities, you are, like ourselves, poor. You are covered with marvels and vermin. Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky does not prevent rags on man.

Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms, blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone. The social question is the same for you as for us. There are a few less deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under different names, the vescovo is identical with the bishop, and it always means night, and of pretty nearly the same quality. To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same thing as to understand the Gospel badly.

Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy parallelism be yet more completely verified? Have you not indigent persons? Glance below. Have you not parasites? Glance up. Does not that hideous balance, whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? Where is your army of schoolmasters, the only army which civilization acknowledges?

Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience? military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honor of Italy? Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization is to be measured. Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in Paris? What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons. Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes! Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass miseries in review, let each one contribute his pile, you are as rich as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great nation of France! Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves, Miserables.

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.

VICTOR HUGO.

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:—D. O. M. 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