A master of unnecessary and maddening digression

In The Hunchback, Hugo drives readers crazy with interminable blathering about the evolutions of Gothic architecture and of the city of Paris.

The first such monstrous irrelevancy in Les Miserables is a seemingly endless rehearsal of Waterloo.

Still he has some interesting things to say about the triumphant Counter-revolution.

And he almost sees in "Bonapartist liberalism" a European triumph of Enlightened Dictatorship, a sort of vast modernizing autocracy in the tradition of Peter, Frederick, Catherine, and others who would eventually be followed by Ataturk, the Shah, Nasser, and their like.

He finishes the digression of some 60 pages with the story of Sergeant Thenardier stealing the ring from Pontmercy, an officer fallen in the battle but not quite dead on the silent field of the aftermath.

Hugo, Les Miserables.