Les Miserables

Hugo spends about the first hundred pages or so of Les Miserables portraying for us the saintliness of Monseigneur Bienvenu, Bishop Myriel of Digne.

He declaims against atheism, which he identifies with Epicurus, Hobbes, and a vision of human life as an egoist war of all against all, and urges an empty theology that is not even a bare theism, and a view of Christ, poverty, and goodness that hears only Jesus's command to give all you have to the poor.

It's rather slow going, but then our author moves on and brilliantly tells the story of Jean Valjean's early life, crime, punishment, early days after his release, and rescue from his profound and repulsive badness by the brave and selfless Bienvenu.

Valjean as a young man lives with and is the sole support of his widowed young sister and her seven children, one a mere infant.

He is an illiterate and unskilled workman relying on day labor for all.

In the midst of one harsh winter there is no work and a day comes when there is nothing for the family to eat, literally nothing.

Valjean, consumed with hunger and desperation, punches through the glass window of a bakery and runs off with a loaf of bread.

The baker pursues and spreads alarm, and he is overtaken and captured.

Within days he is sent in chains to the galleys, sentenced to five years in conditions of inexpressible horror four attempts at escape from which earn him extension of his sentence to 19 years.

Hugo in words and Valjean wordlessly in his heart agree the theft was wrong, but damn society's heartlessness for the poverty and hunger that occasioned it and the appalling injustice of such punishment, and Valjean is crushed into remorseless hatred of society, mankind, and the whole creation.

Hugo ties that same heartless cruelty of society, that appalling punishment, and the profoundly vicious criminality of Valjean they have brought about, all three, to the vision of atheism, or atheist vision of the world, described above.

There is a brief section of those first hundred or so pages on Bienvenu in which the bishop visits a dying old revolutionary.

The fierce man of the people repudiates atheism and the bishop accepts the legitimacy of the Revolution, even conceding his own moral inferiority to the dying hero.

When he is self-righteous, religious, sentimental, moralistic, or even merely political, Hugo is awful.

But he is all the same a magnificent talent, and his narrations of incidents, actions, and events, as well as his revelations of character in them, are wonderful and compelling.

I have read Les Miserables unabridged in English twice and French once.

I am reading it again.