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Overview
Les Misérables is a magnificent, sweeping story of revolution, love and the will to survive amidst the poverty-stricken streets of nineteeth-century Paris.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features an introduction by Paul Bailey. Escaped convict Jean Valjean turns his back on a criminal past to build his fortunes as an honest man. He takes in abandoned orphan Cosette and raises her as his own daughter. But Jean Valjean is unable to free himself from his previous life and is pursued to the end by ruthless policeman Javert. As Cosette grows up, young idealist Marius catches a glimpse of her and falls desperately in love. The fates of all the characters await them during the violent turmoil of the June Rebellion in 1832. This abridged version of Victor Hugo's masterpiece was published in 1915 with the aim to provide 'a unified story of the life and soul-struggles of Jean Valjean'.Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781909621497 |
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Publisher: | Macmillan Collector's Library |
Publication date: | 10/04/2016 |
Pages: | 424 |
Product dimensions: | 3.80(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
Lexile: | 900L (what's this?) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is one of the most well-regarded French writers of the nineteenth century. He was a poet, novelist and dramatist, and he is best remembered in English as the author of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1831) and Les Misérables (1862).
Hugo was born in Besançon, and became a pivotal figure of the Romantic movement in France, involved in both literature and politics. He founded the literary magazine Conservateur Littéraire in 1819, aged just seventeen, and turned his hand to writing political verse and drama after Louis-Philippe's accession to the throne in 1830. His literary output was curtailed following the death of his daughter in 1843, but he began a new novel as an outlet for his grief. Completed many years later, this novel became Hugo's most notable work, Les Misérables.Date of Birth:
February 26, 1802Date of Death:
May 22, 1885Place of Birth:
Besançon, FrancePlace of Death:
Paris, FranceEducation:
Pension Cordier, Paris, 1815-18Read an Excerpt
So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age--the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night--are not yet solved; as long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless. Hauteville House, 1862.
1815, M. Charles Franois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D----. He was a man of seventy-five, and had occupied the bishopric of D---- since 1806. Although it in no manner concerns, even in the remotest degree, what we have to relate, it may not be useless, were it only for the sake of exactness in all things, to notice here the reports and gossip which had arisen on his account from the time of his arrival in the diocese.
Be it true or false, what is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do.
M. Myriel was the son of a counsellor of the Parlement of Aix; of the rank given to the legal profession. His father, intending him to inherit his place, had contracted a marriage for him at the early age of eighteen or twenty, according to a widespread custom among parliamentary families. Charles Myriel, notwithstanding this marriage, had, it was said, been an object of much attention. His person was admirably moulded; although of slight figure, he was elegant andgraceful; all the earlier part of his life had been devoted to the world and to its pleasures. The revolution came, events crowded upon each other; the parliamentary families, decimated, hunted, and pursued, were soon dispersed. M. Charles Myriel, on the first outbreak of the revolution, emigrated to Italy. His wife died there of a lung complaint with which she had been long threatened. They had no children. What followed in the fate of M. Myriel? The decay of the old French society, the fall of his own family, the tragic sights of '93, still more fearful, perhaps, to the exiles who beheld them from afar, magnified by fright--did these arouse in him ideas of renunciation and of solitude? Was he, in the midst of one of the reveries or emotions which then consumed his life, suddenly attacked by one of those mysterious and terrible blows which sometimes overwhelm, by smiting to the heart, the man whom public disasters could not shake, by aiming at life or fortune? No one could have answered; all that was known was that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.
In 1804, M. Myriel was cure of B----(Brignolles). He was then an old man, and lived in the deepest seclusion.
Near the time of the coronation, a trifling matter of business belonging to his curacy--what it was, is not now known precisely--took him to Paris.
Among other personages of authority he went to Cardinal Fesch on behalf of his parishioners.
One day, when the emperor had come to visit his uncle, the worthy cure, who was waiting in the ante-room, happened to be on the way of his Majesty. Napoleon noticing that the old man looked at him with a certain curiousness, turned around and said brusquely:
'Who is this goodman who looks at me?'
Table of Contents
Introduction | 7 | |
Part 1 | Fantine | |
I | An Upright Man | 19 |
II | The Outcast | 71 |
III | In the Year 1817 | 119 |
IV | To Trust is Sometimes to Surrender | 144 |
V | Degradation | 155 |
VI | Javert | 191 |
VII | The Champmathieu Affair | 202 |
VIII | Counter-Stroke | 260 |
Part 2 | Cosette | |
I | Waterloo | 279 |
II | The Ship Orion | 325 |
III | Fulfilment of a Promise | 338 |
IV | The Gorbeau Tenement | 385 |
V | Hunt in Darkness | 399 |
VI | Le Petit-Picpus | 425 |
VIII | Cemeteries Take What They are Given | 451 |
Part 3 | Marius | |
I | Paris in Microcosm | 495 |
II | A Grand Bourgeois | 512 |
III | Grandfather and Grandson | 522 |
IV | The ABC Society | 555 |
V | The Virtues of Misfortune | 584 |
VI | Conjunction of Two Stars | 603 |
VII | Patron-Minette | 619 |
VIII | The Noxious Poor | 627 |
Part 4 | The Idyll in the Rue Plumet and the Epic of the Rue Saint-Denis | |
I | A Few Pages of History | 705 |
II | Eponine | 739 |
III | The House in the Rue Plumet | 756 |
IV | Help from Below May be Help from above | 788 |
V | Of Which the End Does Not Resemble the Beginning | 797 |
VI | The Boy Gavroche | 812 |
VIII | Enchantment and Despair | 844 |
IX | Where are They Going? | 876 |
X | 5 June 1832 | 883 |
XI | The Straw in the Wind | 904 |
XII | Corinth | 915 |
XIII | Marius Enters the Darkness | 943 |
XIV | The Greatness of Despair | 953 |
XV | In the Rue de L'Homme-Arme | 970 |
Part 5 | Jean Valjean | |
I | War within Four Walls | 987 |
II | The Entrails of the Monster | 1061 |
III | Mire, But the Soul | 1076 |
IV | Javert in Disarray | 1104 |
V | Grandson and Grandfather | 1110 |
VI | The Sleepless Night | 1129 |
VII | The Bitter Cup | 1145 |
VIII | The Fading Light | 1162 |
IX | Supreme Shadow, Supreme Dawn | 1173 |
Appendix A | The Convent as an Abstract Idea (Part Two, Book VII) | 1202 |
Appendix B | Argot (Part Four, Book VII) | 1214 |
What People are Saying About This
Hugo's genius was for the creation of simple and recognisable myth. The huge success of Les Miserables as a didactic work on behalf of the poor and oppressed is due to its poetic and myth-enlarged view of human nature... Hugo himself called this novel 'a religious work'; and it has indeed the necessary air of having been written by God in one of his more accessible and saleable moods.