Les Miserables read-a-long 2026 | Deuxième Partie (2)

@cassandreI find the question of canon texts an interesting one, as, as you say, I was taught that the big three 19th century novelists were Balzac, Flaubert & Zola. This surprised me as a teenager, as the person I thought was a classic novelist of that era was Dumas. I can see why you wouldn’t teach Hugo as both Les Mis & Notre-Dame are so long & realistically you want a shorter text that most students might actually read, but I’m not always convinced that readers agree with the critics - this thread is an example of this as is the Monte-Cristo one. I also wonder whether readers are more sympathetic to epic texts than critics (Lord of the Rings frequently topping reader polls being an example).

I also think that the charge of sentimentalism is unfair as this was common amongst many authors of the era - Dickens being rather worse in my view. Then again, when I was reading a bit about Dickens’s work for the 2 Cities readalong, some of the criticism of him seemed unfair particularly that some of his characters lacked depth (in my view the exaggerated traits of many of his characters is part of the appeal of his writing).

My own view is that Les Mis stands up well compared to the other 19th century French texts that I’ve read & I would far, far rather spend time in Les Mis world than that of Mme Bovary or Proust. I could do without the waffle (waffle for me = fall behind in the readalong), but Hugo is very, very good in the calibre of his waffle. I can still remember his waffling about Gothic architecture & the printing press many years after reading Notre Dame.

Where I do find Hugo superb is just how memorable the key moments (& there are a lot of them) are, from the Bishop meeting Napoleon & Valjean meeting the Bishop through Valjean & Javert, Valjean falling from the ship and many more. It’s a novel that is very easy to picture.

@MotherOfCatBoy- it’s not exactly literary criticism, but the Belmondo film of Les Mis both updates the text & dialogues with it. I am planning to watch it at the end of the readalong.

@Piggywaspushed- re humour & women there was also the Bishop’s maid & Fantine’s friends.

I'm glad to have brought this useful comment to our discussion 😅

Yes @cassandre, I too find myself quoting that immortal line of @FuzzyCaoraDhubh's - "Hugo is a waffler"!

Back from holiday and slowly catching up. I’ve just finished Book 2 of this section, and feel sad for Eponine with her unrequited love for Marius and her frank awareness of her low social status. I hadn’t expected to like her!

Book 3 next and then I’ll be pretty much caught up.

Good point about the humour! I think Hugo maybe gets a bad rap because of his reputation for earnestness and sentimentality, but in fact there's quite a lot of humour and wit in his writing.

True. I think that contains the bit I found funny.

True but I did think it was funny when JVJ tests Marius by going to the Luxembourg at different times etc and then instantly decides he hates him because he’s sighing over Cosette - that was quite comical.

He does occasionally do quite Dickens like humour. There was quite a funny description of Marius' mooning looks yesterday. Mme Thenardier aside, the women tend to be rather humour free. But JVJ isn't exactly a bundle of laughs.

Ooh thanks @cassandre I will look that up and do a little digging of my own.

In fact I do have a translation on hand - I cracked a few weeks ago, I think k it was during the build up to the Jondrette/ Thenardier attic bust and all the descriptions of the gangsters - there was so much slang and idiom that the dictionary wasn’t a great deal of help so I found a basic online version available through Apple Books - it’s Isabel Hapgood, quite clunky prose to be honest, but I only use it when I’ve looked up all the words and I’m still stumped for the sense of a sentence/ paragraph.

It is hard going to be honest and if it was more than a chapter a day I’d have given up by now. But because it’s little chunks I can stick with it.

@Benvenuto I'm sure you're right in saying that Hugo is better than some (most?) other 19th c male writers when it comes to representing women. His sympathetic portrayal of Fantine is impressive. I don't think he's challenging any gender stereotypes with his portrait of Cosette, however! I agree with your comments about her,@pashazade.

@TimeforaGandT, you said Slightly disappointed with Cosette's vanity and expenditure on her fashionable wardrobe as it is the antithesis of the way in which JVJ has lived his life. True, but then again Valjean has encouraged that personality trait in her perhaps, by lavishing as many luxuries on her as he can, and depriving himself of as many as he can...

@MotherOfCatBoy I also found the chain gang chapter very powerful (although it isn't subtle). I'm very impressed that you're reading the French without an English translation on hand! About literary criticism on Hugo, that's a good question. I don't think Hugo's novels are usually taught at universities; they're just too long and unwieldy, and as a prose novelist Hugo doesn't have the same cachet as 19th c. French writers like Balzac and Flaubert. In the case of many French writers, there's the Cambridge Companion series which is very good - lots of short articles about one writer (or one period or genre) brought together in one volume and usually written by leading scholars. But there's no Cambridge Companion to Hugo; I checked!

I think his poetry is more often taught. I read his political collection Les Chatiments in a 19th c. undergraduate class (but I remember virtually nothing about it, except that I found it really hard going at the time, ha!). I've also seen his collection Les Contemplations on university syllabi. But never his novels.

There must be a substantial body of scholarship on his novels though! A quick google suggests that one classic work is Victor Brombert's Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (Harvard, 1984).

I’m enjoying these long descriptive chapters this week - they are difficult and I ve had to use the dictionary a lot, but the pictures Hugo paints are magnificent, the writing is very poetic in places. It’s a bit frustrating that we’ve gone back in time a little, but I’m starting to have more patience with the build up.

Today’s chapter with the chain gang was very dramatic and clearly written from a campaigning point of view, but also gives us insight into how destabilising it is for JVJ to see his past (and a possible future he still fears).

Trulu, this book is magisterial, magnificent (and annoying!).

Does anyone know of any literary criticism on it that I could read further? Or any online Uni lectures, that sort of thing?

I had fallen a few weeks behind on my reading so was avoiding the thread to avoid spoilers as I don't know the plot having not seen the musical/film. I have caught up again over the last few days having raced through the action in the garret, slowed down as Hugo diverted into politics and history and sped up again as he refocused on JVJ and Cosette. Slightly disappointed with Cosette's vanity and expenditure on her fashionable wardrobe as it is the antithesis of the way in which JVJ has lived his life. Will try to stay on track now.

I loved the garden chapter. The wildness and beauty of nature made me think of Romanticism. Cosette's maturity mirrors the growth of the flowers in the garden. Beauty is natural but can be exploited as it was with Fantine I guess.

I don’t think Hugo’s depiction of women is that bad if you compare it to contemporary English authors. Fantine is such a richer depiction of a “fallen woman” when compared to say Little Em’ly in David Copperfield and even compared to when Hardy (who is later), it is striking in how Hugo doesn’t flinch from just how sordid Fantine’s fate is with losing her teeth & with becoming a fille publique. Equally Cosette is much more of a person than insipid Lucie in a Tale of Two Cities & I also liked the Bishop’s sister & her maid.

That said, I’m reserving judgment between Mesdames Desfarges et Thénardier, & obviously female English contemporary writers (eg Charlotte & Anne Brontë & Elizabeth Gaskell) were far better than the men at writing interesting women.

I loved the garden chapter too @cassandre , it was so intricate and beautiful, and some of it reminded me of the chaos theory “butterfly wings” stuff about the complexity of the natural world and everything being interlinked.

Whilst generally hating Hugo’s attitude to women I’m enjoying the build up of Cosette and Marius gradually becoming aware of one another (despite his being too old for her as she’s just a kid really - about 15?).

P.S. I wasn't sure whether dragging two hard copies of Les Miz along with me on holiday to France was worth it, but it was worth it, because I've caught up! Go me!

I'm staying in a little town on the southern French coast where we've stayed before, and there is a charming little glass shed in the middle of a square which is like a 'little free library' - there are piles of free donated books, mostly ones which have been pulled out of circulation from the local library, but some which seem to be randomly donated. I always check this shed faithfully, and have found a few treasures there over the years. I visited it today, and there were TWO copies of Les Miserables vol 2 in different editions! But no copies of vol 1! That made me laugh for some reason. How many readers actually make it through both volumes 1 and 2?!

About today's chapter, the title (in both Eng and Fr) is quite sexist in one sense I would say, 'The Rose Realizes She Is a Weapon of War'. Weapon of war in the war between the sexes? The male gaze is strongly implicit here.

In other words, Cosette becomes aware of her own beauty, and wants to maximise its power. It's an interesting choice by Hugo, because he could have made her so innocent and naive that she doesn't realise how beautiful she is, but instead he gives her more self-awareness.

I don't want to extol Hugo's representations of women (because they can be very problematic obviously), but Cosette realising her own beauty makes her a more complex character I think. Valjean is out of his league the way all parents of teenagers are...

In news that is thrilling to no one but me, I have finally caught up with the thread, after lagging behind all year! I have form for falling behind, but joining a read-along eight months late is rather bonkers even for me... oh dear.

I think one reason I've had more trouble keeping up because I know the novel's basic plot already, so I don't have the burning desire of 'what will happen next?' to push me ahead, the way I did with The Count of Monte Cristo and the Dickens readalongs.

Anyway I've trawled through all the historical stuff and really benefited from reading everyone's comments along the way - thank you everyone!

One comment from the thread that sticks in my head and makes me grin is one by @FuzzyCaoraDhubh from earlier in this thread,

Hugo is a waffler. He likes the sound of his own waffle. I'm okay with it because it's a chapter a day and not every chapter is a waffly chapter. Even when there is waffle, there are some good lines at times.

Many is the time I have nodded over the book and sagely repeated to myself, 'Hugo is a waffler'. Ha!

Recently, I did love the amazing showdown in the Thenardiers' loft room, where poor Valjean had his two arch-enemies (the Thenardiers and Javert!) all surrounding him at the same time. And yet he escaped! So thrilling.

About this week's reading so far, I thought the garden chapter was pure Romanticism with a capital R, but would also be interesting to analyse from the point of view of ecocriticism (which isn't my thing but which is super trendy in literary studies right now). The descriptions of nature were so intricate and detailed.

I'm reading in French but I have Donougher's translation at hand to glance at whenever anything puzzles me. (I admit I'm skipping most of the footnotes in both Fr and Eng editions; otherwise I never would have caught up.) I thought Donougher did a good job of translating Ch 4's title, which in French is 'Changement de grille' (literally, 'a change of cast-iron fence'), but which Donougher rendered as 'The Convent Grille Replaced by Garden Railings'. Which is a nice way of helping the reader. However it's also an illustration of how translators are sometimes faced with a choice between brevity and clarity (D. opted for clarity over brevity here).

I think they might change if he doesn't tell her the whole truth. But the punishment never actually fit the crime. Bear in mind that Cosette's own early childhood was in poverty/ servitude. Under those circumstances I'm not sure her feelings towards him would change.

I was thinking more that if Cosette herself finds out (if Javert caught up with him again?) her feelings towards him might change.

But equally, if she doesn’t know any of the history, she can’t share it? Say with any young men who happen to be hanging around showing an interest? Or indeed, the less reputable young lady who is helping him, who almost certainly will have heard her parents’ side of Cosette’s story?

I think it’s Hugo’s way of setting up the narrative with risk for JVJ - if he hasn’t told her much, he has more to lose…

Oh so now I feel a bit foolish. I've just read today's chapter that deals with this!

Perhaps it was the way she was treated by the Thenardiers, that has led her not to persist with questioning,