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

Also: chimney pots that are afraid of getting caught. You were all right about Hugo being witty.

Today's gem : ' Ghosts hardly ever wear round hats.'

Yes, I thought 'oooh, MN will NOT like that'.

I am almost, almost caught up! Loved the description of the attraction between Cosette and Marius. And very grateful to you all for the informed and interesting chat about the context.

In some ways I wish Marius would fall for her instead of Cosette (but that would be in an alternate Les Miz universe!).

@cassandre I couldn't help it, I went looking for Marius and Eponine fanfiction. And it's there. Of course.

https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Marius%20Pontmercys%C3%89ponine%20Th%C3%A9nardier/works

I think Montparnasse was one of the thieves that was friendly with Thenardier perhaps?

In relation to Montparnasse, Wikipedia says this about the area of Paris where the tower now is:

Students in the 17th century who came to recite poetry in the hilly neighbourhood nicknamed it after "Mount Parnassus", home to the nine Muses of arts and sciences in Greek mythology. The hill was levelled to construct the Boulevard Montparnasse in the 18th century.

Maybe the character is named for a connection to that area or something.

My translation used “old man” for Père Mabeuf, and “elderly man” for JVJ - a small but significant difference which avoided confusion! I don’t know if the original uses two different words?

As for Montparnasse, I have the advantage of having just caught up on a couple of weeks’ worth of chapters, which included a mention of him as one of the gang of baddies that gathered at the Thénardiers’ apartment. Reading one chapter a day does make it much harder to remember all the details! Though the lack of tv and internet in the 19th century would also have made a big difference 😄

I’m glad the purse ended up with Père Mabeuf, and what a nice boy Gavroche is - he’s nothing like his parents!

I also loved Book 3 - the beautiful description of the garden, the very realistic private thoughts and feelings of JVJ and Cosette, and the evocative, shocking description of the chain gang. Hugo’s writing is so good! (And I have huge respect for the translator too).

Yes, I though Thenardier too.

I just thought 'well, he's not named after the Tower cos that's like Well Modern, innit.'

I love Gavroche after today’s chapter!

I stumbled over Montparnasse as well. I guess he was either one of the bandits known to Thenardier (but I flicked back and couldn’t see him), then thought he must have been one of the pick pockets/ petty criminals in the gamins de Paris chapter..

I had to read today's chapter twice! I don't know if it was my translator but she used 'the old man' to describe two characters and at first I thought the 'octogenarian' Monsieur Mabeuf had pinned a 19 year old scoundrel to the ground. I realise JVJ was the other guy and being described as old through the eyes of Le Petit Gavroche - but it took a while!

Thanks to this thread , I do not need reminding who LPG is but Montparnasse - no clue. I assume he was in a previous chapter.

Hugo really does presume we are paying very close attention. Maybe this was easier in the 19th century? Middle class book readers couldn't have had an awful lot of other things to focus on - like four box sets, social media, another book on the go and work emails...

I also really really really hate LOTR!

Whoops.

Ive taught Frankenstein and they loved it! It's surely shorter than TOTC?

I love Dickens but TOTC is nowhere near my favourite...

And I really enjoyed Madame Bovary which I read for the first time two years ago.

That's a really good point @Benvenuto about Lord of the Rings and its popularity despite its length. Maybe we can draw the conclusion that the reading public don't mind a bit of waffle as long as it's good waffle.

@MotherOfCatBoy- re shorter texts, I think you have to be realistic about the time that students have & also what might appeal to them. If they are studying a literature based course, then they need to read the text & then reread at least parts of it to engage with the voice & vision of the author - otherwise what is the point of an Arts course?

This was brought home to me when DS1 (not a natural Arts student) sat his GCSEs & had to suffer Frankenstein - inevitably he focused most of his study on the revision guide rather than the text itself (much to my disapproval but completely understandable given the length) nor did he enjoy it much. When we read Two Cities, I remember thinking that he would have got far more out of studying that as it’s quite short for a 19th century text & subject matter (war, alcohol & unrequited love) felt much more interesting for a teenager.

@cassandre- your point re Romanticism was very interesting as I suspect that partly explains why I prefer Hugo, as I’ve always had a weakness for identifying with characters & seeing the novel through their eyes. With Dickens there is more distance between reader & character but as you say it is a personal preference.

What I do find odd re the privileging of realism is that those authors have flaws too. Zola is the one that I know best of the big three, but the naturalism for me is the least interesting part of his work, as there is just too much opining about how characters are formed / doomed by heredity & environment. The more interesting side of his work for me is his fascination with progress in society & how he captures this in his novels (although as you say re Germinal the progress isn’t always positive). I agree with you re Stendhal & Balzac.

I like the sound of a watch-along too!

That is amazing. I listened to a good Radio 4 documentary, I think I linked to it way upthread (warning, spoilers); the narrator annoyed me because she was just so bloody breathless about it all, but they emphasised how much his wife was a good business partner in all this and took part in the marketing for it (despite his many mistresses)..

I did read Le Rouge et le Noir way back when and quite enjoyed all the melodrama - I see it as a kind of anti-Jane Austen where all the drama is right there on the page rather than in the background, set in roughly the same historical moment… You can really see how this would be a sensation, the Netflix of its day when they didn’t have Netflix .. I mean how much entertainment could a normal, poor, provincial person get back then? Travelling players? A local theatre? Early circulating magazines? And you had to be literate.. but they just didn’t have as many stories to choose from so you can see how some are dynamite on first publication .. like Goethe with Werther (never read it).

Really interesting comments from everyone. I also prefer Hugo to Madame Bovary (which I read for an earlier readalong), but I haven't tried Balzac or Zola. Proust is my only ever DNF as far as I can remember - Ulysses used to be another, but I did eventually go back and finish it!

And oh yeah, I'd be totally up for a film watch-along!

This Guardian article is rather fun

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/dec/30/party-tricks-and-naked-writing-the-eccentric-life-of-victor-hugo

It reinforces what you say @Benvenuto about how popular Hugo was with readers
When negotiating payment with his publisher for Les Misérables, Hugo famously declared that he wanted to be paid more than anyone else had ever been paid to write a book. Biographer David Bellos claims that the 300,000 francs (around £3m in today’s money) Hugo received still remains the highest figure ever paid for a work of literature. Luckily for the publisher, the investment paid off: Les Misérables was so hotly anticipated that Parisian workers queued up at bookshops with wheelbarrows to fill with newly purchased copies, to later sell to colleagues for profit.

@DuPainDuVinDuFromage I also think Eponine is a great character. She's so funny and feisty. In some ways I wish Marius would fall for her instead of Cosette (but that would be in an alternate Les Miz universe!).

@Tarahumara glad you also recognised the genius of @FuzzyCaoraDhubh's immortal assessment of Hugo 😂That's all the lit crit you really need right there! Seriously I find it rather charming the way some 19th c writers just go off on tangents, and just expect the reader to indulge them. There's something quite intimate about it even if it's occasionally exasperating.

I also agree with your comments @Benvenuto . Very interesting! I still prefer Dickens to Hugo overall (I think we clashed on this issue before, ha), but that's very much a personal preference of mine rather than a grand universal claim. (I'm always suspicious of grand universal claims.) Also, I like Hugo as well! Both/and instead of either/or.

I'm also very sceptical of literary canons in general. Exactly as you say, the books that readers love in a given era are not necessarily the same as the books that are taught in schools and universities centuries later. Canons (in the West anyway) have mostly been constructed by a small group of privileged white male elite. And canons change over time as society's tastes and interests change. (Incidentally, there's one MNer who pops up now and again, who adores Harold Bloom and who has decided to take Harold Bloom's The Western Canon as gospel truth about which books are Great Literature. Obviously this is not a crime but it winds me up no end - how can you take one critic, a clever guy but still just ONE old white guy who was a bit of lech as well and decide that he's the arbiter of great literature??!!)

Anyway, I think Hugo's novels aren't taught much at universities now partly for practical reasons (they're too long) and partly for reasons of sensibility/taste. (I say this as an observation not a value judgement.) Modernist tastes privileged realism over Romanticism. Hugo, like it or not, is a Romantic. Balzac is taught as the most famous author of the realist novel, Flaubert is taught as an innovator of narrative style (impersonality, free indirect discourse), Zola is taught for his theories of naturalism, Stendhal is taught for his 'early' realist prose and the psychology of his characters. In other words, none of them really wore their hearts on their sleeves the way Hugo did. And all of them wrote novels short enough to read in one university term!

Like you @MotherOfCatBoy I admire Flaubert but found Madame Bovary very depressing! Hugo and Dumas are far better for entertainment value as you say. I read Zola a long time ago and don't really want to go back to him. He's even more depressing than Flaubert. Germinal is a novel to slit your wrists to if there ever was one. Stendhal I wouldn't mind tackling. Balzac really appeals to me and I would happily read more of him, but I think it's important to recognise that 'realism' is also just another way of looking at the world. It's not any more neutral or objective than Romanticism is. I've read a couple of short works by Balzac and they were brilliant (eg The Girl with the Golden Eyes).

Sorry for the massive tangent, I love discussions like this.

Film sounds good 👍
We could have a watch along after we’ve all finished.

Agree with so much of what you’ve said @Benvenuto. I think you might be right about only assigning shorter texts to courses - though when I did my English Lit we did have Clarissa on the syllabus but I do confess that I skim read it and did not plough my way through the whole lot!

I read Bovary in Uni (for pleasure) and it was very angsty and depressing, maybe even more than Tess tbh… there was a big film out at the time, maybe Isabelle Huppert? That made me read it. Dumas and Hugo are both far more entertaining in many ways - they are good old fashioned story tellers. Like Dickens and Tolstoy, neither of whom I read as a student. They have the ability as you say to present you with what we would now think of as big cinematic set piece moments.

I’ve not yet tackled any Balzac or Zola.. Might need another readalong to get me there.

Besides the characters, the things I’ll remember from Les Mis are the “essays” in the side - Waterloo, le mot de Cambronne, the thinking about convents, etc. A bit like Tolstoy, it’s as if you could have a book of collected essays by Hugo about all these diverse subjects.. I get frustrated that they hold up the story but they are actually fascinating to be fair.

@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.