Les Miserables read-a-long 2026 | Première Partie (1)

[AgualusasL0ver]

Welcome to the first thread of the Les Miserables Read-a-long.

I'll be using the Christine Donougher translation for posting in the main, but it doesn't matter which translation you have, they seem to follow the same breakdown. I have not seen the film, the musical, and have very little knowledge about the book, but suspect I will be doing all of these Christmas 2026.

The only rules
The plan is to read ONE chapter a day and contribute/follow the thread as you see fit. There are c. 365 chapters, so we plan to take the year to read slowly and really get under the skin. Sometimes we have clustered chapters in past read-a-longs, and people do sometimes read ahead. All fine - but No spoilers until the relevant day.

Notes from previous read-a-longs

• How you manage one a day is entirely up to you, some people prefer to store them and read all the chapters for the week at once, some read each day.
• Sometimes these books can go off on a tangent all their own (looking at Mr Tolstoy), stick with it :-)
• All formats and translations welcome. Sometimes the translation discussions are some of the most interesting conversations.
• You WILL get behind at some point, but don't worry, just catch up when you can.
• Tangents, things you discovered down a rabbit hole, articles, pod casts, clips of epic scenes when we get to them all very welcome on the thread.

Spoiler free summary , courtesy of Chat GPT below. Schmoop has book summaries so I will post those at the relevant points.

**

Les Misérables is a classic novel by Victor Hugo that explores justice, compassion, and the struggle for dignity in 19th-century France.
At its core, the book follows the lives of several interconnected characters from different social classes as they navigate poverty, law, love, and moral choice. Rather than focusing on a single hero or plotline, the novel paints a wide picture of society—showing how personal decisions are shaped by systems like the legal system, economic inequality, and social expectations.
Key themes include:

• Justice vs. mercy — how laws affect people differently, and whether strict punishment leads to fairness
• Redemption and moral growth — the possibility of change, even after hardship
• Poverty and inequality — the daily realities of people living on the margins
• Love and sacrifice — care for others as a powerful force for good
• Social responsibility — how individual actions impact the wider community

The novel is known for:

• Deep character development
• Emotional intensity
• Philosophical reflections on society and humanity
• Detailed descriptions of history and everyday life

Overall, Les Misérables is less about a single storyline and more about asking big questions:
What does it mean to be a good person? How should society treat its most vulnerable? And can compassion change lives?

What a bunch of arseholes!

I don't think she's pregnant, I think she has a child already? I don't know the story, but in my esperanto text it says:

...kaj la kompatinda junulino havis infanon.

[and the poor young girl had a child]

Esperanto is by design a language that doesn't feature idiomatic usage - because idioms tend to be derived from a particular language, and may be misunderstood by speakers who don't share the same first language. So "kaj la kompatinda junulino havis infanon" only means "had" a child, in the possessive sense.

Similarly, "kaj la kompatinda junulino estis kun infano" would mean being "with" a child in the sense of being together, like walking down the street or something. If you mean someone was pregnant, you actually have to say that: "ŝi estis graveda".

So I'm fascinated to see how this turns out, because of course it could just be a poor translation!

I read it that he left her pregnant but I don't know.

Apparently the English phrase “with child” meaning pregnant does not translate to French.

The French ending of the chapter is:

C’était, nous l’avons dit, son premier amour ; elle s’était donnée à ce Tholomyès comme à un mari, et la pauvre fille avait un enfant.

He was, as we said, her first love; she had given herself to this Tholomyes as to a husband. And the poor girl had a child.

So we know when the men abandoned the women that Fantine already had a child! 😲

I found it exquisitely cruel and heartless that the women probably watched their lovers leave on the coaches (the letter mentions they have left by coach travelling 8mph)?

Also when Fantine notices a coach stop could it have been someone suddenly deciding to get OFF the coach rather than on as Favourite suggests? Could twatty man have had a moment’s doubt?

Very powerful - the fate of these women resting on the chaos, sparks and clattering of horses and coaches departing. Forging fate.

Yeah, ‘with child’ is an idiom peculiar to the English language. Esperanto and French obviously work the same way!

H I was reading it as her being pregnant, not that she already had a child. If it’s the latter (I defer to the readers with French versions!) then things were a lot more relaxed morally than I thought - and I guess someone must have been looking after the baby when they were out having fun, I wonder who?

@Neitherherenortherethank you for the kind comment. I had to go back and reread the section about the rollercoaster as I had no idea that they had been invented so long ago!

@VikingNorthUtsire- thanks for the St Cloud link. I had heard of the château before as it gets mentioned in the history books as it was the home of the ducs d’Orléans & their family, particularly Henriette d’Angleterre (Charles II’s sister).

The last sentence in today’s chapter is:

C’était, nous l’avons dit, son premier amour ; elle s’était donnée à ce Tholomyès comme un mari, et la pauvre fille avait un enfant.

I would translate that as:

It was, as we have said, her first love [affair] ; she gave herself to this Tholomyès as to a husband, and the poor girl had a child.

That does make it sound like the child already exists but like others I did think that being pregnant would make more sense re the plot. I also wondered if avait un enfant mapped to with child - but I have found my very large French dictionary & checked that and some other idioms & can’t find anything (that doesn’t mean there isn’t a translation re pregnancy that I haven’t found - the very large dictionary was noticeably lacking in a helpful box of pregnancy related words which I’m blaming on the fact that the last set of editors were both men).

To be with child is incidentally porter un enfant (en son sein) - which is poetic, but I’m now a bit concerned about the lack of precision re anatomy in French (sein normally means breast, but here it means womb - whereas if you look up the word for womb, you get ventre, which confusingly also means stomach).

Getting back to the text, I felt sick reading the last line even though I knew enough about the text to know that this would happen. It was just such a contrast with the spoiled immaturity of the students going back to be welcomed by their families for returning to a “moral” life - and the very severe consequences this will have for Fantine (especially as Tholomyès must be about 30 so is more than old enough to shoulder his responsibilities).

Just to add to my last comment - I also think that this book is very much the mirror reflection to the books about Bienvenu. Just as we became more invested in Valjean’s salvation because we understood the character of the Bishop, here we Hugo is making us care about the “ruin” of Fantine because we know about her neglected childhood and her innocence and because we also know about how callously Tholomyès has treated her. That would have been important for Hugo to gain the sympathy of a contemporary audience who might have judged Fantine for being a “fallen woman”* but it probably works slightly differently (although still powerfully) for a modern audience as the difference between age & power in the relationship feels very wrong to us.

*My only slight caveat here is that 19th century French novelists were much bolder & more realistic in how they portrayed affairs than English ones. Flaubert & Madame Bovary is the famous one as adultery is so banal in the book (quite a contrast with Dickens & Little Em’ly in David Copperfield which is very melodramatic) - but then I really can’t imagine an English novelist of the era writing something like Balzac’s La Cousine Bette either (where a man ruins his family through an ill-judged affair).

Interesting that it appears Fantine already had a child.. I guess, the old romantic in me thought that with Tholomyes being her first love, he would be her first lover too but clearly not?

I agree that Hugo is making us invested in her although at the moment, I only see her as a slightly naive & gullible child herself - in stark contrast to her friends.

I guess we see what happens in the next book!

Both can be true surely? As per the letter, they have been going together almost two years - I assumed the child Fantine already has is Tholomyès', which makes it worse for Fantine, he's skipping out on her and their child, and she is in a much more parlous state reputationally?

Thank you @Benvenuto for this comment and your previous one about the language. I don't have anything learned to add at this point but really appreciated your thoughts on these points. I'd been musing on the relative conservativism/permissiveness of French vs English society when we were talking about the grisettes. Whether France was more or less puritanical than England.

I wonder if less puritanical, as a result of the Revolution? During those years divorce was legalised and there was a level of sexual promiscuity that perhaps one would t have seen in England (allowing that these tropes tend to apply to the upper classes). There was a backlash and probably society became more conservative again after the restoration. But war and upheaval often produce looser standards and lots of illegitimate children…

I also feel conflicted at this point, because despite the highly sympathetic authorial voice, I looked up Hugo’s life recently and learned from Wiki that he was a prodigious womaniser. Besides Juliette Drouet being his life long mistress, for over 50 years, there was another 7 year affair with a third woman, and he basically slept with anyone. (See extract from Wiki below). Surely the odds would be that eventually a baby would result? There is no mention of illegimate children but it’s hard to read his moralising about Tholomyes when Hugo himself was like this.

Wiki:
Hugo gave free rein to his libido until a few weeks before his death. He sought a wide variety of women of all ages, be they courtesans, actresses, prostitutes, admirers, servants or revolutionaries like Louise Michel[84] for sexual activity. He systematically reported his casual affairs using his own code, as Samuel Pepys did, to make sure they would remain secret. For instance, he resorted to Latin abbreviations (osc. for kisses) or to Spanish (Misma. Mismas cosas: The same. Same things). Homophones are frequent: Seins (Breasts) becomes Saint; Poële (Stove) actually refers to Poils (Pubic hair). Analogy also enabled him to conceal the real meaning: A woman's Suisses (Swiss) are her breasts—because Switzerland is renowned for its milk. After a rendezvous with a young woman named Laetitia he would write Joie(Happiness) in his diary. If he added t.n. (toute nue) he meant she stripped naked in front of him. The initials S.B. discovered in November 1875 may refer to Sarah Bernhardt.[85]

I assumed Fantine had Tholomyès's child.
That's very grim, isn't it, MotherofCatBoy.

@MotherOfCatBoy- I don’t think couples in France had as large families in the 19th century as in England so the lack of a child is possible. I agree that Hugo’s own history casts quite a different light on his narration.

The difference in morals between Britain & France is the 19th century is an interesting one. There was definitely a divergence in literature as in the 18th century both English & French literature were somewhat honest about people’s behaviour - Les Liaisons Dangereuses has a lot in common with (& was presumably influenced by) Richardson’s Clarissa. I think in French literature this continues in the 19th century - I think that this books & others (eg Balzac’s Le Père Goriot) are more honest and describe more about how young men actually live - this is there in English literature but it is more off-stage (eg in Jane Austen, there is Willoughby & Wickham or Harriet Smith being illegitimate) or it’s very sentimental (eg Dickens) although there are exceptions (I finally read an unabridged version of Jane Eyre last year & finally understood why Rochester was seen as so shocking). I also think that there’s a greater class range in French literature (particularly in Zola).

That said, Hugo is very clear that there still is a world of bourgeois respectability as Tholomyès and his pals are going home to it & will presumably be making a respectable bourgeois marriage at some point.

Thanks everyone, so looks like she has a child with him already, I’d forgotten the whole been together two years bit. Probably being too influenced by lyrics from the musical! Particularly heartless though if she actually has a babe in arms, I mean not ideal if she was pregnant but you could excuse him and say he probably didn’t know, but an actual child, that no one is mentioning at all, all very odd.

Aha... yes, that makes so much sense!

Loving your thoughts @Benvenuto and @MotherOfCatBoy 😍
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and reflections.

From today’s chapter we learn Cosette is “going on 3” so now I’m trying to work out the whole timeline of Fantine’s relationship with Tholomyes.

I suppose Hugo revealing Cosette’s existence in this way adds to the drama of what has happened and maybe the slow reveal reflects the growing horror to us and to Fantine of the depth of Tholomyes’ betrayal and its consequences.

Google tells me Mrs Thenadier was singing a song about a women who was dragged to her grave by a ghost 😔 (from a poem ‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine’ 1796). Also about unfaithfulness.

Can’t understand how the Thenardier girls were held on that chain 🤣

@MotherOfCatBoy I knew Hugo was a womaniser but wow he’s complicated!

He advocated for women’s social, legal and educational rights. He argued “The Shared Burden” saying if women bear half the “burden” of society then they are entitled to half the rights (not to be legal ‘minors’). He was friends with George Sand who challenged gender norms.

And yet…. Affairs, using prostitutes, that code you detail 🤢

Perhaps a Madonna/Whore complex?

And the knowledge to write convincingly across all social strata?

If Fantine had been with Tholomyes nearly 2 years when he abandoned her, and then 10 months later Cosette is going on 3… Fantine must have got pregnant right at the beginning of the relationship????

What about Hardy though?

I think you can tell this from his somewhat lascivious descriptions of female beauty.

You are absolutely right about Hardy & I would have mentioned him if I hadn’t been worried about my post being too long, but he is much later in the century. Far from the Madding Crowd is 1874 & Tess is 1891. There’s also Edith Wharton. I can remember my old history of Eng Lit book pointing out that there’s a clear development from Little Em’ly from David Copperfield (melodramatic & sentimental) to Tess. But even Tess is young and beautiful.

In contrast Balzac’s La cousine Bette (1847) begins with a married woman in her late 40s (beautiful but definitely not young) being propositioned by an objectionable older man and her understandable refusal kicks off the whole plot of the novel. That’s 2 years before David Copperfield. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was only 7 years after DC. I can’t imagine an early Victorian English novel being as bold as what was being written in France at the same time. The closest I can think of is either Anne Brontë or Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell (& even Ruth is saintly by the end) - (caveat I’m not an English Lit expert so there may be some I’ve overlooked). There’s also Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair - but that feels a different tone to what is being written in France.

There is an interesting question about why English writers followed the path of middle class values, because Richardson’s Clarissa written a century earlier is far bolder (& he was the middle class moralist compared to Fielding). I looked it up on Wikipedia when I posted yesterday & I’d forgotten just how shocking the plot is. Possibly the shift was due to the need to make the novel a respectable form of literature (there’s a passage in Northanger Abbey where Jane Austen justifies the novel that I keep thinking about re this). Possibly in France there’s the fact that some of their 18th century novelists were also philosophes (eg Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire) who were more interested in the novel as a means to convey ideas than morality and who really weren’t very respectable themselves.

Yes, the Victorian morality codes certainly had huge and lasting impact.