Deliciously Poetic Prose In Les Misérables

Victor Hugo used some drop dead beautiful phrases in Les Misérables but you'd never know that if you've only seen the movie. Come. Read and drool.

Feb 26, 2024

Weird trivia. Victor Hugo was born 222 years ago today. I know that because we share a birthday. Thought I’d celebrate our joint birthday by showing you some of his delicious writing because it inspires me and I hope it inspires you, too.

Les Misérables is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. It’s been adapted for film, television and stage. The story of Jean Valjean, Fantine and Cossette is killer. But most people will never read the book. And understandably so.

It’s a tome. A protest against the inhumanities humans inflict on each other, it was a book for everyone who felt oppressed. But it’s 2,783 pages and 955 of them, almost a third, are essays making a moral protest about society’s failings. Not easy reading.

Hugo was incensed by how the poor lived. Every day he’d go out in the streets, and write everything he saw in notebooks. Those notes fueled his writing. But in between dense paragraphs of outrage at inhumanity—wow. Stunningly beautiful phrases.

Charles Baudelaire said always be a poet, even in prose.

That is what Hugo does. So well. And you’d never know it if you only saw the movie. But here, let me show you. Beautiful, beautiful words. Words to stir hearts.

Love souls. Not bodies, or appearances. When you love souls, you find them again. Perhaps more poignant if we remember he’s talking about the people polite society frowns on. Poor people. Prostitutes. Criminals. He’s saying stop seeing them by appearances. See them as people. Souls.

On a freezing day in February, 1829, Hugo watched a man in rags being dragged away by the police for stealing a loaf of bread. He wasn’t just watching the man. He was watching the mother and child the police didn’t see. Hiding in the shadows, the mother quietly shushing the child silent. Both dressed in rags, unfit for winter.

Hugo knew the man would get five years for stealing bread. And while the man was locked away, Hugo knew what would happen to that man’s wife. Out there, alone on the streets. Like Fantine, she’d probably sell her hair first. Then her teeth. Finally, her body. To feed her child. Les Misérables was a novel, but it was never fiction.

Not “he dressed only in black” which is how most people would write, leaning on literal description, but he clothed himself with night. So simple. So beautiful. Words like this skip the brain almost entirely, going from eyes straight to heart.

Another day, Hugo watched an ex-con, Eugène François Vidocq, use brute strength and adrenaline to lift a cart off a factory worker trapped underneath. Saved the man’s life. He put that scene in Les Misérables. After the book came out, he said Vidocq was part of the inspiration for Jean Valjean. Him—and the man stealing bread.

This. How do you read this and not ache? This is how to write prose like poetry. This is more than writing. It is painting with words. Oh, that we should all aspire to it.

Last one. Once, Hugo watched a wealthy young man walk up to a prostitute and shove snow down her dress. In shock, she slapped him. Knee-jerk reaction. It made the man angry. He started beating her. She hit back. A “dandy,” Hugo wrote in his notes. The police were going to arrest the prostitute for harassing the man when Hugo intervened. They let her go. That scene is also in Les Misérables.

An observation only a poet could make. It is not being loved that lights us, but loving. He gives no description, notice? Stephen King says description starts with the writer but ends with the reader. The color of his jacket, the man’s hair, they’re irrelevant. All other details fade away. Just this —the starlight flooding his soul. Because he loves.

Les Misérables is filled with moral outrage at how humans treat each other. And between the moral outrage, pockets of beautifully poetic prose. Words that grab the reader by the heart. In a letter to his editor, Hugo says this about his book…

“Humankind’s wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines on maps. Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: “open up, I am here for you”.
— Victor Hugo, from a letter to his editor

Years ago, archeologists were digging the bones of some ancient civilization when they uncovered two skeletons, side by side, their fingers intertwined. It took their breath away. As do Hugo’s words here. Sometimes, I wonder why more writers don’t strive to edit not just for typos, but to paint pictures on the heart.

When Victor Hugo died, despite that he’d asked for a pauper’s funeral, two million people showed up. It was the biggest funeral in French History.

A festival of the oppressed, the media called it. Later, historians would call Hugo’s funeral the largest mass mobilization of people ever seen in Paris.

Suffragettes from across France, standing shoulder to shoulder. Brothels across Paris and France closed so every prostitute who could get to París could be there. Veterans, factory workers, civil servants, artists, writers, the poor, the broken and the homeless arrived en masse. They were Les Misérables. There to celebrate the man who saw them as people. The man who gave a voice to the voiceless.

To burn — and yet to fly, that is the miracle of genius.

What else could you call a man 2 million people grieved because of his words if not genius? Three days before Victor Hugo died, he wrote the last entry in his journal.

Aimer, c’est agir.

To love is to act.

His whole life, in one short sentence. Then he gently put his pen down. And was, no more. They say no one really dies for as long as someone still says our name. What grander dream for a writer than to live on, eternal, through our words.

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