Array RMB - Les Misérables

Chapter 7 The Situation Becomes Aggravated

Chapter 8 The Artillery-men Compel People to Take Them Seriously

Chapter 9 Employment of the Old Talents of a Poacher and That Infallible Marksmanship Which Influenced the Condemnation of 1796

Chapter 10 Dawn

Chapter 11 The Shot Which Misses Nothing and Kills No One

Chapter 12 Disorder a Partisan of Order

Chapter 13 Passing Gleams

Chapter 14 Wherein Will Appear the Name of Enjolras' Mistress

Chapter 15 Gavroche Outside

Chapter 16 How from a Brother One Becomes a Father

Chapter 17 Mortuus Pater Filium Moriturum Expectat

Chapter 18 The Vulture Becomes Prey

Chapter 19 Jean Valjean Takes His Revenge

Chapter 20 The Dead Are in the Right and the Living Are Not in the Wrong

Chapter 21 The Heroes

Chapter 22 Foot to Foot

Chapter 23 Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk

Chapter 24 Prisoner

Part 41 The Intestine of the Leviathan

Chapter 1 The Land Impoverished by the Sea

Chapter 2 Ancient History of the Sewer

Chapter 3 Bruneseau

Chapter 4 .

Chapter 5 Present Progress

Chapter 6 Future Progress

Part 42 Mud But the Soul

Chapter 1 The Sewer and Its Surprises

Chapter 2 Explanation

Chapter 3 The "Spun" Man

Chapter 4 He Also Bears His Cross

Chapter 5 In the Case of Sand, as in That of Woman, There Is a Fineness Which Is Treacherous

Chapter 6 The Fontis

Chapter 7 One Sometimes Runs Aground When One Fancies That One Is Disembarking

Chapter 8 The Torn Coat-Tail

Chapter 9 Marius Produces on Some One Who Is a Judge of the Matter, the Effect of Being Dead

Chapter 10 Return of the Son Who Was Prodigal of His Life

Chapter 11 Concussion in the Absolute

Chapter 12 The Grandfather

Part 43 Javert Derailed

Chapter 1 .

Part 44 Grandson and Grandfather

Chapter 1 In Which the Tree with the Zinc Plaster Appears Again

Chapter 2 Marius, Emerging from Civil War, Makes Ready for Domestic War

Chapter 3 Marius Attacked

Chapter 4 Mademoiselle Gillenormand Ends by No Longer Thinking It a Bad Thing That M. Fauchelevent Should Have Entered With Something Under His Arm

Chapter 5 Deposit Your Money in a Forest Rather than with a Notary

Chapter 6 The Two Old Men Do Everything, Each One After His Own Fashion, to Render Cosette Happy

Chapter 7 The Effects of Dreams Mingled with Happiness

Chapter 8 Two Men Impossible to Find

Part 45 The Sleepless Night

Chapter 1 The 16th of February, 1833

Chapter 2 Jean Valjean Still Wears His Arm in a Sling

Chapter 3 The Inseparable

Chapter 4 The Immortal Liver

Part 46 The Last Draught From the Cup

Chapter 1 The Seventh Circle and the Eighth Heaven

Chapter 2 The Obscurities Which a Revelation Can Contain

Part 47 Fading Away of the Twilight

Chapter 1 The Lower Chamber

Chapter 2 Another Step Backwards

Chapter 3 They Recall the Garden of the Rue Plumet

Chapter 4 Attraction and Extinction

Part 48 Supreme Shadow, Supreme Dawn

Chapter 1 Pity for the Unhappy, but Indulgence for the Happy

Chapter 2 Last Flickerings of a Lamp Without Oil

Chapter 3 A Pen Is Heavy to the Man Who Lifted the Fauchelevent's Cart

Chapter 4 A Bottle of Ink Which Only Succeeded in Whitening

Chapter 5 A Night Behind Which There Is Day

Chapter 6 The Grass Covers and the Rain Effaces

AudioBook

(Translator: Isabel F. Hapgood)

Published:1862 Categorie(s):Fiction, Historical

In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.

Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be the heir of his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen or twenty, in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was said that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed, though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and to gallantry.

The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the parliamentary families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were dispersed. M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the Revolution. There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she had long suffered. He had no children. What took place next in the fate of M. Myriel? The ruin of the French society of the olden days, the fall of his own family, the tragic spectacles of '93, which were, perhaps, even more alarming to the emigrants who viewed them from a distance, with the magnifying powers of terror,—did these cause the ideas of renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst of these distractions, these affections which absorbed his life, suddenly smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which sometimes overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public catastrophes would not shake, by striking at his existence and his fortune? No one could have told: all that was known was, that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.

In 1804, M. Myriel was the Cure of B—— [Brignolles]. He was already advanced in years, and lived in a very retired manner.

About the epoch of the coronation, some petty affair connected with his curacy—just what, is not precisely known—took him to Paris. Among other powerful persons to whom he went to solicit aid for his parishioners was M. le Cardinal Fesch. One day, when the Emperor had come to visit his uncle, the worthy Cure, who was waiting in the anteroom, found himself present when His Majesty passed. Napoleon, on finding himself observed with a certain curiosity by this old man, turned round and said abruptly:—

"Who is this good man who is staring at me?"

"Sire," said M. Myriel, "you are looking at a good man, and I at a great man. Each of us can profit by it."

That very evening, the Emperor asked the Cardinal the name of the Cure, and some time afterwards M. Myriel was utterly astonished to learn that he had been appointed Bishop of D——

What truth was there, after all, in the stories which were invented as to the early portion of M. Myriel's life? No one knew. Very few families had been acquainted with the Myriel family before the Revolution.

M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town, where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think. He was obliged to undergo it although he was a bishop, and because he was a bishop. But after all, the rumors with which his name was connected were rumors only,—noise, sayings, words; less than words— palabres, as the energetic language of the South expresses it.

However that may be, after nine years of episcopal power and of residence in D——, all the stories and subjects of conversation which engross petty towns and petty people at the outset had fallen into profound oblivion. No one would have dared to mention them; no one would have dared to recall them.