Les Misérables, v. 1/5: Fantine

VICTOR HUGO (1828)
The present edition of LES MISÉRABLES, in five volumes, has been made with the special object of supplying the work in a proper form for library use, embodying the two great requisites, clear type and handy size. It is in the main a reprint of the English translation, in three volumes, by Sir Lascelles Wraxall, which was made with the sanction and advice of the author. Chapters and passages omitted in the English edition have been specially translated for the present issue; numerous errors of the press, etc., have been corrected; and the author's own arrangement of the work in five parts, and his subdivisions into books and chapters, have been restored.
BOSTON, Sept . 1, 1887.
So long as, by the effect of laws and of customs, social degradation shall continue in the midst of civilization, making artificial hells, and subjecting to the complications of chance the divine destiny of man; so long as the three problems of the age,—the debasement of man by the proletariat, the ruin of woman by the force of hunger, the destruction of children in the darkness,—shall not be solved; so long as anywhere social syncope shall be possible: in other words, and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery shall remain on earth, books like this cannot fail to be useful.
HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, 1862.
ILLUSTRATIONS.
In 1815 M. Charles François Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D——. He was a man of about seventy-five years of age, and had held the see of D—— since 1806. Although the following details in no way affect our narrative, it may not be useless to quote the rumors that were current about him at the moment when he came to the diocese, for what is said of men, whether it be true or false, often occupies as much space in their life, and especially in their destiny, as what they do. M. Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Aix Parliament. It was said that his father, who intended that he should be his successor, married him at the age of eighteen or twenty, according to a not uncommon custom in parliamentary families. Charles Myriel, in spite of this marriage (so people said), had been the cause of much tattle. He was well built, though of short stature, elegant, graceful, and witty; and the earlier part of his life was devoted to the world and to gallantry. The Revolution came, events hurried on, and the parliamentary families, decimated and hunted down, became dispersed. M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy in the early part of the Revolution, and his wife, who had been long suffering from a chest complaint, died there, leaving no children. What next took place in M. Myriel's destiny? Did the overthrow of the old French society, the fall of his own family, and the tragic spectacles of '93, more frightful perhaps to the emigrés who saw them from a distance with the magnifying power of terror, cause ideas of renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst of one of the distractions and affections which occupied his life, suddenly assailed by one of those mysterious and terrible blows which often prostrate, by striking at his heart, a man whom public catastrophes could not overthrow by attacking him in his existence and his fortune? No one could have answered these questions; all that was known was that when he returned from Italy he was a priest.