convent helped, as Cosette did, to build up in 'However, God works His own way. The Jean Valjean what the Bishop had begun. Certain it is that on one side virtue borders very close upon pride. The space between is bridged over, and it is the devil who builds the bridge. Jean Valjean, without knowing it, perhaps, may have been on the confines of that bridge, when Providence placed him in the convent of the PetitPicpus. So long as he had measured himself by the Bishop as a standard, he had thought scorn of himself, and walked humbly before God. But for some time back he had begun to compare himself with other men, and pride came creeping on. Who knows? He might have ended by coming gently back to Hate. The convent other from the seventh volume, for the purThis quotation we shall follow up by anpose of indicating the direction which the fresh trial of Jean Valjean's faith was destined to take. Our author is there taking a backward glance at Jean Valjean's history, and explains the reason of his leaving the convent in the following words: of gardener for Fauchelevent. On recognis- | We will quote a short passage from the coning the man who had saved his life and im- cluding pages of Vol. iv. to show how the proved his fortunes, Fauchelevent devotes author connects this phase of Jean Valjean's himself to his service, and discreetly asks no career with the memorable events of Octoquestions. It was enough for him to know ber, 1815. that he had saved his life. Once there, as the old gardener pithily puts it, the difficulty for Jean Valjean was how to get in; and this difficulty was preceded by another, how to get out. A solution for the first of these difficulties is devised by representing to the Lady Superior that he is becoming very infirm, and would be glad of the assistance of his brother, who had a little grandchild who might very possibly become a nun. This bait is swallowed by the Abbess, who gives him permission for his brother to come and live with him. But how to get out? A nun had recently died in the convent, whom they were anxious to bury within the walls, contrary to the law which forbade such inter-arrested him on this slope.' ments. Fauchelevent is called in by the Abbess to consultation. While the nun was buried in the vaults of the convent, could not the coffin intended to convey her remains to the cemetery be otherwise filled, and so render the illegality they were bent on committing safe from detection? To this proposal Fauchelevent assents the more readily, as he sees in it a means of conveying Jean Valjean outside the convent walls. 'It will be remembered that Jean Valjean The man in charge of the cemetery was a was happy enough in the convent; so much so great friend of his, and he would contrive to day passed without his seeing Cosette. A feelthat his conscience began to be uneasy. Not a send him off to the public-house, and to re-ing of brotherhood waxed stronger and stronger main himself to fill up the grave, but not before he had released Jean Valjean from his confinement. To this scheme Valjean consents. Every day he remained in the convent at the risk of detection filled him with trepidation, both for his own sake and for that of the child, whose fortunes were thence forth linked to his own. He was determined to quit at the risk of suffocation. As for Cosette, she could be carried out in a basket. This risk, owing to an unforeseen catastrophe, was greater than he had anticipated. Fauchelevent's friend at the cemetery was dead, and had been replaced by some one else, to whom he was a perfect stranger, and.who had none of the readiness of his predecessor to abandon the bier with an i for the beer with an e. The scene which ensues, both inside the coffin and out, is one which may emphatically be called, in the language of penny-a-liners, a sensation scene. At length Fauchelevent contrives to get rid of this perversely sober gravedigger, and so extricate Jean Valjean, in a state of insensibility, from his perilous position. At the Second Part we find him installed in the convent as assistant gardener to his supposed brother, and Cosette admitted as pupil in the pensionnat. within him: his soul yearned after that child; it was his, he said to himself-nothing could deprive him of it-it would always be the same -she would doubtless become a nun, led on as she was to do so day by day. To both of them it was there that he would grow old, that she the convent would henceforth be the universe; would grow up; that she would grow old, and that he would die. Separation, oh! joyful hope, was out of the question. As he reflected on all this, he began to be perplexed. He put the question to himself-Was all this happiness his own that he could do what he liked with it? Was it not made up of the happiness of another, the happiness of that child, which he, a man on in this filching? That child, he bethought himself, years, confiscated and purloined? Was not all had a right to know the world before renouncing it: that to cut it off from every joy on pretence of saving it from every trial, that to make use of its ignorance and isolation in order to sow the seeds of an artificial calling, was to thwart the nature of a human being and to lie unto God. And who could tell but what Cosette when she came to understand all that had happened, and found herself, to her sorrow, a nun, might not end by hating him? This last thought was more selfish and less heroic than the others; but it was more than he could bear. He resolved to quit the convent.' Accordingly, after the lapse of five years, during which Cosette's education was nearly | day after day walking with an old man. The completed, Jean Valjean leaves the convent. But we have been anticipating events, and must return to Part III. reader will have guessed, before we tell him, 'Marius,' from whom it takes its name, is the son of that Colonel-the Baron de Pontmercy, whom Thénardier, we have said, extricated from among the dying and the dead at Waterloo. This Baron de Pontmercy had won the affections and the hand of the younger daughter of M. Gillenormand, who stigmatised his son-in-law as the 'honte de sa famille,' he being a rabid Royalist, and looking upon Napoleon and every one who had served under him as objects of unmitigated hate. At the Restoration Pontmercy was placed on half-pay; and consented to surrender his motherless, and, as far as he was concerned, penniless child to the care of his grandfather and maiden aunt, who lived with her father, on the condition insisted on by M. Gillenormand that he should never attempt to get speech of his child, or to hold intercourse of any kind with his family. Marius as a boy knows, indeed, that his father is living; but is brought up in the idea that he is never to be mentioned, and that some terrible disgrace hangs over him. When he reaches his seventeenth year his father dies, and it is only then that Marius discovers how shamefully he has been maligned. A violent quarrel ensues between him and his grandfather, which ends by Marius leaving the house, and refusing to be any longer depen-cuffing the band of robbers who one after dent on M. Gillenormand for support. At heart the old man loves the boy; but his temper is so roused by the Bonapartiste opinions paraded with all the exaggeration of reaction by Marius, that the rupture is complete. We now follow the fortunes of Marius, who takes up his quarters in an old house, which is also occupied by the Thénardiers, under the name of Jondrette. Some time, however, elapses before he is aware of it; and, meanwhile, his hard battle with poverty is carried on with a manly determination which brings out all the force of his character. As M. Victor Hugo well says: 'De fermes et rares natures sont ainsi créées; la misère, presque toujours marâtre, est quelquefois mère; le dénûment enfante la puissance d'âme et d'esprit; la détresse est nourrice de la fierté; le malheur est un bon lait pour les magnanimes' (v. p. 305). It was now 1831. Marius had reached his twentieth year after three years of hard work he had contrived to earn bread enough and to spare. It was no longer a matter of calculation whether he could afford a few sous to buy a côtelette, after having passed several days without tasting meat. About this time his attention is attracted towards a young girl, whom he meets one had introduced themselves into the room, Valjean makes his escape through the window. Diable! dit Javert entre ses dents, ce devait être le meilleur' (p. 331). With this capture of the Thénardiers and escape of Jean Valjean ends the Third Part. With the assistance of Eponine, a daughter of the Thénardiers, who was not locked up with the rest of her family on the occasion of the guetà-pens-and who nourishes for Marius a passion, scarcely secret, but unreturned by its object-the address of Cosette is no longer a secret to her ardent lover. Jean Valjean feels instinctively that the young man who made him abandon his visits to the Luxembourg is near at hand. He renews those visits for a day or two, and sees Marius loitering about in the distance. Victor Hugo describes with great beauty the feeling of despair and of dread which comes over Jean Valjean, as he awakens to the fact that Cosette-the being for whom he has lived, and exposed himself to numberless perils-the being to whom he has acted the part of father, mother, brother, friend-the being who alone has occupied and absorbed all the capacities of love and affection which were given to him, and which had lain at usury without a soul The on whom to squander them, till he had reached | met his eye. He happened to be looking the threshold of old age-that this Cosette into a mirror which surmounted the sidemight be taken from him; be clasped to an- board, and there read, in so many words, the other's breast; be the object of another's love! five lines which Cosette, in the hurry of quit The jealousy which springs from a love into ting the Rue Plumet, had written to her which nothing of sensual can enter or ever lover, partly to tell him of their new abode, has entered is always, it will be found, akin and partly, as we have seen, to let him know to a bitterer hate, a more sombre moroseness that they were bound for London. a more devilish frame of mind generally, than mystery is soon solved. Cosette, who had that which is begotten by jealousy of the gone upstairs into her room under pretence more ordinary type. Here were the germs of of a migraine, which in reality was nothing a fresh crisis, the cloud in the horizon which but crossed love, had left on the sideboard betokened a coming storm. For Cosette, the blotting-book which she had brought meanwhile, all was brightness and gladness. with her from the Rue Plumet, and on which Marius had gained access to the garden of the she had dried the aforesaid note. The imhouse in the Rue Plumet, the scene of the Idyll pression was of course reversed; but this the which in part furnishes the title of Part IV. mirror rendered legible, and thus presented Of a sudden he hears that Jean Valjean means to the astonished eye of Jean Valjean. The to leave Paris, and go-Cosette knows not description of the old man's agony of mind for certain whither-perhaps to England. furnishes the theme of a chapter almost as Driven into a corner, Marius pockets his grand as that which we analysed at length pride, and asks his grandfather for the per- when M. Madeleine was on the eve of surmission and the means to make Cosette his rendering himself to save Champmathieu. wife. The old libertine treats the whole One might have thought that after so many affair as a silly amourette, and his grandson severe trials his conscience would have beleaves the house in high dudgeon, before M. come as it were seasoned; but it was not so. Gillenormand has time to recover himself 'C'est que de toutes les tortures qu'il avait from his astonishment, and to call him back subies dans cette longue question que lui and clasp him to his arms. donnait la destinée, celle-ci était la plus redoubtable. Jamais pareille tenaille ne l'avait saisi. Il sentit le remuement mystérieux de toutes les sensibilities latentes. Il sentit le pincement de la fibre inconnue. Hélas, l'épreuve suprême, disons mieux, l'épreuve unique, c'est la perte de l'être aimé !' (p. 424.) In the midst of this gloom and despair which seem to freeze up the issues of life, the letter which Marius had sent by Gavroche reaches the house and falls into the hands of Valjean. With almost fiendish glee he chuckles, as he reads it, at the thought of Marius being dead he resolves to keep the note in his pocket-Cosette would be none the wiser. Her lover would be disposed of, and he (Valjean) would once more be at peace. The sound of firing made him put on his uniform of a garde nationale and stroll out, musket in hand, in the direction of the sound. It is June, 1832. The days of the émeute, which it will be remembered commenced at the funeral of General La Marque, are at hand. The Epopée of the Rue St. Denis is about to commence. Marius, more from disappointment at thwarted love than from democratic rage at stinted liberty, throws in his lot with the revolutionary party, and becomes, in very wantonness, one of the heroes of the Barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie. In the thick of the fight a letter is given him from Cosette, saying that in a week's time she and her father-so she was wont to call him—would be in London. He tore a piece of paper out of his pocket-book and wrote to Cosette to say that by the time she received that letter his soul would have fled, and that his body might be taken to his grandfather's, M. Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, au Marais. After despatching this remarkably cheerful missive to Cosette by the hand of one Gavroche, a gamin de Paris (one of the most charming creations in the book), he returns to his post at the Barricade. Shortly before it arrives at its destinationwe are speaking of Marius's note, not his body-Jean Valjean, who was hugging in secret the idea of a voyage to England, which would rid him, as he hoped, of Marius, and nip in the bud any lurking feeling which Cosette might possibly entertain in return, was suddenly arrested, as he paced up and down the room, by a strange spectacle which How Jean Valjean passed through the ordeal which this discovery of the clandestine love-passages between Marius and Cosette had laid upon him, is the subject of the two concluding volumes, or Part V. By the time that he arrived at the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the defenders of the Barricades were sorely reduced in number: Marius was still alive, and Javert, who in an early stage of the proceedings had come among them as a spy and had been detected by Gavroche, was not yet shot, though still a prisoner. We cannot follow the incidents of the street-fight through all its revolting and bloody details. Suffice it to say that Jean Valjean, who had taken no part in the fray beyond exposing his person to danger and dressing the wounds of those who were less fortunate than himself, ends by letting Javert escape and by carrying off Marius, faint with loss of blood, through the manhole of the great sewer of Paris. He no sooner emerges from it, after adventures and hairbreadth escapes almost as startling as those they had recently met with above ground, than he finds himself once more confronted by the ubiquitous Javert. His first care is to take the almost lifeless body of Marius to his grandfather, whose address he had learned from the intercepted note sent by Marius to Cosette. He then expresses his readiness to put himself in Javert's custody; but Javert lets him go-an act of such abnormal dereliction of duty, that it drives its author to commit suicide. Life had in his eyes lost its raison d'être, and nature was out of course when a criminal was allowed to escape the grip of the law. The last volume is filled with the convalescence of Marius and his marriage with Cosette, who receives from Jean Valjean a dowry of six hundred thousand francs. Once more the spirit of self-sacrifice had gained the victory over selfishness-love over hate. The service of God, to which the Bishop's parting words had, as it were, devoted him, had not been in his case perfect freedom; but, sooner or later, that service had been paid. But one more act of martyrdom awaited him: he feels it to be his duty to tell Marius that he is a liberated convict. Marius receives the intelligence with anything but equanimity, and there results a coolness between him and Jean Valjean which ultimately communicates itself to Cosette, and poor Jean Valjean discovers that he is de trop. He drops his visit to Cosette, and worn out in body and mind, remains at home to die of a broken heart. As Marius learns that the suspicions which he had conceived as to the origin of his wife's dowry, when he heard that Jean Valjean had been a convict, were without foundation, and further, that the man who had saved his life and conveyed him from the Barricades to his grandfather's house, and whom he had in vain endeavoured to discover, was no other than this same Jean Valjean, stung with morse for his cold churlish treatment of one to whom he owed so much, he hurries with Cosette to Valjean's lodgings, but only in time to receive his last blessing and hear his last sigh. crises in the career of Jean Valjean. The whole history of this extraordinary man, as recorded in the ten volumes before us, is but the development of that injunction which the Bishop gave him when, by an act of signal clemency, he reclaimed him from the downward path of a brutalised conscience, and set him with his face towards Heaven--on that onward, upward path, that dog avw, as Plato calls it, which leads, like Jacob's ladder, up to God. On the last round of that ladder we leave him, no longer troubled by the persecutions of a Javert, or heartbroken by the ingratitude of a Cosette. As we cast a backward glance and survey the ground we have traversed, we think the reader will admit that if the tale we have unfolded before him be indeed a wondrous maze, it is not without a plan which witnesses to the artistic power of its author. It seems to us that nothing but the inconsiderate hastiness with which modern criticism is in the habit of tossing off a judgment on the works, great or small, which come under its ken, can account for the blindness which, so far as we know, has everywhere been shown respecting the leading idea which forms as it were the trunk-line of the work. But the merits of Les Misérables do not merely consist in the conception of it as a whole; it abounds, page after page, with details of unequalled beauty. We feel bound to say that we know of nothing in the whole compass of French literature which can even be compared with such chapters as those entitled Le dedans du désespoir,' 'L'onde et l'ombre,' and Petit Gervais,' in the first volume; 'Une tempête sous un crâne' and 'Bâtons dans les roues,' in the second volume; 'La cadène,' in the seventh volume; 'Buvard, buvard,' in the eighth; and Immortale Jecur,' in the tenth. The power which they so transcendently display is not merely different in degree, it is different in kind, from anything in the language at any period of its history. Michelet, indeed, in some passages of his Histoire de France,' suggests a parallel, but on closer examination it will be found that one cardinal distinction prevents us from pursuing the parallel any further. The process which presided over the cradle of all re-language, and which embodied the abstract emotions of the mind in terms borrowed from the concrete material world, is one which also presides over that inexhaustible fund of imagery with which every page of Victor Hugo is rife. His metaphors are almost uniformly the carrying over of the invisible into the visible world. With Michelet it will be found the converse is the case; and this difference so affects the style, that Victor Hugo is still left without any one to whom Thus we have endeavoured to conduct the reader through the labyrinth of this Titan tale, making use all the while of the clue to its intricacies which we believe the author intended to be furnished by the successive 6 we can liken him. By no writer since the time of Rabelais have the capabilities of the French language been set forth to such advantage-never before have so much bone and muscle been laid bare. Some French critic-M. Cuvillier Fleury, if we remember right has said that, in the presence of the author of 'Les Misérables,' his readers must feel like the Lilliputians in the hands of Gulliver. The comparison is a very just one. Victor Hugo's mind is essentially Titanic; he is more at home, shows more power, where he is dealing with conceptions of a superhuman character, than when he dwells among ordinary men. And yet the tenderness, the grace, the pathos, which he brings to bear on his description of children, are no less wonderful than the grandeur of his style and the majesty of his gait when dealing with the colossal and the superhuman. But, while thus at home with pigmies and giants, he seems at times to be lacking in what Pascal somewhere calls 'l'entredeux.' His creations of men and women, such as we meet with in everyday life, lay themselves open to criticism, as being types of a class rather than individuals with definitely marked outlines of their own. This, however, is a defect which characterises all the works of Romance literature, as contrasted with that of Teutonic races. in reviews and newspapers would scarcely be prepared to meet with. We allude especially to the chapter on Prayer. But then these beauties, though neither sparse nor slight, lose half their charm by losing all their apropos. The digressions, however, do not cease here. At the commencement of the seventh volume we have nearly a hundred pages on the causes which led to the émeutes of June, 1832; and the account of the Journées des barricades themselves-though grand beyond all conception-is, after all, only a digression, and a digression which extends over some five hundred pages. Nor is this all. At one of the most critical periods of the story, just when Jean Valjean has effected his escape with Marius in his arms from the pursuit of the soldiery, we are treated to another hundred pages on the valuable uses to which the sewage of large towns might be put. From one of these numerous digres sions we are tempted to extract a few pages, which will be read, we believe, with all the interest which is due both to the subject and to the author. We allude to Victor Hugo's character of Louis Philippe, which has deservedly been considered one of the most remarkable passages in the entire work : 'The son of a father to whom history will certainly award "attenuating circumstances," but as worthy of esteem as that father had been It is much to be regretted that a work worthy of blame; having all private and most abounding with beauties of such a very high public virtues; careful of his health, his fortune, order, and destined to occupy a permanent his person, and his affairs; knowing the value place in the literature of France, should have of a minute, not always the value of a year; been weighted, in its passage to posterity, temperate, serene, easy-going, patient; a good man and a good prince; sleeping with his wife, with so many digressions and so much nonsense. So little have these last to do with it was to show humbler people his conjugal and having in his palace servants whose business the development of the story that at the couch-an ostentation of bedward regularity commencement of this article we asserted which was not without its use after the illicit our right to assign them to a distinct author, connexions of the elder branch; knowing every in order that we might the more completely language in Europe, and-rarer still-not only disembarrass ourselves of them in following knowing but speaking the language of every up the leading idea of the story from the interest; an admirable representative of the "Middle Class," but overtopping it, and in every commencement to the close. To do this, sense its superior; having the admirable tact, however, our course from the end of the while prizing the blood in his veins, to rate himsecond volume onwards has been a steeple- self at his intrinsic value, and, even in the chase of a very arduous kind. At the very matter of race, punctilious to a degree, calling opening of the third volume we had to clear himself an Orleans and not a Bourbon; very at a jump upwards of one hundred and fifty much indeed of a First Prince of the Blood all pages on the battle of Waterloo, to which the time he was only "His Serene Highness," justice has been done in another part of this but sinking into the plain-spoken bourgeois as soon as he was Your Majesty; diffuse in public, number of the Quarterly Review.' We concise in a room; stigmatised as a miser, but then come in the fourth volume to about one not proven 80; at bottom one of those econohundred and forty pages on convents in gene-mical men who would spend without a thought ral, and on the convent of the Rue Picpus in particular. No one can deny that these pages are not destitute of beauties of the very highest order, and breathe an amount and depth of what we believe to be genuine religious feeling, in its way, which those who only know Victor Hugo by what they read if fancy prompted or duty called; lettered, but with no taste for letters; a man of birth, with out chivalry; simple, calm, and strong; adored talker, as a statesman not susceptible of illusions, by his family and his household; an excellent no fire in his breast, a slave to the interests of the moment, governing from hand to month, incapable of a grudge or of gratitude, wearing |